Inbound Marketing Search Engine Marketing Blog

Marketing Objectives 101

Marketing objectives may have remained the same but the marketing methods have changed dramatically.

What every business should know about the revolutionary shift from Outbound Marketing to Inbound Marketing.

I believe that fundamental marketing objectives haven't change too much over the past 40 years.

Marketing principles as defined by "Wikiversity":

"Marketing seeks to satisfy the needs of people (customers or the market) (creating a sense of usefulness or utility) through the exchange process.
The Marketing Mix or the "4 P's" are:
    •    Product
    •    Price
    •    Promotion
    •    Place (or distribution)
These are employed to satisfy a target market' or target demographic (the pool of potential customers).
Example:
    •    Product: Procter and Gamble introduces a new toothpaste designed to taste good and fight cavities. Logo and packaging designed in bright colors to appeal to kids of elementary school age to encourage more tooth brushing.
    •    Price: $2.00, and discounted by means of coupons
    •    Promotion: television and radio commercials, magazine and newspaper ads, and a website; these use bright colors and happy music, perhaps an animated cartoon character for a fun and family-friendly attitude
    •    Place (or distribution): Supermarkets, drugstores, discount stores such as Wal-Mart
Target demographic:
    •    Mothers with kids who make toothpaste buying decisions for the family (advertising could be shown on children's programming, prompting kids to ask parents to buy the toothpaste)"

The Inbound Marketing Concept:

The inbound marketing objectives are very similar to those mentioned above in the wikiversity definition and example. The major changes are seen in concept, formulas and expectations.

Inbound marketing or attraction marketing is the conceptual antithesis of the more traditional, 40 year old outbound marketing.

The idea is simple:

• Outbound marketing equals “interruption” marketing. This older less effective process attempts to interrupt a given marketplace through traditional methods of advertising.
  • TV advertisements
  • Radio advertisements
  • Telemarketing
  • Billboards
  • Print advertising
  • Yellow pages
  • Email broadcasting

Even though the marketing objectives may be similar, these are all good examples of interruption marketing where businesses were trying to stop you in your chosen path to deliver the message they wanted you to hear and understand.

• Inbound marketing uses a different concept & method that makes your message available when your target market is actively researching or searching your subject or topic. Successful inbound marketing also configures your message to be used again and again as it becomes available in more online locations. Adding the viral concept to your inbound marketing messages also make it easier for your message to be passed from one person or business to another with the power of a traditional referral.

The Inbound Marketing Formula:

• Get Found
• Convert
• Analyze

The Inbound Marketing Components:

• Website Development
• SEO (search engine optimization)
• Blog Development
• Social Media Promotion
• Conversion Strategies
• Regular & Accurate Analysis
• Regular & Focused Evaluations

Search Engine Positioning Guarantees

When negotiating with a search engine optimization professional, is a search engine positioning guarantee reasonable?

This topic of discussion was much more common in recent years but as many businesses are more involved with the inbound marketing or search engine positioning process and are deeper into this process, they seem to understand the relative validity of a search ranking guarantee. Especially an Organic search engine positioning guarantee.

This blog post is more general in nature for those who still need to understand the process, expectations and the differences between a sponsored ad strategy and an organic search strategy.

I was asked by a potential new alliance partner today about guaranteed search engine positioning from an SEO (organic) or pay per click perspective. This is a topic of discussion that I have had more often 12 to 24 months ago. As SEO was the primary method of entry into the world of inbound marketing, many businesses getting involved with inbound marketing presented this question but has now become less frequent. I think that many businesses and many organizations that are getting involved with inbound marketing understand a little bit more about the nature of search engine optimization both from an organic stand point and a sponsored ad stand point, here is how I answered this question about a guarantee in the world of SEO.

A guarantee in the world sponsored ad marketing is reasonable. I believe that there can be a guarantee simply because you're purchasing position (not in all cases) but in most cases a certain paid sponsored listing in a specific targeted search engine location. So I believe this can be guaranteed in one form or another.

Offering a guarantee for an organic search engine position as a rule, is much more dangerous from an inbound marketing professional's standpoint. The reasons are as follows:

1. Each computer/IP address will get varying search engine positioning. For example if we're discussing an air conditioning company in a specific geographic region I can type in a given keyword and get x-results on the search engine results page while another individual, even in the same location and certainly other geographic locations will get a different ranking position. This is because the search engine technologies and algorithms are changing. They are becoming more personal and geo focused based on past personal searches.
   
