Archive for the ‘Inbound Marketing’ Category

5 Tips to Succeed at Inbound Marketing

If your website isn’t converting like it could, you are probably wondering what you’re doing wrong. The right content will attract the right customers organically and help your website rank higher in search engines. If you aren’t seeing this, there is room for improvement. But don’t worry, using the 5 tips we’ve compiled below, you can succeed at inbound marketing.

Do you want to create a successful inbound marketing strategy but don’t know where to start? How do you succeed in bringing the right customers into your website? We’ll go through all of these steps in the following article. Hang tight!

What Is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing, simply put, is a digital marketing strategy where a business or entity organically attracts the attention of their ideal customers at different stages of their buying journey. These stages are awareness, consideration, and decision. This is the opposite of traditional advertising, such as running ads or putting up billboards.

Inbound marketing takes into consideration the buyer's journey.

Graphic courtesy of Aria.

In a perfect scenario you attract potential customers to your site through offering highly valuable and useful content. Once the customers are there, they learn all about the company and what you offer. Through this content, they become customers. Instead of forcing your business on them through magazines or radio ads, more than likely, your customer is actively looking for a service like yours.

Thus, if you can offer the content they are looking for, they will stay on your site and convert.

Content marketing is a great way to bring customers into your site. By crafting blogs and articles that are perfect for what the customer is looking for, you can easily bring them in.

Inbound Vs Outbound Marketing

If inbound marketing refers to strategies that bring people to you, outbound refers to going straight up to them. Outbound marketing is a traditional method of marketing that looks to put messages out to in front of potential customers.

Outbound marketing includes activities like trade shows, seminars, cold calling, radio and print ads, magazines, television advertisements, billboards and more. In fact, the average human today is bombarded with over 2000 outbound marketing interruptions per day. That is a lot of interaction with outbound marketing tactics.

Comparatively, outbound marketing is remarkably more expensive than inbound marketing, and often, quite less effective. You are speaking to the masses and more than likely, the masses aren’t your target market. The marketer’s and any business owner’s dream is to speak to potential customers who are within their target audience, because they are actually looking to buy, not trying to ignore the sponsored messages because they are forced to watch it before their favorite tv show comes on.

So, how do you go about connecting with the right audience? Let’s discuss 5 tips that will help you succeed at inbound marketing.

5 Steps To Succeed At Inbound Marketing

1. Build Your Target Audience

How do customers find you? Well, this process begins by knowing exactly what these customers are looking for. This step can be accomplished by doing some keyword research. Keyword research helps you find out more about your industry, what people are searching for, and how competitive the landscape is.

Knowing how your industry ranks and what keywords are being searched can help you write the right type of content to attract buyers.

There are several tools you can use both free and paid. At Elevare, we do a combination of things to help you do the necessary keyword research. We use a program called SEMRUSH, but if you are looking to do this research for free, you can use Google Search Console.

While increasing your website traffic, in general, is great, it can be a vanity metric. You want to rank for the right keywords, not just any keywords.

2. Define SMART Goals

Once you understand what your potential buyers are looking for (determining their pain points), you can start to develop your goals for your specific campaign. Using the SMART framework is a great way to do this. What does SMART stand for? SMART is an acronym that stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-based.

Each part of the SMART framework works together to help you create goals (and further a campaign), that is carefully planned, clear and easily trackable. If you are working towards the wrong goals, this will not yield the results you want.

3. Build Your Team

Now that your goals are set and the audience defined, it’s time to hire the right people. You’ll need content writers to bolster your content marketing initiatives. You have a few options here you can build an internal team, hire an agency or hire freelancers and split up the work.

If you decide to hire an internal content team, this will be a time-consuming process but often worth it in the long-run. These people will have full-time access which means they will be more accessible and can create content more often.

If you decide to hire an agency there are a couple things to look out for. Agencies are often great for starting your project quickly. You can find an agency that provides SEO services, website development and content marketing.

However, because the agency doesn’t know your team as well, often the content can be fluffy and not have your voice as a brand. It may not bring in the right type of qualified content.

If you decide to hire a freelancer, you could save a lot of money, but expertise varies. It can be a very mixed bag in terms of quality! Some freelancers work harder than salaried employees, while for others, your job for them is a side hustle. It highly depends on the situation.

At the end of the day, finding the right mix of employees for your team is up to you and your specific goals and budget.

4. Develop A Quality Content Strategy

Once your goals have been set, you’ve done your research, and you’ve hired your team, now it’s time to write relevant content. Content writing involves much more than simply writing. It involves a lot of processes such as keyword research, brainstorming topics for blogs, building reports and evaluating, updating and optimizing old content.

If you want your inbound marketing to be successful, you will need to plan out how all of this will get done and fit together. You will have to build processes that ensure your blog posts are written and campaigns executed.

If you aren’t sure where to start with a creating a content calendar, click here.

