4 tips to keep sales & marketing on the same track

4 Tips To Keep Sales & Marketing On The Same Track

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Sales and marketing are usually thought of as being separate. However, with inbound marketing, both departments or teams need to work together to achieve their common goal: revenue. Inbound marketing is all about helping and informing the consumer throughout the various stages of the buying process, so they ultimately decide to purchase from you. This type of nurturing cannot happen unless sales and marketing work seamlessly. Here are 4 tips to keep your sales and marketing teams on the same page.

Keep constant communication

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Video Marketing Ideas: Using Storytelling In Social Media

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Storytelling is one of the most important aspects when it comes of successfully conveying your message to your audience and giving them an idea of who your brand is and what you stand for. While storytelling is something that can be done via all types of content across all platforms, it’s particularly effective in video content on social media. However, coming up with different video marketing ideas that help strengthen your brand’s storytelling can be challenging. The following are a few video marketing ideas that you may want to implement on your social media channels to aid your storytelling efforts:

1. Film Your Customers’ Stories

Telling the stories of your customers is an easy way to get viewers to relate on a more personal level to your brand. When you film the story of your customer, they become the main character, which allows you to demonstrate through their story how you were able to provide a solution to their problems or needs.

2. Tell Personal Stories

Tell your brand’s story by showcasing how your company came to be. For example, you can focus on your owner as the main character and show how they started the business. This is a great way to put a face behind your brand and to make your company more relatable to your audience.

3. Create Fictional Stories

In addition to using the stories of your customers, make up some of your stories. Fictional stories often give you the opportunity to add humor and excitement that real stories don’t always have. For example, you could make the main character a superhero but keep the problem or need the same. If you’re selling a carpet stain removal product, it might be humorous to show a superhero having trouble removing a carpet stain even though you just showed them having no issue at all taking down a bad guy. Just make sure the message is clear and that you end with a strong call-to-action.

4. Film Documentary-Style Videos

Documentary videos give audiences a look into the process behind your company, whether it’s showing the process of working with a client or showing what a typical day at the office is like. It’s a good way to showcase how hard your company is working to help your customers.

5. Provide Behind-The-Scenes Videos

Behind-the-scenes videos give audiences a glimpse into what it’s like to work for your company and into what you and your company are trying to achieve. These types of videos make your brand feel more human as opposed to just being a faceless corporate entity.

The Power of First-Person Experience Videos

6. Perform Product Walkthroughs

Showing how a product works will be a lot more engaging if you film it in the form of a story. You can do this by establishing a character, showing what their problem is, demonstrating how to use your product or service, and, finally, revealing the result.

Storytelling is an essential part of marketing your brand effectively, and there are few better ways to do it than through video marketing. Use some of these video marketing ideas to enhance your storytelling abilities on social media.

Learn The StoryBranding Process

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Creative Marketing Solutions

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There are many creative marketing strategies that you can implement in order to increase outreach to customers and improve your bottom line. While many businesses are going above and beyond in their search for creative marketing solutions, you can simply seek to be creative within the 4 basic components of an online marketing approach (i.e. brand development, inbound marketing, content marketing and email marketing).

By seeking creative solutions within these 4 tactics, you can develop a successful creative marketing strategy. Here’s how:

Creativity in Brand Development

A creative way of increasing the relevance of your brand is by making your brand tell a story. Story-banding is an effective way to connect emotionally to your customers so they can see your products as having a greater purpose. You can achieve story-branding for your company by highlighting the inspiration behind your products and services.

Emphasize what motivates your company to achieve its goals (for example creativity, self-fulfillment, better health etc.), and incorporate your operations as a means towards achieving this goal. That way you can make your brand the hero of its own story, one which customers will relate to.

Read more on Defining Your True Brand Story and Bringing it to Life Online.

Creativity in Inbound marketing

A creative way to generate leads to your website is by having unique, yet appropriate content across all your channels. One approach you can use is to dedicate a portion of your site for product education.

If you are selling a well-known product, you could come up with creative ways on how the product can be used, how to make it last longer, behind the scenes details on how it works, etc.

