healthcare marketing agency

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 A poorly designed website that looks outdated will give visitors reservations about your healthcare company’s quality.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.

inbound marketing strategy

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
Cornerstone Content 2

Cornerstone Content & Why You Need It

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As you likely know at this point, the success of your inbound marketing strategy depends significantly on your content strategy. Your content strategy, however, probably consists of several different facets. As you plan your content, it’s important to understand that not all content provides the same value to your strategy. Some content is much more valuable to your marketing strategy than other types of content. The most important of this content is known as cornerstone content. It’s useful to understand what cornerstone content is and that you implement it on your website.

Cornerstone ContentWhat is Cornerstone Content?

Cornerstone content is the best and most important content found on your website. Out of all the content you create, this is the content that you want to rank highest in search engines. It provides new visitors with an overview on important topics that are relevant to your business. For example, cornerstone content for a roofing contractor might include an article, about the different types of materials that can be used in a roof installation. Or how to tell when your roof needs to be replaced. It can also include an in-depth breakdown of services offered by your company and when they might be needed.

As such, cornerstone content can take the form of a blog post or a webpage. Cornerstone content is generally found at the top of your funnel. Since it provides visitors with a thorough introduction to a topic, it doesn’t need to be gated.

The Benefits

The following are some of the benefits of creating and implementing cornerstone content onto your website:

  • Increase your brand awareness – Your content is more likely to be found by new visitors, who are looking to educate themselves about certain topics. Because your content provides visitors with an introduction to certain information, it should help to drive awareness of your brand as a result.
  • Create a positive first impression on visitors – People who first arrive at your site are more likely to do so via your cornerstone content. If the information is helpful and insightful, then you will leave a good first impression. This will encourage them to continue exploring your site and to read other content.
  • Earn natural links – Cornerstone content is more likely to earn links from other respectable sources. As a result of being a good source of information for people who are new to the topic. As such, cornerstone content is more likely to earn traffic as a result of external links.
  • Drive relevant web traffic – Create what is relevant to your brand, then the people who search for the topics you’ve focused on are more likely to be part of your target audience.
  • Build brand authority and trust – If what you create is of high quality, it will help to build brand authority, making it easier to earn trust from new visitors.
  • Repurpose into other types of content – Because cornerstone content is a long-form introduction or overview of a topic, you can repurpose it into other types of content, such as smaller blog posts.

How to Create What You Need

As important as cornerstone content is, creating it is a simple process. The following are some of the basic steps you can take in order to create what’s needed for your website:

  • Identify main keywords – Do keyword research to determine what the main keywords you want your website to rank for. Use these keywords to form the topic ideas for your content.
  • Write long-form content – Cornerstone content should be more in-depth pieces of content that provides readers with highly-informative material. Content that is impressive in both quality and scope is more likely to be linked to. Make sure that when you begin crafting that it’s well-developed and comprehensive.
  • Connect related content – Link your cornerstone content to other pages and other content on your website that’s relevant. Keeping it interconnected will help boost your SEO as well as make it easier to keep visitors on your website.
  • Optimize – Make sure you also use proper keywords in your headers, meta tags, titles, and URLs.
  • Make your content accessible – It should be easy to find your cornerstone content. Even if new visitors don’t find it via a search, they should be able to find it when on your website. It’s why you should link to it from your homepage.

When it comes to your content strategy, the importance of having this information on your website is essential. It is the foundation that will help to drive the success of your content marketing strategy in general.

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5 Ways to Update Your Internet Marketing Strategy in 2020

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The end of the year is quickly approaching. This means that you should take time to review the progress of your marketing efforts this year. You should also think about adjusting your internet marketing strategy and improving upon it. Even if your internet marketing strategy was successful this year, there are always ways you can improve. This is especially true when you consider how quickly internet marketing evolves and changes. With that in mind, the following are five ways that you should consider updating your internet marketing strategy for next year:

1. Update Your Web Design

Your web design has a big impact on whether visitors will stay on your website and continue to explore. The thing is, many businesses don’t update their web design for years. What might have been considered a cutting edge web design three or four years ago may be significantly outdated now. Your website should be easy to read and easy to navigate on both desktop and mobile. As a result, modern web designs tend to go with a cleaner, more minimalistic approach. Take a look at the websites from some of your competitors or from other businesses within your industry to see what they’re doing. If it’s been more than a year or two since you last updated your web design, there’s a good chance that it could do with a few improvements.