Pro tip: It’s important to set up the right processes for organization and workflow from the beginning. Tracking every piece of content from inception through publication is important for ensuring quality and producing valuable content. You can use calendar and tracking apps like Slack, Asana or Notion to name a few, to help people stay on track of their work and ensure clear communication and expectations.

Things like social media management and email marketing can be full-time jobs by themselves. Be aware you don’t ask too much of your marketers and split jobs into their necessary areas to avoid burnout and lower workloads.

5. Analyze And Adjust

The last and most important step is to constantly be analyzing and adjusting your initiatives. We recommend tracking and evaluating your inbound marketing efforts periodically. This will help you see what’s working and what needs to be adjusted or optimized.

Eventually once you see what works for your business, you can branch out and try new marketing strategies such as newsletters, building out your social media strategy or expanding to using more video content.

Pro Tip: It can be easy to get fixated and hung up on small issues, instead of focusing on the bigger picture. Sometimes it takes months for a specific campaign to take off. You’ll need to give campaigns time to see if they are successful or not.

Craft Your Inbound Marketing Strategy

Developing and implementing a comprehensive inbound marketing plan can seem daunting. There are a lot of moving parts. However, with the right team and the right goals set, you’ll be able to improve the traffic to your website organically and attract the right customers without spending too much.

We hope these 5 tips to help you succeed in your inbound marketing endeavors. However, if developing an inbound marketing strategy seems difficult or if you’re still not sure where to start, feel free to contact us today!

SEO Works for Small Businesses and We Can Prove It

SEO works for small businesses, it really does.

You don’t need to feel intimidated by competing against large well-known brands. With a smart

Smart business owners typically weigh the pros and cons of an investment before fully committing to it.

When spending money on search engine optimization (SEO), it’s often a matter of how much to invest rather than why.

If you’re still questioning whether SEO is worthwhile for a small business, we have eleven reasons why SEO works for small businesses and why you won’t regret investing in it.

Quality User Experience

The goal of SEO is to provide online users with the best answers as quickly as possible. When your business optimizes their website and social accounts, it’s easier for people to find you online.

Ideally, there is a seamless flow of information from the company, to search engine, to the searcher.

Behind the scenes, search engines constantly work to improve user experiences and provide correct answers. The person searching will find an answer and take the next step towards a solution—which means interacting with your business.

Optimal Reach

Investing in SEO also increases the reach of your business. As a website becomes optimized, it’s easier for search engines to navigate and understand your site’s content.

This higher understanding gives your website favor; resulting in search engines ranking you as their highest suggested result.

As an example, Water Extraction Experts has invested in adding relevant keywords to their website.

Search engines now have a better understanding of what the company offers, and it’s more likely to show people results for their business when those keywords are used.

This also helps to build a stronger connection between the company’s website, social accounts, and links across the web.

Now that Water Extraction Experts has an effective SEO strategy, the company has multiple results on the first page of this search. Included in the search are links to their website, contact page, and social media accounts.

Cost-Effective Marketing

SEO methods target users who are actively searching online, which means they are looking for specific products, services, or answers.

By creating optimized content, your business can reach people who are searching in the awareness, consideration, and decision stages of their purchasing cycle.

Once these users land on your page, you can lead them down the appropriate inbound marketing or sales funnel.

Marketing Agency Impact found that properly optimized websites result in organic search leads that have a 14.6% close rate compared to a 1.7% close rate for outbound leads.

Boosted Brand Awareness

As the saying goes, “Any publicity is good publicity.” When it comes to SEO, gaining exposure in search engines is your best opportunity for growth.

As you create more optimized, relevant content, your business will build credibility. This causes search engines to trust that your company provides users with high-quality content.

The more trust that you have from search engines, the more your business and brand awareness will grow. The cycle then builds again and again for each new piece of optimized content you produce.

Easily Trackable ROI

Once you begin investing in SEO, tracking your growing traffic will become addicting. While proper SEO methods are not an overnight solution for growth, they will add up in the long run.

Some businesses do see almost an instant improvement, but others can take a couple of months or even a year to fully see growth. The great thing about SEO is that you can quickly change tactics or use new keywords if a strategy isn’t working.

By keeping track of traffic, unique visitors, page rankings and keyword search frequency, it’s simple to see if your methods are going to be a good return on investment.

Improved Local Search

Local search SEO efforts are especially important for businesses with brick-and-mortar stores or services that rely on local customers.

This optimization tactic includes sharing company information and using keywords specific to your area. One way to boost local search is to add your business address and contact information across multiple platforms.

Another is to include keywords such as your city or business name, or “find near me”; considering that people now narrow searches specific to their location.

Because SEO works for small businesses, family-owned businesses are a perfect example of companies that need to invest in it.

Let’s say that ‘Betty’s Bakery’ in Boca Raton, FL makes incredible breakfast pastries but lacks the awareness to attract guests. By using keywords such as “breakfast in Boca Raton” or “Boca Raton best pastries”, Betty’s can attract more vacationers searching for a restaurant.

