5 Holiday Email Templates for Salespeople

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When it comes to email marketing, you should always welcome the opportunity to do something a little bit different. Changing it up is a great way to keep it fresh and to keep your leads interested. One of the best times to do this is during the holiday season. The following are five email templates that you can use to send out emails appropriate for the holiday season that will help boost your open rate and that will engage your audience:

1. Gift Guide Email

Sending out a gift guide email is an excellent way to reach prospects who are still in the early stages of their customer journey. A gift guide email gives you the chance to stay in touch (and thereby, to stay on top of their minds) and to remind them who you are and what you have to offer. Using a gift guide format, you can list several of your products and services as well as how they might benefit the prospect. Considering the fact that the holiday season is very much gift-oriented, this is an appropriate way to connect with your prospects.

2. Discount Offer Email

Promotional content is not something that you want to send out too often, but it’s typically considered appropriate during the holidays due to the fact that it’s a very commercial season in which everyone is buying gifts. As such, it’s completely appropriate to send prospects discount opportunities to encourage them to purchase certain products or services. Avoid having your email come off as an advertisement by addressing the prospect in a more lighthearted manner (this tends to be okay to do during the holidays when people are less formal).

Email Opening Lines That Actually Work

3. Holiday Checklist Email

If you’re working on a deal with a prospect, then sending out a holiday checklist email is a great way to help them stay on track so that they won’t fall behind on deadlines. Reminding prospects about upcoming deadlines can be a challenging task, especially since you don’t want to sound pushy. Providing a “holiday checklist” that lists the dates and the milestones that they should reach on those dates is a great way to not only remind your prospect about upcoming deadlines, but to give them an overview of all of their milestones and deadlines that they can refer back to at any point.

4. Upselling Email

Trying to close new sales shouldn’t be your only priority. The holiday season is also a great time to revisit old customers. Using their purchasing history, suggest products or services that may appeal to them. Besides simply trying to upsell them, thank them for their previous purchase and offer a discount that shows them how thankful you are to have them as a customer.

5. Personal Thank You Email

Thanksgiving is a great opportunity to send out thank you emails to your prospects and clients. Not only will they appreciate a brief email that thanks them for working with you or taking an interest in your brand, but it’s also an excellent way to stay on top of their minds and to touch base with those who you haven’t heard from in a while.

These are five examples of email templates that can be quite successful during the holiday season. The holidays are an opportunity to not only be a little more playful with your email templates and to have the excuse to send out promotional material, but they are also a great opportunity for keeping your brand on the top of your audience’s minds and to stay in touch with both existing clients and prospects.

email marketing program
Marketing Qualified Leads

Using Lead Scoring to Identify Your Best Prospects

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Although one of your main goals should be to capture as many potential leads as possible, it’s worth mentioning that not all leads are the same. Some leads are more qualified than others–and the last thing you’ll want to do is waste time trying to nurture low-quality leads when there may be other prospects that are ready to advance through the sales funnel. The way to ensure that you’re dedicating your resources to the best leads that are available is through the use of lead scoring.

What Is Lead Scoring?media mix

Lead scoring helps you to separate your leads in terms of how far along they are in the sales funnel and what needs to be done to nurture them. By using a scoring system, you can more easily identify which leads have more interest in your products or services. By simply looking at the scores you’ve automatically assigned to your leads, you’ll be able to tell if:

  • They need more marketing content
  • They’re ready to engage with a sales rep
  • They’ve already made a purchase and need additional direction

With proper lead scoring, you won’t waste time trying to convert a sale with a lead who still needs to read or view more content to make a more informed decision about your brand. Doing this not only wastes resources, but it also risks alienating the lead by putting too much pressure on them. On top of that, it allows you to ignore low scoring leads that aren’t likely to convert in favor of those that are.

5 Types of Landing Pages To Increase Your Lead Conversion Rate

How To Score Your Leads

At its basic core, lead scoring involves assigning points to each lead based on certain criteria. The more points the lead has, the more qualified they are. The following are a few of the criteria that you should use to assign points to your leads:

Lead demographics

The closer they are to your buyer persona, the stronger a lead they become. Some of the information that can help you score a lead based on their demographic includes the industry they belong to, their company, where they are located, their age, their gender, their education level, their job title, and more. The closer they are to your ideal customer, the more likely they are to become a customer.