One company that uses product education as a tool for its inbound marketing strategy is Gonesh Incense. The company produces incense products and has a DIY blog that contains videos on how their products can be used in many different ways; from re-using flowers after Valentine’s Day to making bath salts using their fragrance oils.

Such content is not only useful and appropriate to potential leads, but it also helps their brand establish trust and stronger relationships with customers.

Read more on The Benefits Of Inbound Marketing.

Creativity in Email Marketing

When you send out emails, incorporate interactive elements such as GIFS, rotating banners and menus. You could display an enticing sales discount or a new product launch by using a GIF. You could also categorize information about your product under different headings within a menu in the email.

This gives your customers the independence to browse product information and select whichever section they would like to read more about, right within the email.

Read more on Interactive Email Trends.

Creativity in Social Media Marketing

One way that you can utilize social media creatively is by developing targeted messages that appeal to common groups of people online, who you can bring together in relevant social media groups.

For example, a company specializing in manufacturing bicycles can create a fan page for cyclists and bring them together through targeted messages that contain useful information that applies to cycling. The more cyclists the company is able to attract to join the group, the more they can incorporate their branding into the fan page and begin to nurture their leads.

Read more on 8 Tips on Social Media Best Practices For Your Business.

Creative marketing solutions are the future of online marketing. By simply rethinking and refocusing the conventional ways through which you carry out your online marketing, you can be able to achieve creative marketing solutions and grow your bottom line.

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Closed Loop Marketing

How Closed-Loop Marketing Helps Convert Leads To Customers

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Closed-loop marketing sounds like a fancy way to reel in customers, but it’s far from being the new-fangled way of doing business and attracting new customers to your brand. In fact closed-loop online marketing has been used and refined for over a decade by some of the world’s top companies. But what makes it so different?

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3 Key Benefits of SEO

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You may have noticed during your own Google searches that you usually don’t go far past the first page of search results, even though there are plenty of results following that page. Why is that? Well, search engines provide the most relevant, useful, and credible answers first. This means that they have examined all of the content on the web and ranked the organic results based on relevance to your search. This is just one additional benefit to the three key benefits of SEO you will learn.

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How to Use Personal Selling During the Decision Making Stage

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The final article in this series, focuses on the final stage of the buyer’s journey: the decision making stage. Previously our view of inbound marketing was from a marketing heavy stance. Here, we’ll shift to sales and how to use personal selling during the decision making stage. Your prospective buyers have finally made it to the bottom of the funnel. All of your hard work with content, landing pages, social media and marketing has paid off.  Your leads are now ready for sales.

At the decision making stage, your buyer is already 60% of the way towards their decision and you can attribute that virtually all to marketing. You’ve heard the adage, “You can bring a horse to the water, but you can’t make it drink,” and this couldn’t be any more true in inbound marketing. And in all likelihood, despite some cleverly crafted and personalized lead nurturing campaigns, the personal aspect of your buyer’s journey with your company’s sales team is just beginning.

Deliverable Content

A more traditional approach to getting buyers to make a decision was to draft bottom of the funnel content. This used a “Speak to Sales” or “Request a Consultation” button to get sales involved in the buying process. Many buyers roll their eyes at the prospect of speaking to a sales person, so the new approach deals more with deliverable, downloadable content.

While marketing does close to 60% of the work in getting your leads sales ready, content’s job isn’t quite done. Your buyers are looking for the final piece of your content puzzle to help them know that going with your brand is the best thing for them. Offering deliverable content with personal selling is an excellent way to optimize your brand’s efforts during the decision making stage.

Content at this stage of the buyer’s journey is generally geared towards giving the buyer added value. Offers can include case studies, free assessments, service comparison, or product literature. Of course, the content you tailor to your buyer all goes back to your buyer personas.

Personal Selling in the Decision Making Stage 

Once marketing has done their job, qualified their leads for sales, and your leads have shown the behaviors associated with sales readiness it’s time to bring in the sales team.

For your sales team, personal selling will deal  with getting inside your buyer’s head and asking questions they’re asking themselves. Some of the fundamental questions a buyer will likely be asking as they vet potential sellers are:

  1. What specifics of your product or service do the buyers typically evaluate?
  2. How do buyers evaluate those products or services?
  3. What sets your brand apart for buyers?
  4. Who is involved in the decision and how to their perspectives differ when making the decision?