Efficient and Effective Marketing

As a marketing method, SEO one of the most effective tactics for growing business. While large companies have entire teams dedicated to SEO, it is not as hands-on as social media, blogging, or email.

Once a page is optimized for SEO, you can sit back and watch it bring in new customers.

Pages, however, do need to be tweaked and updated to reflect new keywords or updated strategies. Overall though, SEO is not as time-consuming as other marketing efforts.

It does, however, take time to learn the ins-and-outs of an effective SEO strategy. It’s smart for small businesses to consult with a marketing agency to get an SEO plan started.

Higher Search Rankings

How many times do you view the second or third page of results when searching online? Probably not much if you’re like many other online users.

This is why SEO works for small businesses and is so important. It’s the primary path to getting your business to the top of the first page.

Remember the cycle of quality content and trust we mentioned above? SEO starts this cycle to boost your visibility, credibility, and likelihood of rising through the rankings.

In the case of online search engine rankings, being #10 is much better than ranking #11; although you should still aim for that #1 spot.

Quality Sales Leads

Cold-calling is an essential sales method for some businesses, but why not let your website do the work for you?

With an optimized website, potential customers can find your services and reaching out when they are ready to purchase. While this process applies to businesses in the service industry, the idea behind it can work for any business.

Reaching out to these warm leads through a phone call or email is much easier and more effective when they already know about your company.

Ideal Audience Targeting

Reaching your ideal customers is easier with SEO since it’s possible to target age, location, gender, and interests through keywords.

Not only can this attract customers who may be more interested in your business, but it also increases the likelihood of qualified leads. With qualified leads comes a boost in sales, customer referrals, and loyal customers.

When choosing keywords to reach an ideal target audience, don’t be afraid to get creative. For example, instead of entering “plumber in wellington fl” with 685,000 results, a local business could use the keyword “friendly plumber in wellington fl” with only 293,000 results. Just one word can change your ranking!

Competitive Advantage

SEO works for small businesses and when your business invests in a solid SEO strategy, it makes you more competitive online.

If your rankings are below similar local businesses, SEO may be all you need to steadily rise to the top. While white-hat SEO isn’t a quick-fix solution, it will benefit your business and make you more competitive.

Build an Effective SEO Strategy

Investing in SEO is worthwhile for any small business that wants to improve their brand awareness, build quality content, attract new customers, and increase credibility.

If you’re ready to take the next step with SEO but want guidance on best-practices and how it can affect your ROI, contact us today for a free 1-hour consultation.

You can also fill out the short form below and we will get back to you as soon as we are able. Let us help you get started with the best small business SEO strategy for your business.

About Elevare

Elevare is an all-inclusive marketing and business development agency that offers the services and skills necessary to help businesses of every size to be successful.

Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to learn more about how social media can help develop your professional career.

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Making Money with Social Media

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, Google+, and Youtube are just some of the social media outlets available online today. Nearly two thirds of the world’s population spends roughly five hours per day online. With all of that opportunity to meet other people and experience the world, how can individuals and businesses make money with social media? With these special tips from our expert team, we’ll show you the most successful ways to go about making money with social media.

Utilize Your Best Channel(s)

Knowing how you communicate on an individual or business level is extremely important. The options out there are limitless, but you are the only one who knows what your goals are and what you need to accomplish. Here are our 7 best channels and suggestions to begin making money with social media.

Facebook

Facebook is one of the first social media channels ever to come into existence. Your most active demographic are both male and female users between the ages of 13 and 40. Facebook should be used for light, fun, and basic information. Join groups, attend events, and reach out to your acquaintances from the past and present. If you’re providing a special sale, service or offering, make it sweet, simple, and fun, and you’re guaranteed to make money using Facebook.

Twitter

The key to using Twitter is to keep it short and to the point. If you’re not gifted in the art of short conversation, making money with Twitter may be a challenge for you. Twitter is the place to make brief announcements, such as a product release that leads to your website or a new partnership agreement. Even letting the world know about the one or two words that you may be feeling because your hockey team lost last night isn’t a bad idea.

If you’ve just published a book or started a blog, Twitter is the place to announce it. Not sure how to use Twitter? Check out our latest blog for some useful pointers. Making money using Twitter won’t happen overnight and it’s essential to have a decent following before you try to start. Not sure how to get a Twitter account started? Check out companies like Twiends.com to help you get the ball rolling.

This social media outlet is the most difficult and expensive to utilize; but, for good reason. Making money with LinkedIn is not for the faint of heart, and can yield substantial results. If you’re an individual, the best way to use LinkedIn is to help find the perfect job.

If you’re a business, LinkedIn is the perfect way to align yourself with professionals within the industry you want to reach. This will also help showcase your product or service to the right people. Advertising on LinkedIn can be expensive, so make sure to really consider how you’re spending your advertising dollars. If you’re not sure how to make the most of your advertising dollars on social media, you may want to reach out to a professional agency.