2. Personalize Your Email Marketing Efforts

Email marketing might be an old internet marketing strategy, but it’s certainly not an outdated one. Email marketing is one of the most cost-effective ways to not only nurture your leads, but to continue building relationships with existing customers. Be sure to segment your email lists based on the personal data and user behavior data you have access to so that you can personalize your emails more effectively. The more personalized your emails are, the more relevant they’ll be.

Check out our article: Email Opening Lines That Actually Work

3. Make Better Use Of Social Media

A lot of companies have social media pages, but they don’t do anything with them. Use your social pages to your advantage. Link new content to your social pages. Encourage conversations about your brand or your industry by asking your followers questions. Contribute to conversations that are relevant to your brand. By engaging with your followers, you build brand trust.

While using social media to engage with your followers should be a priority, there are other ways that you can take advantage of social media as well. For example, find influencers within your industry and connect with them. Building relationships with influencers can expose you to even bigger audiences and can help to boost your reputation.

4. Create New Content

New forms of content catch on quickly. Because of this, don’t limit yourself to just writing blog articles. While you should certainly continue with your existing content marketing tactics if they’re working for you, you should also look to vary your content. For example, if you haven’t started creating video content yet, then there’s a good chance you’re already falling behind the competition. If you don’t have the resources to create high-quality video content, consider recording podcasts.

Creating new content in a variety of formats will help to extend your reach and will go a long way towards building your brand authority. You may even want to source some of your content from your users. Consumers often connect more with user-generated content, after all. You can do this by holding contests on social media and awarding prizes to the best user-generated content (such as the best picture submitted on Instagram or the best video on YouTube).

5. Continue Finding Ways To Improve SEO

One of the most common online marketing mistakes people make is to assume that once they optimize their content for SEO, that they no longer have to worry about it. However, SEO optimization should be continuous. You should continue doing keyword research in order to optimize new content that you publish. You should monitor your page speed and improve it when it slows down. Also, work on off-page SEO, such as earning backlinks from respectable sources (such as by getting influencers to share links to your content). Remember that SEO isn’t just about optimizing your website. Your SEO strategy will only improve if you compliment it with your content marketing and social media strategies.

When it comes to your internet marketing strategy, it’s important to take note of what worked and what didn’t at the end of every year. Focus on improving marketing efforts that you feel fell short of expectations or of the goals you set. Even if you’re happy with how your marketing strategy performed, look for possibilities for improvement. As such, keep these five ways to improve your internet marketing strategy in mind for 2020.

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.

Traditional Marketing vs. 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.

25 Website Must Haves For Driving Traffic, Leads & Sales
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What’s Trending In Marketing For July 2018

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This week in inbound marketing we look at the new AdWords tools Google introduced that will transform how YouTube advertisers use the platform. Read more on the changes and trends happening in marketing today.

Noteworthy Marketing News

Instagram’s New Shopping Bag Icon Adds E-Commerce Element To Advertisers’ Stories

With hundreds of millions of users watching Instagram Stories daily, it would be crazy for brands not to take advantage of this popular platform. Luckily, Instagram has made it easier for brands to do so by recently introducing its new shopping bag icon that will appear on select advertiser’s Instagram Stories according to a recent write up on Marketing Land. Tapping the icon will allows users to view more details like images and pricing information on products from their favorite brands, transforming the way customers engage with brands.

Learn more about advertising approaches on 4 social media platforms

Advertisers Will Soon Have AdWords Tools To Test & Measure Creative Elements Of YouTube Video Ads

Google recently introduced new AdWords tools for YouTube advertisers that measure and test creative elements in their video ads. The YouTube creative suite will feature four new tool sets—Video Creative Analytics, YouTube Director Mix, Video Experiments, and Video Ad Sequencing. A recent post on Marketing Land goes into detail about how these tools will allow advertisers to do a variety of things that will transform their experience using AdWords. Advertisers will also be able to analyze and keep track of how the creative elements they choose to implement influence campaign performance.

Instagram Moves On YouTube With IGTV Launch, Opening Platform To Hour-Long Videos

According to an article by Amy Gesenhues on Marketing Land, Instagram is now making way for long-form video by introducing its new IGTV platform and IGTV standalone app. Both platforms will allow users to upload hour-long videos. Instagram has reached a remarkable 1 billion users and with more of them watching videos compared to other types of content, CEO Kevin Systrom believed it was time to open up a platform where videos are the focus. As for advertisers, Systrom recognized that the new platform would be a great place to offer more affordable advertising options in light of Facebook’s rising ad costs.