By answering those basic questions for your buyer before a sales call is even made will make a huge difference for how well prepared your sales team is. Also, it’s critical for marketing to communicate with sales and pinpoint exactly what your buyer’s journey look like. This way, sales and marketing are on the same page and your buyer isn’t left with redundancy during their personal interactions.

How do you  drive website conversions throughout the buyer’s journey? Find out by clicking here. 

Tailoring Sales to the Buyer

Finally, let’s focus on tailoring a sales presentation to your buyer. Inbound salespeople are tasked with advising a prospective buyer on how your brand’s unique position fits the context of the buyer’s need, but that is the bottom of the four step inbound sales process. The four step inbound sales process includes identifying the buyers problem, connecting with prospective buyers, and exploring solutions. Smarketing helps align those stages of the buyer’s journey to the inbound sales processes.

The presentation your sales team give to a sales-ready lead should be 100% tailored to your buyer. Hopefully, you’re already leveraging every possible avenue to identify your buyer on a personal level and create a sales presentation that hits home. Those types of presentations may include consultations, demos, or guided case studies where sales takes a buyer through the information.

Just the Beginning of Smarketing

The decision making stage is only the beginning of your sales and marketing efforts for your brand and personal selling is the cornerstone to your sales-marketing marriage. Hopefully through this series of articles, you’ve been able to see with your own eyes the value of smarketing. Inbound is only the beginning of how your sales and marketing come together. The fruits sales and marketing produce will be immeasurable over time.

Download Our White Paper Guide To Learn How To Perfect Buyer Personas For Your Business

 

 

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The Difference Between Lead Generation vs Demand Generation

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When it comes to building your audience and increasing your sales, there are two strategies that are vital to your success:  demand generation and lead generation. However, there are a lot of misconceptions about both. For instance, many people confuse one for the other. Some people think that demand generation is part of lead generation, while others think that lead generation is a part of demand generation. In reality, they are two different strategies that are critical to your ability to convert more customers.

Demand Generation vs. Lead Generation

The question for many is, “what is the difference between demand generation vs. lead generation?” Think of them as steps that must be taken to eventually close a sale. The first thing that you must do is to generate demand. Once you have achieved demand, you must then capture leads. The following is a more thorough breakdown of demand generation vs. lead generation:

  • Demand Generation – Demand generation is a strategy that includes numerous marketing tactics aimed at building awareness. Another misconception many have about demand generation is that it’s only about increasing brand awareness. However, it’s also about educating your audience about their needs and how your brand can solve them. As such, you’re also building brand authority during this stage. The ultimate goal of a demand generation strategy is to put your audience into the position to be converted into leads.
  • Lead Generation – Lead generation is the strategy of converting visitors to leads by capturing their personal information, such as their name and email address. It’s through the generation of leads that you will be able to nurture your leads through the sales funnel and eventually close the sale. When it comes down to it, lead generation is the act of taking advantage of the demand you’ve generated to collect contact information. Using that contact information, you can then engage leads directly.

Implementing A Demand Generation Strategy

Since demand generation consists of generating brand awareness as well as educating your audience, there are many tactics you can use. The following are just a few examples of demand generation that you can use:

  • Blogging – A blog allows you to regularly publish content to your website that is educational and informative. Blog content can also help people become aware of your business, if you promote it properly. For instance, by earning backlinks, optimizing it for SEO, and sharing it on social media.
  • SEO – Optimizing your website and all of its content for SEO, helps increase your presence on Google’s search engine. As a result, you can attract more organic traffic to your site.
  • Paid Advertising – Paid advertising, whether on Google or on social channels, can help expose your brand to specific segments of your target audience.

One thing to keep in mind when creating a demand generation strategy is to know who your audience is. Your demand generation efforts won’t have much of an impact if you’re targeting the wrong audience. Because of this, it’s critical that you develop your buyer personas.