The biggest challenge in scoring your leads based on their demographics is collecting the information you need to determine what their demographics are. You’ll want to ask certain questions in your online forms so that when they sign up for your email, you’ll immediately have enough information to score them based on their demographics.

However, you’ll want to be careful about asking too much or asking questions that may be deemed to personal as this can scare leads away from submitting the form. What you can do is ask some basic questions on your initial form, then send out occasional surveys to help you gather more information.

Lead behaviors

In addition to scoring your leads based on who they are, you’ll also want to score them based on what they do. The way they navigate your site and engage with your brand online can tell you a lot about how ready they are to convert. The following are a few metrics you can use to score your leads based on their behavior:

  • Page views – The more pages that a lead has been to on your site, the more interested they likely are in your brand. A lead that has explored your site is a much stronger prospect than one who has only been to one or two pages.attraction marketing
  • Website visits – The more a lead visits your site, the more interested they are likely to be. It’s important to understand that a lead isn’t always going to be interested on their first visit.
  • Specific pages seen – What pages the lead has been to matters. For example, a lead that has read through your product pages and that has visited your e-commerce page is much stronger than a lead who has only been to a few pages on your blog.
  • Offers converted – Leads that have signed up for your email newsletter or who have downloaded free offers (such as eBooks or whitepapers) have likely developed a certain level of trust in your brand.
  • Email engagement – Even if a lead has signed up to your email, it doesn’t mean that they are necessarily strong prospects. If they’ve never opened your email, it means that they may have just been taking advantage of one of your offers and aren’t actually interested in your brand. However, a lead that has opened multiple emails is more than likely interested.
  • Social engagement – Leads that engage on social media with your brand, such as sharing, liking, or commenting on content, are likely to be strong prospects.

These are some of the metrics you’ll want to use to score your leads. Keep in mind that you can give leads negative scores for certain demographic information you gather about them or certain behaviors (such as not opening your emails). This will allow you to identify both good leads and poor leads.

Search Engine Optimization Techniques

Which Is Best For Me?: Growth Driven Design vs. Traditional Web Design

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Both growth driven design and traditional web design can be successful if you implement them effectively. The biggest difference between them is that a traditional website is built all at once, while growth driven design evolves. This makes a growth driven design more adaptable to the changing needs of your business, your customers, and technology. A traditional web design will often require a complete redesign to adapt to major changes–but that doesn’t mean that a traditional web design can’t be effective as well.

So how do you determine which type of web design will best suit the needs of your brand? The following is a more in-depth look into the differences between the two types of web design to help you decide which will best suit your needs.

The Optimization Of A Website

With a traditional website, you have to make use of the data you have to make the best possible design choices. In most cases, you may not have a lot of data yet since your website isn’t up and running. This means that you’re going to have to make a lot of guesses about your audience and your strategy.

With a growth driven design, you start off with a launchpad site that helps to collect data. You can then use that data to build your website over time. The more data you collect, the more you can add to or adjust your site. This way, your website can better reflect the information you have about your audience. This lets you continuously improve your site based on the desired path of your customers.

The Cost Of Designing A Website

A lot of brands invest a significant amount of money into their traditional web design because they understand that their website is going to have a huge impact on the success of their online marketing strategy. It’s not uncommon for a medium-sized business to put anywhere between $15,000 and $100,000 into their website. A launch pad website will costs less to build then a full blown website.

The Differences Between Traditional Marketing and Digital Marketing

However, this is only when comparing the initial costs. A growth driven design doesn’t require a lot for the launchpad site, but it will require a budget to continuously collect data and add to the website month after month. A traditional website’s budget is mostly spent on the initial launch, unless you decide on a website redesign later.

When comparing the costs, understand that a traditional web design will be more expensive in the short-term. However, consider the overall budget. Factoring in the long-term costs of growth driven design, there’s not a huge overall difference between the two designs. Keep in mind that the trial-and-error nature of a growth driven design can help offset continuous costs.

The Time Spent On Your Website

A growth driven design requires constant analysis of your website’s data in order to continually update your website throughout the year instead of just during the web development phase. This is done periodically; for example, every month or every six weeks (However, you’ll usually be billed monthly). Although a traditional website design does still require constant content creation as well as the need to track certain metrics in order to make strategic adjustments to your marketing strategies, the website itself will essentially be set in stone, which means not nearly as many resources need to be dedicated to your website.