2. Another determining factor that would make a professional avoid making a guarantee is the actual real estate available. The search engine results page is becoming more limited as search engines like Google are including blog results and soon-to-be social media results on the SEPR or search engine results page. This decreases the space available for straight SEO or search engine optimization programs.

With these reasons in mind a wise and experienced Internet marketing professional would not make any guaranteed search engine positioning statements. It's more a matter of establishing expectations on a case-by-case basis. Each business is different and each business has a different target market. In some cases the target market is local with limited competition whereas others are national or even global in nature. These factors must be taken into consideration when discussing expectations.

To add to this thought process, I would advise that any search engine optimization strategy that maybe recommended by and inbound marketing professional doesn't guarantee a certain search engine position through organic search. This, in my mind should raise a red flag. The actual process of search engine optimization on any given website is as follows and is not as secretive in nature as it used to be.

• Each page can be optimized for 1 to 3 keywords.
• The relative components on a given web page need to reflect these one to three keywords.
  
• The content on the actual page needs to also reflect the other elements like page titles, page description, and all other related HTML code tags.

Here is a new checklist that you can use to be sure each of your web pages is at least "search engine friendly".

Keyword Selector Tool

How a keyword selector tool can and should help you develop the foundation of your inbound marketing strategy.

There are many quality keyword selector tools available at no cost. There are also many that drive down deeper into the process and are fee based. Each one of these resources will help you at least gain some insight. The choice of which keyword selector tool to use will be determined by the your level of experience, expertise and the status of your inbound marketing strategic process.

Keyword selector tools available are as follow:

1. Google Adwords Keyword Selector Tool
2. Wordtracker Free Keyword Selector Tool
3. Keyword Selector Tool
4. Overture/Yahoo Keyword Selector Tool

The keyword selector tool as part of your inbound marketing strategy:

The keyword selection and evaluation process is the foundation of your internet marketing or inbound marketing strategy. It is where all of your ongoing inbound marketing efforts will be launched. A good keyword analysis will isolate and define where your target market is speanding their time, what they are researching and searching for in detail and who is competing for that valuable search engine results page real estate. If you get this element wrong, you risk wasting much of your time and budget delivering the wrong message to the wrong or audience. Great keyword selection is about market focus and allowing your target market(s) to "trip" over your message.

Don't under estimate the importance of this process. Your upcoming SEO (search engine optimization), blog development and social media promotions will rely heavily on the results produced by your keyword selector tool.

The basic information that should be produced by any keyword selector tool are as follow:

1. Monthly searches for each considered keyword
2. Level of difficulty for each keyword
   • This could be a number from 1 to 100 that indicates the level of competition for a given keyword
   • It should be based on monthly searches against the number of other sites competing for this keyword.
   • This process will highlight "lower hanging fruit".
3. Your current ranking for this keyword.
4. Variations or derivatives of a more general keyword.
   • Sometimes known as a "long-tail keyword"
   • The more general a keyword is, the more it lacks niche focus and in many cases is too competitive for the start of an inbound marketing strategy.
5. PPC value: The relative cost if you were to utilize a pay per click approach.

Summary: Your selected keywords are the link between you and your target audience and possibly the main link between your website and productive traffic and conversion. That connection needs to be as accurate and as powerful as possible as all else will depend on your keyword selections.

Although you may be able to run a keyword selector tool internally (DIY), I strongly suggest speaking with a certified inbound marketing consultant to answer any questions or concerns. Then you'll be in a better position to know that all elements of your inbound marketing strategy are connected. This includes your design, SEO, blog, social media and conversion strategies. I see in too many cases that keyword selection, SEO, blog and social media efforts run too independently and lack the common thread of your main strategy.

Useful resources:

Inbound Marketing: Pay Attention

Inbound Marketing has landed, don't drive around it, pay attention to it!

It started slowly about 15 years ago but only a few paid attention and got involved. In the last 5 years, inbound marketing began to take strong root and became a viable segment of marketing for companies that recognized this emerging opportunity. In the last year alone, inbound marketing has become the primary marketing method for small to mid-sized companied around the world. The consumer and business market have moved from outbound marketing to inbound marketing 2 to 1, and I'm talking about both sides of the process. First, using inbound marketing to search, research, define, isolate and choose their vendors of choice and second to promote and market their own business products and services.