Like this article ? Also read A Brief Guide to Sales Lead Generation

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Implementing A Lead Generation Strategy

If you have a constructive demand generation strategy, you should be in an excellent position to capture your leads. At this point, your audience should not only know who you are, but they should be interested in your brand due to the influence that you showcase. However, the majority of them won’t be quite ready to take the leap, which is why you need a lead generation strategy. Such a strategy involves providing something of value in return for their contact information.

With that in mind, the following are a few examples of value that businesses commonly offer to drive lead generation:

 

  • Gated content – Offering more in-depth content in the form of ebooks, whitepapers, and more, is an excellent incentive for providing you with their personal information. Businesses include links to gated content in the CTAs of their free-to-read blog content. Doing so allows them to capitalize on the authority they’ve just built.
  • Email newsletter – For anyone who is reading your blog on a regular basis, a periodic email newsletter filled with relevant and unique content is a great incentive to convert to a lead. Not to mention that they will have to provide their email to receive email content.
  • Free trials – Interested audience members are more likely to convert if you give them a free sample of your service. Offering a free trial in return for their personal information is generally accepted as a more than fair trade.
  • Webinars – Webinars are live stream of presentations, such as panel discussions, lectures, or interviews. They can run for a longer period of time and tend to dive in topics in great detail. Not to mention that viewers can often engage during the webinar by asking questions. Webinars are a great way to generate leads because you can acquire viewers to register in order to get access.

Understanding The Difference Between Demand Generation vs. Lead Generation Is Critical

To achieve success, you need to focus on both demand generation and lead generation. However, not understanding the difference can make it difficult to meet your goals. Not to mention, it will be difficult to monitor on how your marketing efforts are performing.

30 Greatest Lead Generation Tips
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Five Tips for Effective Inbound Marketing for Healthcare

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Quality healthcare has always been important, but it’s even more important during the pandemic. More people are searching for health-related information than ever before. As such, it’s critical that your healthcare business is in a position to be found. To achieve this, you need to implement a strong, long-term inbound marketing strategy. A good inbound marketing strategy can help drive awareness of your business and help generate more leads. It’s why you should work with a reputable healthcare marketing agency. With that in mind, the following are five essential inbound marketing tips for healthcare businesses:

1. Add Educational Content To Your Website

One of the most important goals you should have is to build trust with your audience. Trust is essential to any healthcare business; after all, your customers are often putting their lives in your hands. With that in mind, you should add educational content to your website. This content shouldn’t promote your services or products. Instead, it should educate your audience. The more informed they are, the more confident they will be in making a purchasing decision. Not to mention that it helps build your brand authority, which directly increases trust.

COVID-19 Content

An example of educational content might be a page dedicated to COVID-19. This page could explain what the symptoms are, what patients should do if they exhibit symptoms, and how they should seek help if needed. Not only are you providing valuable information that can save lives, but you’re also providing relevant information that can build trust.

2. Build A Compelling Website

Your website is the foundation of your inbound marketing efforts. It doesn’t matter how good your content is if your website is poor. The following are just a few important elements of a compelling website:

  • No technical issues – Broken links and slow loading pages can hinder the user experience. Few visitors will stay on your site for more than a few seconds if they’re encountering technical problems.
  • Visually pleasing layout – Your website should be visually pleasing. A poorly designed website that looks outdated will give visitors reservations about your healthcare company’s quality.
  • Easy navigation – Your site should be easy to navigate. Make it easy for your visitors to jump from one section to another and to find what they’re looking for.  Besides a solid navigation menu, you should also use internal links to help guide your visitors to related content and pages.
  • Ability to contact you – Whether visitors have questions or want to schedule appointments, it’s vital that you make it easy for them to contact you. Your contact information should be on every page. However, you should also have a page dedicated to your contact information where visitors can fill out a form. You should also think about incorporating a live chat or chatbot feature to provide basic information and guidance.

3. Maximize Your Email Marketing Strategy

Email marketing has been an incredibly cost-effective marketing strategy since the beginning of online marketing. Healthcare companies, in particular, can benefit from email marketing. For example, you can create an email newsletter that leads and customers alike can sign up for. You can use this newsletter to educate your audience and to build trust in your brand. You can achieve this by using your newsletter to provide new health information,  healthcare tips, and office updates. A good email marketing strategy can allow you to nurture more leads and encourage more appointments.