These are some of the differences between implementing a traditional web design and a growth driven design. The main difference is that with a growth driven design, you’ll need to continue building your site over the long term, whereas once you launch a traditional website, you’re done until you decide to do a redesign. Yes, a growth driven design needs your continuous attention, but you may get more out of it as a result.

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The Use of Inbound Marketing in the Manufacturing Industry

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When it comes to B2C marketing, inbound marketing has long surpassed traditional marketing as the most popular way to advertise a business. However, many businesses, especially manufacturers, still assume that traditional marketing is the best way to go when it comes to B2B. This is no longer true. In fact, there are some real benefits when it comes to inbound marketing for manufacturers that you will want to take advantage of.

What is Inbound Marketing?

The big difference between inbound marketing and traditional marketing (which would include TV commercials, print ads, direct mail, etc.), is that inbound marketing is essentially done online and focuses on positioning your company to be found by other businesses. For example, instead of sending out a pamphlet highlighting your manufacturing capabilities, you would publish content relevant to the manufacturing industry (and whatever niche within that industry you occupy) online. This content lives online from that moment on, giving visitors the chance to find it at any point.

Inbound marketing involves using a variety of strategies (such as creating a user-friendly website, producing high-quality content, using SEO, engaging on social media) that makes it easy for your target audience to find you online and to do a majority of the research about your company and services on their own. This is different than traditional marketing, which involves finding your audience and directly advertising to them.

Inbound Marketing Works. Politics Proves It.

The Benefits of Inbound Marketing for Manufacturers

The following are four reasons why you should strongly consider implementing an inbound marketing strategy for your manufacturing business:

1) Businesses are doing research online first

Around 70 percent of buyers will do research about manufacturers online before they make the decision to reach out to a potential partner. For example, maybe a buyer is looking for a PCB (printed circuit board) assembly manufacturer for their electronic products. They will probably begin researching PCB assemblies by looking for general information online. This will lead to them to a variety of blogs with informative content that they can read at their own time. Content that strikes them as particularly helpful will stand out, and they will do more research into the manufacturer that published that content. If you do not have an online presence, then you’re missing out on buyers like these. A good inbound marketing strategy will help position yourself online to be found by buyers who are doing research.

2) Inbound marketing provides long-term results

As you build your online presence through inbound marketing techniques, you’ll have the opportunity to nurture many potential leads over the long term. For example, let’s say you’re a PCB manufacturer. You have a blog on which you regularly produce PCB-related content (such as, for instance, the benefits of flexible circuits). There may be leads out there who read your content regularly and have done so for years. They may build their own PCBs in-house and a change in strategy has resulted in them deciding to outsource its build. At that point, they’ll be familiar with your site and will be more likely to reach out to you. Traditional advertising doesn’t have such a long-term impact. 

3) What worked once won’t always work

You may have had a lot of success with traditional marketing methods–and you may continue having success with those efforts. However, if you expect to grow your business, then you’ll want to expand your customer base, which means that you shouldn’t limit your advertising efforts. Otherwise, the day might come where your traditional marketing efforts aren’t as effective as they once were, and you’ll be left scrambling to implement an inbound strategy.

4) Find out what your audience needs

Unlike traditional advertising, inbound marketing allows you to engage directly with your target audience, making it easier to develop relationships, receive feedback, and discover the needs of your leads.

As you can see, there are many benefits to inbound marketing for manufacturers. By implementing an inbound marketing strategy in your advertising efforts, you can position your company for marketing success well into the future.

Inbound marketing will help you grow your business by attracting website visitors, converting them into leads and closing leads into customers
brand development process

What’s Trending in Marketing For November 2018

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Businesses that stay up to date with all the latest marketing trends and news are more likely to see success due to the ability to adjust their marketing strategies accordingly as a result. As such, we like to highlight marketing news and trends every month as well as provide a bit of insight on how you can improve your marketing. The following are the latest marketing trends, news, and tips that we think are worth noting this November.

Noteworthy Marketing News

Google Launches AdLingo

Google recently launched its conversational marketing platform “AdLingo.” AdLingo provides the first conversational ad format outside of messaging apps, allowing advertisers to deliver ads that query users as well as respond to them. Read up on the ins and outs of the new AdLingo feature and why it matters to marketers at Marketing Land.