Instagram

The world of pictures awaits you, and consists of everything from breakfast food to dogs playing Frisbee, when you use Instagram. If you’re an individual who sells art, crafts, merchandise, food, or any other tangible item, Instagram would be your social media jam. Making money with Instagram is easy if your business caters to all things visual. Make sure to build your followers and then post pictures of the latest and greatest that you or your company have to offer. Linking your images back to a source where your item can be bought is key to making money using Instagram. Never leave a photo un-linked.

Idea central. Ever needed an idea to help you make the most of the left over materials from your last remodel? Is your five year old’s birthday coming up and they want a themed party that you can’t seem to find any inspiration for? Pinterest is your place.

If you’re an entrepreneur or small business owner, Pinterest can allow you to share your life-changing ideas with others. Making money with Pinterest is simple, but remember one thing. Just like with Instagram, your images should always be linked to a source that consumers can purchase your product or service from. Dead links or pictures result in lost revenue.

Google+

This lost, yet sometimes relevant, social media outlet isn’t without it’s perks. Google+ is the best social media platform to use to make new friends and customers. According to Huffington Post writer, Bianca Boster, Google+ is, “an interests network, not necessarily a social network”. Boster also stated that there is, “potential for a social media trifecta: Facebook as social…, Twitter as information… and Google+ as interest…” Utilizing Google+ to make money is all about getting to know new people based on common interests. This will lead to expanding awareness for your products, services and business.

Youtube

If you’re a ham in front of any camera, then Youtube is the best channel for you. Investing in a small in-house or in-office studio with decent lighting would be a great way to start. Pick a fun background or conduct an informal interview to introduce your new ideas or products. Do a demo, create a new, catchy theme song about your latest invention or conduct a review of services. The sky’s the limit with Youtube, but you have to be into being more on camera than off. YouTube is also a great way to brand yourself and your company. Take a look at these successful Youtube entrepreneurs from 2016 for some inspiration.

Making Money With Social Media

When trying to make money with social media, make sure that you’re using the best information at the most relevant time. Always try to make your information as visual as possible as well. Posts should always have an image or picture associated with them on any channel. Videos need to be relevant, full of information, and attractive to the average consumer. Making money using social media is possible, but takes time, hard work, and the ability to know and study the audience you want to reach. Keep it simple and you’ll be successful.

Elevare is an all-inclusive marketing and business development agency that offers the services and skills necessary to help businesses of every size to be successful. Fill out the form below and we will get back to you quickly.

Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to learn more about how social media can help develop your professional career.

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Is My Brand or Website Affecting My Bottom Line?

Maybe it was a snippet of a conversation you overheard an employee and a customer having.

“I was using your website the other day and it looks, well, bad.” or “I went to your website and it wasn’t working right.”

Without knowing the full context of the conversation, those words alone can cause a business owner to pause. You’ve had your website for several years and it’s served the business quite well, thank you very much. But times change and so do customers expectations, including expectations of a business’s website. All of this leads into a question we’ve heard from clients and others we’ve met with: is my brand or website hurting my bottom line?

The answer is somewhere in the middle, quite possibly. Having your brand consistent across all platforms and mediums is crucial, but so is having an up-to-date and secure website that is also user-friendly. So many moving parts, right?

Let’s look at your brand first. Having a unified brand image and message for all of the strategy elements you use in your marketing will keep building off one another. Using consistent logos, branding, and messaging across all marketing, social media, websites, and anything your business is involved in or produces ties everything together. By doing this, you’re letting customers and non-customers alike know anytime they see that particular logo or tagline, it’s your business.

On the other hand, your website truly can make or break a business as it brings many components together in one central location. Having a clear design acts as a clear message to your customers and anyone visiting your website. Crisp, sharp, user-friendly can signal your business is engaged, operational, and holds customer service to a very high standard. Conversely, a muddied brand or website can send multiple messages to people, such as lackadaisical, disinterested, uncaring.

How Can I Measure This and Make It Better?

If you find your website or brand aren’t providing as much of a return-on-investment to your bottom line as they should, don’t panic. There are several things to look at before you tear everything apart and start over. Chances are only one or two things will need an adjustment.

Let’s start with your conversions. This word is used and tossed around a lot in marketing and business, but the meaning can become a bit muddied over time. A conversion is how many of the people who visited your website actually did something that will impact your business, such as downloading a checklist or ebook, after providing some basic information like email address or telephone number. Everything you do with digital marketing is meant to have as many conversions as possible. Conversions feed directly into Google Analytics, which we will touch on in a moment. The more in touch you are with your analytics, the more quickly you can spot conversion hangups or roadblocks and make changes.