4. Use Social Media

Social media is one of the best ways to engage directly with your target audience. Many people turn to social media in order to seek healthcare-related advice. In fact, it’s estimated that 40 percent of people say that they use information they found on social media to make health-related decisions. If you establish a regular presence on your social media channels, you’ll be able to offer professional advice to potential patients. As a result of such engagement, you can build trust. Not to mention that any interactions you have will be public, which will help to generate more brand awareness.

5. Create A Blog

While you should have educational content throughout your website, a blog can be particularly helpful. A blog allows you to publish new content on a regular basis. It also allows you to publish content that may be relevant to a specific time. For instance, a post on health-care-related laws passed during the pandemic would be a great blog post. However, you can use your blog to post about all kinds of general disease information.

An effective healthcare inbound marketing strategy is essential to your company’s success, especially at this point in time. Although these marketing tips are incredibly effective, they do require time, experience, and expertise to implement successfully. As such, you should strongly consider working with a professional healthcare marketing agency.

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Developing Inbound Marketing Strategies For Your Business

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Everyone is familiar with traditional marketing. Traditional marketing includes TV commercials, radio ads, magazine ads, billboards, and more. While such marketing can still be very useful, it’s not always a cost-effective option for smaller businesses. It’s one of the reasons why most businesses have set up websites and social media pages (such as on Facebook). What you may not realize is that marketing your company online in such a way is known as “inbound marketing.” You should also know that a lot more goes into inbound marketing strategies than just setting up a website.

What Is Inbound Marketing?

People often think of inbound marketing as being the same as online marketing. However, while online marketing is often a form of inbound, they are not the same. Inbound marketing refers to any marketing strategy with a focus on attracting an audience. Most traditional marketing strategies, such as TV commercials, directly engage an audience. This type of marketing is known as “outbound marketing.”

How Is Inbound Different Than Outbound Marketing

Instead of directly engaging an audience, inbound marketing involves letting your audience come to you. To achieve this, you need to put yourself in a position to be found. For example, when someone does a Google search and finds your website on Google’s SERP (search engine results page) and they visit your site as a result. This is a form of inbound marketing.

The Benefits Of Inbound Marketing Strategies

First of all, inbound marketing is the most affordable option for companies with a smaller budget. What’s particularly beneficial about inbound marketing is that you can scale your efforts as you grow. It’s also a more effective way to build your brand authority, thereby helping to increase your reputation while building a larger audience.

Inbound Marketing Is A Long-Term Strategy

In addition to being cost-effective and easier to scale, inbound marketing is also a long-term strategy. You’ll rarely see significant results from your inbound marketing efforts the moment you implement them. But if you keep at it, you’re much more likely to achieve long-term success. This differs from outbound marketing, which tends to be more short-term in its results.

5 Essential Inbound Marketing Tips

Hopefully, your business has a website or a social media page. Most small businesses, including mom and pop shops, at least have a Facebook page. This is a good start; however, you’ll want to expand your inbound marketing efforts to increase your chances of success. The following are five essential inbound marketing strategies that you should adopt:

1. Create Attention-Grabbing Content

To attract people to your business, you need to have something of value to offer.  Because of this, you need to create content. Content is the reason people use the Internet, whether they are doing research, looking for help, or seeking entertainment. By creating website content, you put yourself in a position to be found. The content you create can continue to attract new leads over the long run. However, not just any content will do. You need to develop content that’s relevant to your business and that provides value to your target audience.

2. Promote Content On Social Media

Creating high-quality content is the first step. However, you need to promote it to attract as many potential customers as possible. Social channels are arguably the best way to promote new content since billions of people use social media. By posting content on social media, you will generate awareness of that content to your followers. Additionally, you will have a chance of attracting more leads if your followers share your content.

3. Set Up A Blog

The blog is one of the most effective ways to generate and organize content. By setting up a blog, you create a dedicated section on your site where you can publish new content. Your audience will know that they can continue to visit your blog to view new content in the future. As such, a blog also makes it easier to nurture your leads and maintain your audience.