Pinterest Updates Ads Manager And Adds Product Pins Features

Ahead of the holiday season, Pinterest has improved its Ads Manager tool by allowing advertisers to choose business goals, select pins they want to promote, and to select an audience. They have also rebuilt their Product Pins system by adding stock information and dynamic pricing. Find out more about the changes made to their Ads Manager and Product Pins features by reading Marketing Land’s write-up.

Facebook Working On Connected TV Device

Facebook appears to be expanding its reach even further as they are rumored to be working on a connected TV device that will work in a similar fashion to Amazon’s Fire Stick or Roku. The Facebook TV rumor is explored in more detail in Marketing Land’s article, which also goes into the impact it could have on marketers.

Pandora Announces Ad Distribution Agreement With SoundCloud

Pandora has been busy making moves to become a major platform for advertisers. Not only has Pandora finally launched its own analytics tool, they also announced a new partnership with SoundCloud. According to Pandora, the partnership will make them the biggest digital audio advertising marketplace in the U.S. and will expand their addressable audience to 100 million. Marketing Land’s article goes into more detail about Pandora’s recent developments.

8 Tips on Social Media Best Practices For Your Business

Improving Your Marketing Program

Learn About The Differences Between Smart Display And Custom Intent Campaigns

AdWords continues to be a valuable marketing tool, which is why we recently explored two of their newest PPC options, Smart Display Campaigns and Custom Intent Campaigns. Check out our article to find out what the differences between the two features are and how they can benefit you.

The Importance of Social Media Engagementsocial media

One of the common mistakes advertisers make is to focus on their following instead of on engagement. Our recently published article highlights the importance of social media engagement and goes over several tips on how to improve your engagement on social media.

Traditional Marketing vs. Digital Marketing

Knowing the differences between traditional marketing and digital marketing will help to better inform your overall marketing campaign. We recently explored the differences between digital and traditional marketing, from the long-term and short-term impact to the costs and more.

Recent Marketing Trends, Reports, and Updates

Pew Reveals Relevant New Marketing Data

The Pew Research Center recently revealed new data that might surprise marketers. For example, broadband Internet penetration remains at only 65 percent amongst U.S. adults and that smartphone-only Internet usage has increased from 12 percent to 20 percent over two years. Head to Marketing Land for a more in-depth look into Pew’s recent marketing research.

Survey Reveals More Customers Plan To Use Amazon For Holiday Shopping

Amazon’s marketplace domination continues as a recent survey conducted by Survata revealed that the majority of holiday shoppers plan on using Amazon over any other online platform. In fact, the survey showed that online shoppers prefer Amazon 3-to-1 over Google. Check out what else the holiday shopping survey revealed at Marketing Land.

Marketers Focusing Primarily On Black Friday

A Nanigans study revealed that only five percent of retailers that responded are focusing any of their ad budget on late-season shoppers, while 25 percent of ad budgets will be spent on Black Friday weekend. Read Marketing Land’s article to find out more details about the holiday ad budget study.

Free Marketing Consultation

SMART Goal Examples That Will Make You a Better Marketer

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When creating your inbound marketing strategy, it’s important that you set goals as part of your planning process. Without goals, you won’t be able to judge the performance of your inbound marketing tactics, which means you’ll have no idea whether your money is being put to good use. When you have goals in place, you can make adjustments to underperforming tactics. However, one of the mistakes many brands make is to set goals that are vague or too broad, such as “increasing brand awareness” or “building brand authority.” While general goals like these are fine, you should also have SMART goals.

What Are Smart Goals?

SMART goals are goals that are (S)pecific, (M)easureable, (A)ttainable, (R)elevant, and (T)ime-bound. They are clearly defined goals that are realistic, quantifiable, and focused. By implementing goals such as these, you’ll know exactly what kind of results you’re aiming for and how to accomplish them. The following is a more detailed breakdown of SMART goals:

  • Specific goals – Specific goals are metrics that you want to improve, such as leads or visitors.
  • Measurable goals – To track the progress you’re making, you need to quantify your goals; for example, increasing the number of visitors to your site by 20 percent.
  • Attainable goals – It’s important that your goal is something that’s actually possible. For example, doubling the number of visitors to your site in one month is probably unrealistic. Increasing your visitors by 10 percent may not be, especially if you managed to increase your visitors by 5 percent the previous month.
  • Relevant goals – Make sure that reaching the goals you’ve set will actually have an impact. For example, hitting your goal to increase your website traffic by 10 percent may not mean much if you have a high bounce rate or if none of these visitors are converting.
  • Time-bound goals – Set a deadline to meet your goals so that there’s some pressure to actually accomplish them.