If you use Google Analytics to track your website, and anything happens on your website, even the briefest of visits, Google Analytics will let you know. What pages people are visiting – or not – on your website, where the visitor is located based on internet provider address, and what type of device they’re accessing your website from are a small sampling of the information Google can provide. Through this, you’ll be able to see if a call-to-action is working and if not, make needed changes for it to be more engaging and inviting to visitors.

One of the deepest insights you can have from your website is through attribution models. These statistics determine how much credit for conversions are assigned to touchpoints (specific clicks) in conversion paths. The purpose is to quantify each impression on a visitor’s decision to convert or not. With these numbers in hand, you can optimize advertising budgets for specific conversions. Attribution models are split into three areas: single source, fractional, and algorithmic/probabilistic. Single source assigns all credit to one event, but are regarded as least accurate for this reason. Fractional attribution does what its name implies, giving equal weights to all touchpoints, while the third model, algorithmic/probabilistic, is the most complex. Using science or proprietary algorithms, credit is assigned across all touchpoints before the conversion.

So what does all of this mean for you? Well, we recommend starting with looking over your Google Analytics for any obvious sticking points. From there, you can either adjust content, landing pages, calls-to-action, or any other element of your website that isn’t engaging your visitors to the point of conversion.

Are There Any Calls-To-Action and Are They Being Clicked?

Your calls-to-action should be the first thing you’ve looked at once you’ve verified your content is quality and relevant to your customers. Whether it’s scheduling an appointment, navigating through the shopping cart or otherwise on your website, it should be clear and concise for users. A Google Analytics tracking code should be placed on every call-to-action your website has. Why? Otherwise, you’ll never know if the call-to-action is remotely working.

Are Your Calls-To-Action and Pages Showing up in Google Rankings?

Everybody and everything are about that Google rank and your calls-to-action should be feeding that. The landing page behind any call-to-action needs to follow three basic guidelines to be considered high quality by Google.

First, any content, meaning text or keywords used, must be directly relevant to the call-to-action. Cross-pollinating calls-to-action is definitely not recommended if you’re aiming for a quality rank. This also includes testing out a change in your brand; the call-to-action should remain consistent with all branding messages your business has. Second, the information on the landing page needs to be useful for whatever your call-to-action was bringing people in for. See the reason above as to why this is necessary. And lastly, the call-to-action should offer useful features and or content unique to your website.

Elevare Can Give You a Boost

Nobody likes to see their bottom line being affected by anything. But when it comes to having mixed messaging with a brand or a website that has gone from stellar to stagnant, Elevare can get your business back on the right track.

We’ve worked with companies who wanted align their current branding across platforms and companies who wanted to create a whole new brand for a new transition.

As for websites, we work really hard to build websites that present your company, knowledge and services in the best way possible so you can be successful in your marketing efforts. It doesn’t matter if it’s a hiccup or the type of bottom line issues that have your hand hovering over the panic button, Elevare can help steer your marketing in the right direction!

Let Us Help You Increase Your Bottom Line Effectively. Get a FREE 30 Minute Consultation!

We would like to offer you a FREE 30 minute consultation to review your website and brand and help launch your business to new heights. Just fill out the form below and our marketing specialist will contact you within the hour!

A Buyer Persona, What Is That?

So what is a buyer persona? Those two words are tossed around quite a bit these days in marketing. While it might sound like a horoscope or another theory, it’s really a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer. Why is it semi-fictional? Because these customers do exist, though fictionally named, because they are mostly based on market research and real data about existing customers. You’ll sometimes see buyer persona called marketing persona, but both phrases mean the same thing.

The Right Persona for Any Size Business

Regardless of how big your business is or isn’t, taking the time to develop your own buyer personas will result in stronger and more cost effective marketing. Untargeted marketing is essentially the spray and pray way of doing things – sending your message to the masses and hoping someone takes an interest in it. Time is money and following this marketing method will only result in spent money and very little result at best. With a strong message behind your marketing efforts, your buyer personas or ideal customers will be pulled in. Understanding common objections your customers may have can be custom addressed in your marketing content.

As businesses of all size begin to shift to personal relationships with their customers, knowing your buyer personas can create those relationships more quickly. You could have one or two personas or more than 10 depending on your business size and specialty. Once you’ve created your personas, they aren’t set in stone, much like your customers and audience. Personas will need periodic adjustments and perhaps removal or addition of new personas.

How to Determine Your Personas

When it comes to figuring out what or who your personas are, demographics are key but wide-ranging. This information won’t tell you everything you’ll need or want to know, but it is a great starting point. Gender, age, location, education, and job are a handful of the broad demographics generally used. However, you can get as specific as you would like or stay broad if starting out and trying to build a customer base.

Our favorite way to determine our personas at Elevare is to ask ourselves these questions: What are the problems facing your ideal customers and what do they hope to achieve through a solution?