What are the differences between inbound marketing and outbound marketing?

To better understand the concept of Inbound marketing, think of it's counter part, outbound  marketing. Outbound marketing has been the preferred and primary method of delivering a commercial message for the past 40 years. The outbound marketing concept has been to blast or push out an organization's message to as many people as possible in hopes that the message will get the attention from the right market, at the right time. Examples of Outbound marketing include, TV, Radio, Telemarketing, Print Advertising, Direct Mail, Yellow Pages, Email Broadcasting, Billboards, etc. Some people refer to this type of marketing as the "shotgun" approach where a message is shot and scattered over a group of people with the hope that some small percentage of these people will be interested at that particular time. Although outbound marketing or traditional marketing will always have a place, it has become much less effective and much more costly as the ROI (return on investment) continues to shrink.

The gap between inbound marketing and outbound marketing is growing to a point where marketing professionals are using the follow two terms to highlight the major difference:

1. Outbound marketing is "interruption" marketing.
2. Inbound marketing is "attraction" marketing.

Another way to understand why outbound marketing is not as effective as it was years ago, is to understand how much better we are all equipped to block the outbound messages:

• Remotes controls to block commercials
• DVRs to pass over commecials
• Caller IDs to evaluate who is calling us
• Satelite radio to remove commercials
• Spam filters to block email advertising
• Yellow pages have become nothing more than paper weights or door stops
• More...
  

Inbound marketing is the unfolding "revolution" of marketing. It represents the transformation from the old, to the new. Technology has been advancing at an unprecedented rate and it has caught up with the marketing industry and has staked it's claim. The truth is, like all other technology, if you don't get on board and utilize the resources available, you will be left behind in the world of obsolete. To use an analogy, inbound marketing is to outbound marketing as the automobile was to the horse & buggy. If you look all around, you see the mega marketers (Johnson & Johnson, CNN, AT&T, etc.) using the new methodologies of social media, search engine marketing, blog development and conversion strategies.

What you should recognize is that these same powerful strategies, are available to you. Understand that you are now on a leveled playing field and can compete. For the same money it would take to run a short series of radio advertisements (outbound marketing), you can create and develop a farther reasching inbound marketing strategy.

Inbound Marketing Objectives:

1. Get Found
2. Convert
3. Analyze

Inbound Marketing Components:

1. Website or Blog Creation
2. Search Engine Optimization
3. Blog Development
4. Social Media Development
5. Conversion Strategy
6. Evaluation & Adjustment Process

Inbound Marketing Foundation Elements:

• Lead Generation
• Lead Tracking
• Lead Nurturing
• Lead Conversion

One additional note: A warning to those considering or starting an inbound marketing plan. Get professional advice and consultation. If you are using Twitter for example, you might see outragous claims stating the ability to spread your marketing message to thoughands overnight. This simply translates to an ineffective and incomplete strategy. Like anything else worth while, this is a process that does take time and careful planning. If you are going to get involve in a new marketing startegy, do it right and work with an experienced professional. Even if it's only to consult and help you create and launch components in house.

More helpful inbound marketing resources:

Inbound Marketing White Paper:
How To Use Twitter For Business

Lead Generation, Tracking, Nutruring & Conversion

Internet marketing boiled down looks like this...

1. Lead Generation
2. Lead Tracking
3. Lead Nurturing
4. Lead Conversion

In my last blog post I discussed the process and methodology of managing the middle of the funnel and converting tier one traffic into leads. I talked about how this component of the overall process (listed above) may be the most important of all. In a recent tweet posted on Twitter, Facebook & LinkedIn, I stated that I would rather have less traffic with a high conversion ratio than mountains of traffic with a weak conversion ratio. I'm sure you can see why I would say this. If the end game is new customers, than the conversion process has to be high on the priority list. But how? What must we do to convert the traffic we have created into leads, then into customers.

In my last post, I spoke about this concept and tried to share what needs to be considered. After all, you need to have an understanding of the big picture before you are able to drill down and work the details.

The guts of any conversion strategy will be well constructed landing pages. Technically, a landing page is any web page or blog page that includes a conversion form. You may get a different definition from other inbound marketing or Internet marketing professionals but this explanation may make it easy for you to conceptualize.

