Sales Driven Marketing Hub

Too many businesses dive head first into inbound marketing without doing all of their homework. Content marketing requires much more than hiring an intern to write and publish your blog posts. You've got to have a plan, and it begins with a laser focus on the basics of inbound marketing strategy.

One of the most important things you need to do before launching an inbound strategy—before blogging, partaking in social media marketing, creating email marketing campaigns, etc.—is to create buyer personas.

As we discussed in a previous post, email marketing not only allows you to bring in new leads but also helps renew existing customer relationships. We’ve already covered how to capture your audience, get people subscribed to your list(s), optimize your subject lines, and connect to your readers. 

Now it’s time to focus on what types of lifecycle emails you should be sending. Thanks to our friends over at Vero, we’re able to provide you with a comprehensive list of different lifecycle emails you should be sending throughout the buyer’s journey. 

Whether you’re reaching out to a brand new prospect or a repeat customer, here are 41 types of lifecycle emails that can help boost your email marketing campaigns.

How is your business performing on social media? There are a lot of analytics options out there to check out how your company’s site is doing. Whether you’re using Google Analytics, Kissmetrics or Hubspot for your website analytics, it’s also important to check out your platform-specific social media metrics.

These social analytics are not only beneficial to marketing teams, they help them demonstrate their company's social media ROI to the C-Suite.

Using stock images can be tricky. You want your blog posts and social media content to be visually stimulating, but you don’t want your photos to misrepresent your brand.

For all intents and purposes, you should be using images—at least one per blog post—and stock images provide a cost-effective way to access a lot of them from one place.

The problem arises when you use stuffy, bland, boring images that look stock. This reflects poorly on your company and its website. If your image is boring, chances are people will think the post is too and will leave your site.

Therefore, I’ve devised this post of five ways to make your stock images stand out to help you get out of stock image purgatory.

Who are the biggest names in your industry? Do they know who you are? An incredibly important part of inbound marketing is knowing who your industry influencers are. Although getting the attention of a highly influential and high-profile professional can seem like a daunting task, it’s not impossible.

The things we learned in English class don't apply to writing web copy. You have to play by a new set of rules to improve your search rankings and capture your readers' attention.

Here are four tips for writing web copy to help you improve SEO, drive traffic, and maximize reader engagement.

These days, inbound is driving corporate marketing strategy. It is the most effective way to attract potential customers to your company; much more so than using traditional advertising methods. Content fuels the inbound marketing engine to capture prospects' attention, build brand recognition, and increase customer loyalty.

Hopefully if you’re reading this you have the basics of social media down. You know what type of content works best on which social media platforms and when the best times to post are.

Once you have a presence on the appropriate social media sites for your business and have pretty much figured out the best practices for each platform, it’s time to take your efforts to the next level.

How fast does your sales and marketing team move when a new lead comes in? At many companies, the average lead response time is nearly 47 hours. That timeframe may have worked in the past, but online consumers have little patience for waiting. If you want to convert leads into sales, timing is everything. But just how important is speed to conversion, and how fast should your follow-up be? Let's see what the numbers say.

What's your marketing process? If you're like many businesses, you rely a lot on web site and email marketing to bring in new leads or renew existing customer relationships. Many businesses have an email list, but that list could work a lot harder. Here's how to make email marketing an essential part of your overall marketing strategy.