Examples Of How Smart Goals Should Align With Your Business Goals

SMART Goal Examples

The following are a few SMART goal examples to give you an idea of how you can implement SMART goals in your marketing strategy:

  • Bring in more web traffic – Increasing web traffic is a very general goal. The SMART goal version of this might be to increase web traffic by 10 percent within one month through the use of SEO, content marketing, and social engagement in order to increase lead generation.Future of email
  • Increase email subscribers – Email marketing is an excellent way to nurture leads. A SMART goal version could be to increase your email subscribers by 20 percent within one month using your Facebook ad budget on blog posts that have previously captured the most email subscribers.
  • Gather a webinar audience – If you are planning a webinar, then you can use a SMART goal to help measure its success. Let’s say you’ve already collected 100 signups within two weeks. The seminar is scheduled in one month. Your SMART goal might be to double your signups for your webinar by the webinar date through social, email, and blog promotion in order to close more sales.

These are a few SMART goal examples. As you can see, these SMART goal examples take some very basic marketing goals and make them more actionable and easier to measure. The use of SMART goals can really help you get the most out of your marketing dollars since you can use the results (whether you end up meeting your goals or not) to set future goals that may be more realistic and impactful.

Inbound marketing will help you grow your business by attracting website visitors, converting them into leads and closing leads into customers

Does Direct Marketing Have A Role In Inbound Marketing?

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With the proven success of inbound marketing, you might be wondering if there’s a point to some of the traditional marketing strategies you may have once leveraged–for example, direct marketing. A lot of brands assume that direct marketing, which is the strategy of sending leads newsletters or flyers through the mail, no longer has a place in today’s marketing world, especially since email marketing is so effective.

However, you would be mistaken to dismiss traditional forms of B2B marketing such as direct marketing. The following are a few reasons why you shouldn’t abandon traditional marketing strategies, such as direct marketing.

1. Build Trust With Potential Leads

Direct mail has a higher trust level than online marketing. Online, anyone can send you an email, including scammers. It takes a lot more time and money to produce a direct mail campaign that’s a scam. This means that potential leads are more likely to take the direct mail they receive much more seriously than an email, especially if they don’t recognize your brand.

2. Target More Specific Demographicscompetitive advantage

When it comes to direct mail, you know exactly who you’re sending it to. A lot of inbound marketing requires that you implement numerous strategies (such as SEO) in an attempt to position yourself to be found by your target audience. This means that you can achieve a greater level of demographic specificity in a direct mail campaign. All you have to do is to rent lists of businesses that match your buyer persona.

How to Create Detailed Buyer Personas for Your Business

3. Supplement Your Inbound Efforts

Direct mail can be extremely effective in helping to supplement your inbound marketing efforts simply because of their level of trust and the ability to achieve greater demographic specificity. Once your mail is in the hands of your potential lead, you can direct them using a call-to-action to go to your website or to sign up for a newsletter. You can offer them free downloadable content if they go online and even add a QPR code to your mail to make it easier for them to engage with your brand online immediately.

4. Keep Brand On Top Of Mind

Even if the lead you’re sending your direct mail to is familiar with your brand already but doesn’t follow your call-to-action, direct mail will help to keep your brand at the top of your mind. This is actually a bigger advantage than you might think–many businesses have given up on direct mail completely and are purely focused on email marketing and other inbound techniques. This means that direct mail is an excellent way to stand out from the crowd.

These are a few examples of how direct marketing can continue to be a relevant part of your marketing strategy. Although inbound marketing is one of the best ways to reach your audience, don’t just abandon all of your traditional marketing efforts. Traditional marketing can still play an important part in your overall marketing efforts.

Inbound marketing will help you grow your business by attracting website visitors, converting them into leads and closing leads into customers

Understanding Growth Driven Design & Its Methodology

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Your website design is arguably the most important element of a successful inbound marketing strategy. The website is the foundation of all your online marketing efforts, after all. When it comes to designing your website, there are two main ways to go about it. You can implement a traditional website design, in which you employ the best practices of website design into the creation of your site, or you can use a growth driven design.