Improving Your Marketing Program

What Are The Benefits Of Using HubSpot Marketing Automation Tools?

If you want your long-term inbound marketing strategy to be effective, you must be able to tackle various tactics that range from creating high-quality content for your site to engaging with followers on your social media—managing all these task often requires a balancing act. Our own Nicole Wagner published an article that explains how HubSpot marketing automation tools can simplify your workload.

Tips To Consider When Developing Strong Email Subject Lines

Having an attractive email subject line can make all the difference when it comes to increasing your open email rate and overall exposure with your target audience. Debbie Szwast offers insightful tips on how to develop strong email subject lines that you’ll want to keep in mind the next time you send an email.

Recent Marketing Reports, Updates, and Trends

Facebook’s Removing Third-Party Targeting Data: What Marketers Need To Know

In a recent post about Facebook published on Marketing Land, Ginny Marvin highlights the changes Facebook is making to combat the scrutiny and regulatory pressure its facing, and informs marketers on how to navigate these changes. Facebook announced that they are removing access to third-party data brokers within their advertising system, both pubic and private. Several factors such as the GDRP that aims to protect people by ensuring they have control over their personal data have sparked the drastic changes. The phasing out of third-party data brokers will start in the EU.

The Future Of TV Advertising In Today’s Digital World

Despite what some critics might say about advertising being ineffective on TV, in a blog post published in MarTech, Chuck Moran explains why TV is still an important part of the media ecosystem and how it has evolved to become advanced TV. Advanced TV combines old-style linear TV with streaming video provided through OTT platforms or connected TVs. This transformed version of TV changes the way marketers target their audience as they can now optimize their reach by creating campaigns that sync with local events, receive real-time analytics of viewing habits, and determine which ads to deliver based on first-party data.

Tokenized Loyalty Platform Sweet Offers Sugar Tokens To Energize Fans

Life is sweeter with… sugar tokens? According to a recent post on MarTech, a startup called Sweet has become the first tokenized loyalty platform of its kind to hit the market. The company gives brands the opportunity to promote themselves by rewarding the fans that engage with their brand online with reward tokens called ‘Sugar.’ Fans can redeem their sugar tokens for amazing experiences and rewards in the Sweet Marketplace.

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

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What’s Trending in Marketing

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Keeping up with what’s trending in marketing is an important way to ensure that your marketing efforts remain up to date. Not to mention that they can provide insight into how you can adjust your marketing strategies in order to improve your results. The only problem is that keeping up with what’s trending in marketing can be quite a challenge seeing as how the online marketing landscape seems to always be shifting.

The following are a collection of articles that we have curated from some of the most notable marketing blogs on the web highlighting recent marketing trends that we think you should be aware of:

1. Noteworthy Marketing News and Trends

The power of podcasting: How to boost your reputation and search engine rankings

Podcasts have exploded in popularity over the past five years, taking on the position that radio once had in our lives. As you can imagine, there’s a lot of opportunity for marketing using podcasts as a result. A recent article about podcasts published on Search Engine Land recommends establishing yourself as an authority within your field through the creation of webinars, video content, a social media presence and more. This helps build credibility so that you’ll have a better chance at being invited onto a podcast. Once you’ve built a name for yourself, you’ll want to pitch podcast ideas that can benefit your SEO efforts to podcast hosts that are relevant to your business.

YouTube’s new TrueView for Reach option makes bumper assets skippable

According to an article by Ginny Marvin on Marketing Land, YouTube recently introduced a skippable option for short-form ads that are called TrueView for Reach, which can be skipped after five seconds; however, advertisers only pay if the viewers watch 30 seconds, the viewer interacts with the ad or the video ends. YouTube has implemented this new option in response to requests for ways to optimize TruView buys based on the different campaign objectives that customers have. One of the beta testers of the TrueView for Reach option, Samsung, revealed that it reached over 50 percent more people at half the CPM (cost per thousand) using the new feature.

Google Switches to Infinite Scrolling Mobile Search Results

Google has switched from having to click from page to page on their mobile SERP (search engine results page) to being able to scroll down infinitely by clicking on a “more results” button. This could potentially change what it means to rank on the first page of SERP according to a recent write up on the new infinite scrolling feature on Search Engine Journal. However, it’s currently in a test phase, which Google will only make permanent based on user feedback.

What other trends are there? Check out these ten ways to use Google Trends to Increase SEO!

2. Growing Your Inbound Marketing

Do You Need to Redesign Your Website?