There are many ways to solve those problems. Interviewing current customers is one of the best ways to determine this information. Questionnaires and surveys, such as creating one through SurveyMonkey, can also help gather this information especially if you already have an email list. Remember, undertaking this will require time and organization to sort through all of the information, but it will literally pay off for you.

How to Use Those Personas to Build Your Business

So now you have this wealth of information about your buyer personas, but what do you do with it? We’re going to use Facebook as our example for how to use the deep stack of analytics your website and social media may be giving you. Analytics are a treasure trove of information about known and unknown buyer personas. Depending on the size of your business, have people from other departments involved in going through analytics to determine personas, such as sales and customer service.

As one of the biggest data aggregators, Facebook also gives you a leg up on building your buyer persona through its Insights and the People tabs. In these areas, your fans are broken down by gender, age range, country and city of IP (internet provider) location, and language the user is using Facebook in. Posts will show you when your page fans are online during a one week period, allowing you to schedule content for publishing during peak activity times.

Let us help you build your personas. Get a FREE 30 Minute Consultation!

We would like to offer you a FREE 30 minute consultation to help you find the right buyer personas for your business and help launch your business to new heights. Just fill out the form below and our marketing specialist will contact you within the hour!

Want Even More for Your Business?

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Why Inbound Marketing Is Key to Growing Your Business

You may have read the title and immediately wondered what inbound marketing is. A decade ago it was a relatively new idea testing the marketing waters. Now it’s the forefront of marketing methodology for thousands of businesses in the United States and abroad. But if you knew what inbound marketing was when you clicked on this blog, you might be thinking “No, we don’t need it.” That could be very true given your individual business and situation. But if there’s any chance you could be interested, hear us out on how inbound marketing could be quite beneficial to you and your business.

Review of Inbound Marketing

Everyone has a want or need in life, and consumers are no different. Every day they take to the internet searching for an answer or guidance to a want or need they may have personally or professionally. Inbound marketing aims to be a method to the solutions. The communication throughout inbound marketing is interactive and an ongoing two-way street with customers coming to you via search engines, social media, and organic searches. The crux is to earn people’s interest and attention with informative content rather than demanding it as outbound marketing does.

Current Business Challenges

The list of current challenges facing businesses could be a book in itself. No two businesses will tackle the same challenges at the same time, but these were the most common we came across.

Tiredness

Long hours are a hallmark of being a business owner or employee, but those hours can come at a personal toll. Mistakes, disorganization, and forgetfulness can quickly creep up on a daily basis, and these factors can derail even the best-laid marketing plans. With inbound marketing, once set-up, it works for itself while you’re catching up on much needed sleep. Content you created and published five months ago will continue to interest and engage customers, keeping the inbound cycle ever moving.

Customer Retention

Customers come and go to businesses of any size, but targeting and retaining faithful customers can and will pay off in revenues. One facet of inbound marketing is an ongoing email marketing campaign that leans on drip communications. The drip happens when your customers receive the right email at the right time, usually triggered by an action taken on your website such as signing up for a newsletter.

Employee Resources

You may have a small staff and not enough hours in the day to get everything done, including marketing your business. A delegation of tasks might fall to one person with a little more marketing or advertising knowledge than the next person. When you hire an inbound marketing agency to handle your business’s marketing, you’re delegating those tasks to people whose sole job is dedicated to marketing. No more sending off a last second email on a Thursday afternoon to a coworker down the hall about this week’s social media post.

Check out our blog: “Why LinkedIn Should Be Part of Your Marketing Strategy“

Growing Revenues

There are many factors at play working for and against growing revenues for any size of business, let alone small businesses. Obviously, this can be an ongoing stressor for business owners eager to see the bottom line steadily increase. With so many facets to inbound marketing, there will always be an opportunity for a current or prospective customer to engage with your company. This also opens the door for those customers to share their experience with friends and family, leading to new faces becoming regular customers.

How Inbound Marketing Benefits Any Season

Seasonal businesses can easily be categorized as niche, making an already specialized marketing process even more so. However, once inbound marketing gets moving, it never stops. Older blog and social media posts can be polished up and recycled as they will gain more engagement than more recent items. Each post to your blog, Facebook, or behind-the-scenes news on your website is a reminder to your current and potential customers you’re active and more than happy to field their questions and concerns throughout the buyer’s journey. This is how inbound marketing continues to build upon itself.

Targeting the Right Customers

By targeting your determined ideal customers, you’re not excluding people, but instead wisely spending your limited marketing funds on customers most likely to purchase your product or service. You can choose basic demographics to start, such as gender, age, and location then further split into areas like income and education levels. This is the hard part of targeting your ideal customers, but once it’s over, you have unlimited ability to tailor your messages for optimal reach. By knowing the basics of your audience, you can continually fine tune your marketing toward your targeted audience, which may evolve over time.

Ready to Make the Switch to Inbound?