4. Monitor Social Media And Website Analytics

You’re going to have a difficult time determining the success of your inbound marketing efforts if you can’t judge their performance. Fortunately, there are tons of website and social media analytics tools that you can use. By tracking various KPIs, you can identify what inbound efforts are performing well and which ones are doing poorly. This data can help guide your future marketing efforts.

 Six Steps to Better Use of Marketing Analytics & Dashboard 

5. Use SEO For Your Headlines

Search engine optimization makes it easier for Google to identify what your content is about and how engaging it is. It factors these things into ranking content. The better your content ranks, the more organic traffic you’re likely to receive through Google’s search engine. As such, make sure that you optimize your content’s headlines using strong, relevant keywords.

Develop an Inbound Marketing Strategy Today

As beneficial and cost-effective as inbound marketing can be, it’s important to understand that it’s not superior to outbound marketing. Inbound marketing is just a different type of marketing strategy than outbound. The best approach is to use both inbound and outbound marketing strategies that work with each other. Either way, you’ll want to make sure that you use the right inbound marketing strategies to get the most out of your inbound marketing efforts.

 

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

Inbound Marketing Strategies To Use During The Pandemic

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We are well-aware that the coronavirus has economically affected many companies drastically. However, what matters more is what your company is doing to respond to these trying times. With many states following the stay-at-home order, people are at home surfing the web now more than ever. This means there is a greater chance that they will end up on your company’s website. It is vital for your company to take advantage of this pandemic and implement more effective inbound marketing strategies to show consumers that you are still there for them and ready to work.

Have a Clean, Easy-to-Navigate Website

Your company’s website is a sales tool that can be viewed by millions of people around the world at any time of the day. It is crucial that it contains relevant, useful information as well as inbound marketing solutions such as blog articles, informative content, videos, images, and other tactics. This is especially important now, while technology use has increased because of the pandemic. There is a higher chance of someone finding your website. You want your website to provide the right content that will have consumers returning to your site. Your website should be clean, easy to navigate, and tell a story. In order to accomplish this, you must provide quality content.

Post Useful & Informational Content

Content marketing is one of the most important parts of inbound marketing. It grabs the viewers’ attention and makes them want more. It is central that your company posts informative, easy-to-understand content that consumers can use as a reference and keep coming back to.

While we are in this pandemic, content is an essential part of your inbound marketing strategy since your website’s content will be the first thing consumers see. It is key to provide frequent, valuable blog posts and marketing on social media.

It is also important to take into consideration the buyer’s journey. Does your website lead a potential buyer down an easy-to-navigate path to complete a purchase? You need content to educate consumers when they are in the early, middle, and end of their buyer journey. Make sure you provide helpful content that includes information about your product and frequently asked questions to ensure that the potential buyer has all the information they need to feel confident about buying from you.

Enjoy this article: How To Develop A Solid Inbound Marketing Strategy

Market and Engage with Prospects While Social Distancing

Conferences and trade shows are canceled and travel is restricted. It is critical that you know some ways you can still market and engage with prospects:

Online Events:

It is common that marketing teams have a few in-person events they attend in a year such as conferences or trade shows. These events are important to attend because they bring in leads. However, many have been cancelled because of the pandemic. With no in-person events to attend, it is important that your company does not just sit around and wait for the next one. Instead, launch a webinar series. Your consumers and prospects still want information, so give it to them!  You can schedule webinars far in advance so people have time to sign-up. You should continue to use webinars even after the pandemic is over to ensure more leads and sales opportunities.

Engage with Followers on Social Media:

With all the current craziness and ever-changing news, people are constantly checking their social media. Now is the time to post relevant, attention-grabbing content and engage with your followers. Your social media channels should be up to date and provide useful content. Followers should be able to tell that your company frequently uses its social media sites and is keeping up with everything going on. The main goal of using social media is to lead followers back to your company’s website, so make sure to post content that includes a link back to your website.

Using Live Chat:

Since many people are home now, they may expect you to respond to their live chat faster than usual. It is important that you set up a chat to answer quick questions from consumers. Chat tools such as live chat and chat bots bring up upgraded, next-level website experience for consumers. You have to plan and organize the way your chat is set up. You must consider what page it goes on, who receives the live chat questions, etc.

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