Your website plays a huge role in your ability to market effectively. If it’s been a while since you updated your website, it may be in need of a redesign. Our own Nicole Wagner did a write up recently sharing some of the signs that a website needs to be redesigned. These signs include poor web rankings, a change in branding, a lackluster conversion rate, an outdated look and a subpar user experience.

Your Company’s Core Values Play a Role in Developing Your Brand Story

Storytelling is one of the most important aspects of marketing. Without it, you’ll have trouble engaging with your audience and connecting with them. We recently published a blog post on developing your brand story detailing how important it is to employ storytelling in order to share what your company’s core values and beliefs are and how that will evoke stronger emotions and build stronger bonds with your audience.

3. Recent Marketing Reports, Updates, and Trends

Pinterest reports 50% gain YoY in SMB advertisers

The Pinterest Propel ad program has been around for a whole year now and it recently reported a 50 percent jump in small and medium-sized business advertisers since it first went live. Pinterest has made a concerted effort to position their platform as an effective tool for advertisers and also revealed that businesses who are using Pinterest Propel are earning three times as many clicks than those who are not — and are even experiencing an average of 15 percent lower cost-per-clicks within the first 90 days.

Snapchat looks to offer new e-commerce options for Discover Publishers

According to a recent post on Marketing Land, Snapchat is currently testing a new e-commerce option on some of its Discover publisher channels. The new feature will allow users to swipe on products within the Discover platform in order to buy them from the Snap Store. Although they are just testing the waters, the company seems to have great ambition for its store’s future potential. Several publishers have revealed that they have tested the new feature and that currently, Snapchat is not taking a revenue share from any of the products being sold so far during the testing stage.

Facebook & Cambridge Analytica: What we know, what they knew & where that leaves us

Facebook has been all over the news as of late due to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Considering the fact that many businesses leverage the use of Facebook for their marketing efforts, you’ll want to know where the future of Facebook lies. A recent article on Marketing Land goes into detail about the scandal as well as Mark Zuckerberg’s recent testimony in front of Congress addressing the issue of Facebook’s privacy settings and user consent.

The future of retail is Generation Z-dependent — and martech is the way to reach them

A new generation (Generation Z) is coming of age, and like every generation before them, their buying habits are different. Rohit Gupta explains how important it is for businesses to begin adjusting their marketing efforts to better target this upcoming generation by providing numerous tips. These tips include customizing the purchase journey, connecting through social media, preparing for the use of voice recognition technology, and focusing on convenient shipping options.

A GUIDE TO EFFECTIVE MOBILE MARKETING TECHNIQUES

inbound marketing benefits

Top 3 Ways to Maximize Your Inbound Marketing Strategy

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Do you have a favorite sport? Maybe it’s something popular like football or hockey. Perhaps a more dignified pastime such as golf or horseracing better suits your style. Whatever your preference may be, do you ever wonder how your favorite athletes (hopefully!) win more than they lose? Most likely they are playing with a strategy. It may seem obvious, but strategy – even in a sport like racing – is essential to victory.

The same is true for your business website. Without a strategy, your website will fall behind the competition. Don’t let this happen! Many companies fall into the trap of creating a website for nothing more than an “online presence.” With inbound marketing, websites can do so much more than they could 20 years ago. With inbound marketing, businesses are seeing more online traffic that results in more customers and sales. But without a strategy, even inbound marketing has its limits.

Inbound marketing benefits from a well-developed strategy. There are three aspects to creating a well-developed inbound marketing strategy.

1. Create website goals

What do you want your website to do for your customer? That’s the main question that should be asked before a website is developed. Without a clear goal, a website could be published without having any significant benefit to the owner or the visitor. If a website generates most of its sales after visitors view a product information page, the goal of the website should be to create more product information pages, increase traffic to these pages, and streamline the ability to go from product information to product purchase. Inbound marketing benefits from having a website with clearly defined goals. If you are wondering about your website, try having a friend or colleague take a look at it. Ask them if they felt your website had clearly defined goals. Once you’ve determined you have the right goals in mind, it’s time you ask yourself if you have the right person in mind.

2. Create a Persona

Creating a persona is a powerful way for a business to better understand its customers. Without a persona, businesses have an incomplete idea of who to market to. So what is a persona? A Persona is the ‘ideal’ customer that a business wants to reach out to. Personas are defined by many things – ethnicity, location, motivation – but what they all have in common is that they help shape the strategy used by a company to achieve its goal.