If you still have questions about whether your business needs inbound marketing, no worries, that’s why we’re here. There are a lot of constantly moving parts to inbound marketing, but that’s where Elevare can bring an easy transition to an inbound marketing plan. Weekly blogging, engaging social media campaigns, customer promotions via email marketing, and more, we are ready and able to get your company into the inbound mindset and help you celebrate a growing customer base and revenues.

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25 WEBSITE MUST HAVES TO INCREASE TRAFFIC, LEADS, AND SALES

What to Expect Your First Year of Inbound Marketing

Marketing doesn’t work as a one-time event, or even a once a month set-it-and-forget-it approach. It’s an ongoing approach with many pieces moving and working in unison at the same time, with the same end goal – driving revenue and leads for your company. As with anything worthwhile in business, a marketing plan takes proper research, planning, strategy sessions and more to build enough momentum to be fruitful.

Patience is a virtue and this is even more applicable to inbound marketing. As many companies move away from traditional marketing to a customer focused inbound approach, the results are less likely to come overnight, but are greater in the long term. With many moving parts working alongside each other, going into an inbound strategy with a finely tuned plan and an understanding of the process is highly recommended.

Marketing Expectations in the First 3 Months

Consider these first few weeks and months the build-up of what is to come, with a lot of scratching out ideas and resisting the urge to overhaul everything. Creating your buyer personas and beginning to target those personas will be beneficial to your company in the short and long term. By reaching out to your ideal customers, you’re putting yourself out there and into the minds of people who may not have previously considered your business.

Making an editorial calendar will give everyone on your team an idea of what to prioritize and what will need to be finished by a certain date. It’s also a great time to review your targeted metrics and make any adjustments if necessary. Sure everybody wants to see a 50 percent increase in leads, conversions, and sales in a matter of months but refer back to that patience thing we mentioned earlier. On a positive note, you will begin to see results from citations and search engine optimization efforts by the end of your first three months. Such as increased traffic, leads, and eventually sales from lead nurturing.

Natalie Sisson’s YouTube channel The Suitcase Entrepreneur has some tips on what to include in your editorial calendar.

Marketing Expectation in the First 6 Months

This is the point on the timeline when both on-site and off-site results will become apparent. Results from search engine optimization should really begin to ping back along with blogging efforts ranking on a national scale if done correctly. Then there is the matter of your social media presence. By the six month mark, you’ll have a good idea and feel for what has worked in terms of most engagement. Maybe it’s your weekly motivational mini poster or the short behind-the-scenes at the office video. Whatever is working, keep it up. Whatever is not working, needs to be modified or adjusted to test results.

If you have a healthy list of email subscribers, now is the time to start breaking them from one massive list into several, smaller, segmented groups for further targeting. Your segments can be anything from a specific geographic location to age ranges, with subsequent content sent to them with a more personal touch. By creating segments, you also widen yet narrow your content creation strategies going forward; widening by having a specific audience to target, but narrowing because the content will need to be specific to those demographics.

Marketing Expectations in the First Year

At the end of the first year, your blogging efforts should begin to hold their own on a national scale. SEO efforts will need to continue, and competitors will have taken notice and put you on their radar. It’s also time to start planning for a new cycle of marketing.

As you begin to look back on the last year, remember that return-on-investment goes beyond monetary returns. A shortened sales cycle with inbound marketing can cut down on internal expenses. Establishing yourself in your industry and area as a thought leader will help create a lasting impression and presence in the search engine result pages.

What Now?

You’ve made it through your first year, but now is the time to re-evaluate what worked and what didn’t work before beginning to plan for year two. One thing to look at is what medium worked best for your brand and business. It might have been Facebook, weekly email marketing, or your website itself. The best way to judge this is through the pages of analytics gleaned from tracking mechanisms.

Look around at what your competition is doing and improve upon it. While the old adage is that imitation is the best form of flattery, it’s much better to improve an idea then keep following someone else. Double check that your content is appropriate for the audience you’re targeting. No, we don’t mean things that need to come with an NSFW warning, but that it’s relevant to your business. A great way to refresh this content is by following the trending information from your industry.

Have You Picked out a Marketing Agency Yet?

Success takes time, especially when it comes to putting together a winning marketing strategy. Elevare works with businesses to remove a headache and hassle. Instead, we deliver powerful results through inbound marketing tactics. From reaching your customers, new and old, through weekly blog posts to increasing your company’s presence in search engine results pages with search engine optimization, we work with you from initial idea launches to profound success. Using a 24/7 focus built around your brand and vision, Elevare can get you through the first year of a marketing plan and beyond.

Get a FREE 30 Minute Consultation!

Want Even More for Your Business?

Are you looking to drive more traffic, leads, and sales to your website? We are offering our readers a FREE and essential new eBook called:

25 WEBSITE MUST HAVES TO INCREASE TRAFFIC, LEADS, AND SALES

Inbound Marketing and SEO for Florida Business Owners

Florida business owners, this blog is for you. SEO. Inbound Marketing. Are these new buzzwords for the marketing world that will quickly be filed away as has been tactics or are they something more? If you went with the latter, you would be correct. As consumers have changed the ways they search for answers and information to everyday questions and challenges, companies have begun changing how they respond to those questions and challenges. If you are a contractor, roofer, restoration and remediation company this is the need to know blog for your business.