What Is A Growth Driven Design?website redesign process

The big difference between a growth driven design and a traditional design is that a growth driven design focuses on the creation of a systematic and interactive website that can adapt to changing technology as well as to the changing needs of your audience over the years. This allows you to make informed improvements to your site based on continuous learning, visitor research, and regular testing.

While traditional website designs can be just as successful, they require complete redesigns in order to implement any major changes that you might want to make in the future.

The Three Phases of Growth Driven Design

The growth driven design process is all about constantly measuring the performance of your site and making changes based on what you’ve learned to improve that performance. The following are the three phases of a growth driven design:

1. Strategymarketing-make-or-break

The first step is to create a strategy by performing an audit of your current website, allowing you to see what works and what doesn’t. An audit will not only help guide your design, it will also help provide you with benchmarks that you can compare your new design to moving forward. Part of your audit should include user testing, interviews, and surveys to get a better understanding of how visitors interact with your site. Once your audit is complete, set measurable goals that will help define the results you’re looking for. Finally, revisit your buyer personas and buyer journeys to help guide your content strategy.

Growth-Driven Web Design – Is It Right For Your Company?

2. Launch Pad

Once your strategy is in place, create a launch pad. This is a site built using your strategy and wishlist. It’s not a finished product even though it’s completely functional for the end user. Essentially, it’s a working base that you can build on over time and allows you to track user behavior and begin the process of ongoing optimization.

3. Continuous Improvement

Using the information you’ve gathered from your audit and launch pad, you’ll continuously improve your website over monthly sprint cycles within an 11-month period. This last phase is made up of four stages:

1. Plan

Take note of how effective your site is and what changes have the best impact on your long-term goals.

2. Develop

Take the plan you’ve developed and implement it.

3. Learn

Review past changes to determine what worked and what didn’t so that you have a better idea of how to improve your site for the next spring cycle.

4. Transfer

Take everything that you’ve learned and share it with the different departments in your company, from marketing and sales to service and more.

Many brands are choosing to implement a growth driven design due to the ability to adapt to changing customer needs as well as a constantly changing online environment. However, this isn’t to say that a growth driven design is superior to a traditional design. Much depends on what your brand is trying to accomplish and what your specific marketing needs are. In some cases, a traditional web design may work just as well.

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How To Transition From Traditional Advertising to Inbound Marketing

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If your brand has been focusing on solely traditional advertising methods, then it’s time that you consider inbound marketing. Although traditional advertising, such as TV or radio commercials, print ads and billboards can all be successful strategies when properly utilized, they are short-term strategies.

Purely focusing on these advertising methods also means that you are missing out on an enormous online audience. It also means that all of your marketing budget is going into a short-term strategy. By also implementing an inbound marketing strategy, you’ll set your brand up for more long-term marketing success while increasing your brand exposure to a bigger audience. Of course, transitioning from traditional advertising to inbound marketing is going to require some work.

The following are the steps you’ll need to take to incorporate inbound marketing into your overall advertising strategy:

1. Understand The Advantages Of Inbound Marketing

If you don’t understand how inbound marketing differs from traditional marketing, then you’re going to end up applying the same type of strategy. Namely, your online presence will focus on promoting products and services. Posting online advertisements isn’t going to cut it. Online audiences differ greatly from those that you are targeting with traditional marketing efforts.

The idea of inbound marketing is to provide consumers with something valuable along with the information that they need to educate themselves about your brand, products, or services. By doing this, you’ll position yourself to be found by potential customers instead of having to find them. Inbound marketing also allows you to engage directly with your audience. This makes knowing what they want and need more important. They not only have a choice as to what content they consume, they can actually respond to your marketing efforts as well.

2. Use Your Available Data

Any data about your business and its customers should be carefully analyzed to help guide your inbound marketing strategy. This is because inbound marketing is all about optimizing your advertising efforts based on the data you have available. In fact, you should continue adjusting your strategies based on the new data that you’ll be collecting.

For example, you should use the information on your existing and past customers to expand your audience and create a buyer persona. By creating more in-depth buyer personas using customer online behavior data, you ensure that your content will be relevant to your specific audience. Your buyer personas should inform everything you produce and post online.

Five Inbound Marketing Resources Every Marketer Should Know About

3. Establish A Plan

Inbound marketing is so broad–it incorporates a wide range of strategies, including your website optimization, social media marketing, content marketing, SEO, email marketing, and more. You’ll need to have clear short-term and long-term goals so that you can judge the performance of your efforts.