Read more on Why Buyer Personas Are So Important

By creating a strategy with a specific end-user in mind, we are better able to understand what their problems are and how we can help make their lives easier. Don’t get too attached to your persona though! You will likely find that you may need to update them as you gain more insights on your customers. You may even considering adding an additional persona. Once you have your persona or personas created, you can move on to the next step.

 3. Get to know your persona

Now that you have a persona, ask yourself, how well do you know him or her? It may seem like knowing a pretend person’s upbringing and background is a little silly, but it can go a long way with customer satisfaction. By constructing your persona’s life story, you are better able to understand their motivation, needs, and desired outcome in life. If your persona is looking for a product that satisfies a long-term need but your business only sells products for immediate use, you’ve just gained valuable insight. You’ve recognized a need your typical customer has as well as an opportunity for your company to grow. By using information gathered from our personas, we can update and adapt our company strategy to best fit our customer needs.

Download A Free Template For Developing Personas

Just like in all sports, strategies continue to adapt as they encounter new problems and opportunities. You will likely find that a strategy created today might not work for you a year from now. That’s okay! Revisiting your goals, updating your persona’s attributes, changing their background and desired outcomes; these are all essential to a successful business. Just remember, inbound marketing benefits strongly from a well thought out strategy. How do you think your company’s online strategy is? If you’d like a free consultation, please check out the link below.

Want more resources on how to redesign your website? Click here!

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

Inbound Marketing Benefits

Inbound Marketing Works. Politics Proves It.

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We can all agree that politics in America right now is messy. To be honest it’s beyond messy. That’s no secret. So I won’t be writing about how divided we are today, rather, I’m going to be discussing how inbound marketing benefits organizations that operate in the political realm.

So what does inbound marketing have to do with politics?

Absolutely everything.

Think about where most people get their news from today. Is it the “failing” New York Times? What about CNN? Fox News? No, the answer is social media: Facebook, Twitter, etc. For traditional news organizations, this is devastating. But for inbound marketing news websites? It’s a cash cow.

What’s inbound marketing news? We’ll get to that. First I want to talk about how social media works. I’ll keep it brief because I’m sure you already know. Social media tracks your interests through likes, shares, and retweets. Based on your interests, the social media service you’re using is more likely to put content in front of you that you will react to. It’s human nature to want to see the things you like.

Considering The Source

Okay, back to news. News isn’t supposed to be all good or all bad. News is, or rather should be, a collection of facts that are communicated to its audience regardless of their feelings and personal opinions. Good things happen, and bad things happen. Your favorite politician may betray you with certain legislation, or maybe someone you detest says something you agree with. These are hard realities to grapple with for anyone. But social media doesn’t want to give you difficult feelings to grapple with; it wants to make you happy. Always happy.

[Read About Creating A Brand To Become President]

So is Facebook going to let you see a CNN article about how the president isn’t living up to his promises to you? Of course not. But what if a website were to take the same information and deliver it in a way that makes you happy? That’s what inbound marketing news is. These websites make their fortunes by taking anything that happens in the world and delivering it in a nice, easy to digest fluff piece that puts its audience’s mind at ease.

Now, I’m not making a political statement with this article. I’m pointing out how inbound marketing works and I want to use the best example. For that reason I am going to focus on conservative media. Head on over to the “Being Conservative” Facebook page.

The Echo Chamber

First of all, this is one of the most followed political pages on Facebook right now with almost 3 million followers at the time this article is being written. Take a look at all the posts on this page. They are ALL from The DailyWire.com. Almost 3 million followers seeing multiple posts every single day from a single news source translates into an astounding amount of views for that website. This fact isn’t lost on advertisers who pay to have their products and companies advertised on the website. This alone generates an impressive amount of income for the website. The fact that The DailyWire also charges to remove ads creates another revenue stream for the company.

Once visitors click on a headline and are brought to the website they are shown other articles that may interest them based on the tags and keywords in the original article. While exploring The DailyWire, visitors increase the website’s SEO ranking and credibility with Google, meaning DailyWire articles are more likely to appear in search results. Now that The DailyWire has millions of daily visitors they can generate money by publishing books, scheduling speaking events, and a number of other things, all of which helps their SEO and Facebook following grow.

This level of online engagement should be the envy of every business owner hoping to grow their company. Think about this; in a time where print media and local newspapers are struggling to survive, The DailyWire has been growing steadily since its founding in 2015. Without inbound marketing benefits continuing to improve the company’s marketing efforts the website would probably find itself struggling to stay online. But with new and relevant content, active engagement on social media, and the support of millions of viewers, The DailyWire will most likely continue to defy the odds and succeed in today’s digital economy.

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