What is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound Marketing flips the idea of traditional marketing. Rather than cold calling, mass mailing, and otherwise sending unsolicited messages about your business or product and trying to convince mass amounts of consumers why they should use your company, inbound relies on metrics and analytics to develop a targeted audience. By creating content that is not only relevant to what consumers are searching your website for, but timely, you can create immediate relationships with inbound marketing.

Benefits of Inbound Marketing for a Florida Small Business

As a small business, your focus is on your customers and always creating an enjoyable experience and overall rapport with them. Inbound marketing has a strong emphasis on personalization, from the content you create to how you distribute it. That rapport can be built through the attracting and conversion process in inbound marketing. By creating targeted content which answers questions and needs of current and potential customers, you’re providing an assurance you are the right business for them to choose.

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is what helps Google, Bing and other search engines learn what your website is about. Using keywords readily searched for by consumers, along with a handful of other on-page factors, SEO provides credibility to your business along with providing a higher ROI (return-on-investment) in advertising.

Benefits of SEO for a Florida Small Business

Contrary to popular belief, SEO still works and isn’t going away anytime soon. As the search engine algorithms evolve and become more detail focused, SEO will still play a role in having your small business content rank in organic searches. New changes have begun placing more weight on audio and video content, but when the searches return, likely they picked up on keywords from the original file name of the content.

SEO is still a cost-effective way for the foundation of your small business marketing efforts. While it’s not as flashy as social media or may not provide the revenue stream as pay-per-click, having a solid foundation is always a good idea. Plus, search engines have gained more market share, such as nearly 90 percent of online customers checking online reviews prior to making a purchase, including at small businesses.

Inbound Marketing vs. SEO

In one vein of thought, SEO and inbound marketing are intertwined, one fueling the other. SEO is borne of creating valuable content which inbound marketing is based upon, but the differences soon come to the forefront. As a rule, SEO focuses on ranking in search results, but doesn’t allow you to capture the traffic generated from search results. Inbound thrives on sources which can sustain changes to search algorithms throughout time, such as a blog written two years before but still contains information consumers are seeking out.

As the ranking algorithms used by search engines change, more emphasis has been placed on not only well developed written copy, but visual content and social media from the source. Visual content grabs the attention in a vast sea of words, while SEO quickly blurs together. Google has begun placing weight on social media in terms of a site’s rank.

But you don’t have to be pounding the keyboard daily to see results with inbound marketing. According to HubSpot, business-to-business companies who blog only one to two times each month generate 70 percent more leads than companies who don’t blog at all. Those leads nearly double when a company increases its blogging from three to five times per month to six to eight.

What Does it Mean to be an Inbound Business?

When you become an inbound client, the first thing is to develop a marketing strategy. As with any strategy or plan, goals, objectives, challenges and more will be outlined during this process, producing a guide to refer back to. A website that meets user friendly standards will be the front gate to sought after blogs that can be shared, while further engaging audiences through social media.

At this point in being an inbound client, the focus will shift slightly back to SEO as optimized keywords from the content help pull it to the front pages in search engines. Once the audience has come across the content, landing pages and calls-to-action will begin to convert traffic to leads, appealing to potential customers at all levels of the buyer’s journey. From there, leads convert into sales through lead nurturing and email marketing to deliver timely information to all contacts. The final step is compiling and analyzing the metrics gained from the previous five during the inbound process.

Attracting the Right Customers to Your Website

Everyone who visits your website has specific questions and is seeking information related to those questions. What will keep them thinking of you and your business is well written, concise content that can engage the reader through all stages of the buying process. The ability to access this information at the right time and through the right platform will also drive leads to your website. Social media, regardless of the platform you use, expands the opportunity to engage your audience and encourage sharing of your informational content. Newsletters and podcasts are other forms of communication which can be utilized for inbound marketing and spreading the word about your company or industry to consumers.

Ready to Take Your Small Business to Inbound Marketing?

Inbound Marketing focuses on an around-the-clock presence among your targeted audience, a focus we at Elevare also believe in. As Inbound Marketing and SEO are continually growing and changing, we understand that so will your goals, challenges and everything in between. We work with you from the initial meeting to craft a successful and flexible inbound marketing campaign that will keep your brand at the forefront of your customer’s minds. Contact us and let’s get started.

Get a FREE 30 Minute Consultation!

Want Even More for Your Business?

Are you looking to drive more traffic, leads, and sales to your website? We are offering our readers a FREE and essential new eBook called:

25 WEBSITE MUST HAVES TO INCREASE TRAFFIC, LEADS, AND SALES