For example, one of your long-term goals may be to increase brand awareness. By setting this goal, it will inform the marketing strategies you implement (such as being active on social media or using PPC ads) and will also allow you to judge your strategies based on that goal (such as page visits over time, conversions over time, number of social shares, etc.).

4. Repurpose Offline Content

Many of your traditional advertising efforts can be repurposed online. For example, the newsletters that you may have been sending out can be turned into email newsletters instead. Your copywriting team can transition from writing copy for print ads and commercials to writing blog content for your website. You can even use your research reports and white papers to create infographics and eBooks.

Once you’ve decided to transition from traditional advertising to inbound marketing, you’ll want to follow these steps in order to get started. Doing so will help establish a foundation for your inbound marketing efforts to build on.

Why Your Website Redesign Would Benefit From An Inbound Marketing Strategy

Inbound marketing will help you grow your business by attracting website visitors, converting them into leads and closing leads into customers

Understanding The Importance Of Brand Soul In Digital Engagement And How To Leverage It

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One of the biggest challenges facing any business is losing the image of a corporate entity and creating an image of a brand that’s more personable and engaging. This is called having a brand soul. Without a brand soul, your audience will have trouble connecting with your brand on a personal level.

The following are 9 ways that digital engagement can help you to develop your brand soul:

1. Own your cultural landscape

Instead of considering yourself as a supplier of products or services, begin looking at yourself as part of the cultural landscape. You should believe that your product or service is adding something to the culture and you should treat your marketing efforts in this manner. You can leverage this idea through digital engagement by emphasizing the cultural components of your audience through social media. For example, posting pictures of your products being used in daily activities.

2. Stand for a social cause

Trying to stay neutral is an attempt to appeal to everyone, and that never works. Don’t be afraid to stand up for social causes that are important to your company. Doing so shows your audience that you stand for more than just profit. Take Nike as a recent example. While their social cause involved some controversy, they have taken a stand and it has certainly made them seem much less like a company that only cares about profits. The social cause they’ve stood up for may have lost them a few customers, but it’s greatly strengthened brand loyalty as a result as well.

3. Curate content

Digital engagement isn’t just about posting content that you’ve created. While your content may be relevant, it can seem a little like you’re just fishing for likes or shares. It’s important that you curate some of your content as well, meaning that you post links to relevant content on other websites. Doing so not only helps provide your audience with high-quality content, it shows them that you care about being helpful and it’s not all just about you. This, in turn, helps build trust in your brand.

4. Encourage Conversation Through Feedback

Encouraging feedback from your audience is a great way to learn about your audience, thereby giving you the chance to more effectively tailor your content to their needs. By encouraging feedback and responding positively (no matter how negative the feedback might be) you show your audience that what they think is important to you, thereby making them more willing to reach out and engage with your brand.

5. Reinvent service and support

Be proactive when it comes to customer service and support. In addition to providing a phone number, email, and social media channel through which your audience can contact you, consider adding a chatbot that can answer questions in real time or send customers questionnaires asking about the quality of the products or services they bought.

6. Guide your customers’ journeys

Make use of all of your customer data so that you can create content for every step of the buyer’s journey, no matter where they are, be it on your website, on mobile, or on one of your social channels. Use automation to trigger the best content, offers, or messages at the right time for each platform you’re on.

Using The Right Media Mix During Each Stage Of The Buyer’s Journeys

7. Personalize your marketing

Use the information you gather from your audience to personalize your marketing. This allows you to deliver content that’s more relevant to each individual reader, thereby allowing you to build stronger relationships with your leads.

8. Provide an immersive experience

One of the traps a lot of brands fall into is creating a non-memorable experience in which visitors read their content and move. Create content using a story format to make it more memorable. Don’t hesitate to use visual content as well, such as graphics, videos, and even gifs. This helps to create more of an immersive experience for the reader.

9. Be truthful

Always verify your facts, especially if you are using statistics. In the age of fake news, the last thing you want is to be labeled as dishonest due to inaccuracies in your content creation.

Digital engagement is an important part of establishing your brand soul and showing your audience that you are much more than just another lifeless corporate entity. These are just a few digital engagement strategies you should consider implementing to help build your brand soul.

 

social media marketing