A landing page is the page destination where you want to lead your traffic. As part of your Internet marketing strategy, you must:

1. Optimize
2. Promote
3. Convert
4. Analyze

Step number 3 happens on a well designed landing page that includes compelling content and a CTA or call to action. If you have optimized and promoted your content well, you, will have filtered much of you top line traffic into your landing page. This is where your conversion opportunities lay.

If you are a shoe seller, your goal at the promotion phase (Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, etc...) was to promote or highlight a specific brand, style, discount or event. If you have done this with focus, you will have filtered some of your main shoe store (home page) traffic directly to the landing page that outlines your offer, discount or event. You now have the strongest opportunity to convert this targeted traffic into a lead.

Create this landing page to discuss the features and benefits of this particular offer and no other. This prospect "landed" on this page because they were research or shopping for something very specific and you successfully got their attention. Now you must use this page to present an offer compelling enough for them to take some action.

Your goal may be simply to collect email addresses from semi-interested parties for future and ongoing promotions (lead nurturing). Or, you may be in a position to make a sale. In the shoe store case, this is entirely reasonable. If your technology is in place, there is no reason not to make a sale directly from a well constructed landing page.

In summary: You need to have an accurate view of your entire inbound marketing strategy first. Then you need to isolate & define each element. Remember to develop all elements with focus and the understanding of your specific market.

In my next blog post I will discuss the technology available to manage this process in conjunction with all the other elements of your Internet marketing..

Other resources available to help you expand your reach:

Internet Marketing: Lead Conversion Strategy

How much focus have you applied to your conversion strategy?

As a certified inbound marketing consultant I am consistently evaluating online or Internet marketing strategies. I'm sure it comes as no shock to any reader that in the past 12 months, almost every (if not all) KPI (key performance indicators) have shown significant increases in:

1. Overall search traffic
2. Blog readership
3. Blog creation & posts
4. Social media accounts
5. Social media communications
6. Paid advertising
7. Products & services offered
8. Websites launched
9. Etc, etc...

My point is that all players in all ends have increased dramatically. In my own mind, and from my own perspective, this simply means more competition for attention as well as more opportunity for the savvy marketing professionals.

All of this overview leads me to the focus of this particular blog post and that is a perceived weakness or oversight in many inbound or Internet marketing strategies.

If getting found, converting & analyzing are the staples of a good Internet marketing process, this blog post is about the middle element or conversion strategy as I see that in many cases, this area needs the most attention. It's considered a great success to improve your search engine positions, increase your inbound links, double your traffic and reach but in the end, if your conversion process is sub-standard, it's not as big a success as it could have been.

With all of this in mind, it is important to understand the traditional sales funnel and sales cycle.

1. Top of the funnel = Tier one traffic from all sources including:
   • Organic traffic
   • Referral or link traffic
   • PPC traffic
   • Direct traffic
   • Email traffic
   • Blog traffic
   • Social media traffic
2. Middle of the funnel = Lead generation or conversion. This is the process of qualifying or filtering all traffic into interested or lead traffic. Once tier one traffic is converted to a lead, they have moved from the top of the funnel to the middle of the funnel.
3. Bottom of the funnel = Customers

In my next blog post I will discuss the process and methodology available to manage the middle of the funnel and convert tier one traffic into leads.

Other resources available to help you expand your reach:

 

 

Marketing Analysis: Key Performance Indicators (KPI)

Marketing Analysis: How To Evaluate Your Inbound Marketing Efforts: KPIs

This article is part 4 in a series outlining the philosophy and approach behind an effective inbound marketing strategy. If you haven't read the previous 3 articles, please feel welcome to do so here:

Article #1: Inbound Marketing Methodology - Part 1, Get Found, Convert, Analyze.
 Article #2: Inbound Marketing Fundamentals - Part 2, Get Found.
Article #3: Lead Conversion: How Do I Convert Traffic To Leads?

Part 4 - Analyze: (Marketing Analysis)

1. How do I evaluate my "get found" & "convert" efforts?
   
2. What are the "key performance indicators" I should be studying?
   
3. How do I know if I am doing all the right things?
4. What changes could I make to get better results?
5. Is my marketing analysis complete?
6. What methods are best for my marketing analysis?
   

In summary, our view of a powerful, integrated and effective inbound marketing strategy needs to include 3 main elements:

1. Get Found - Have your content optimized for search engines, blog articles & social media).
2. Convert - Make it easy for the traffic you created to engage and become a lead.
3. Analyze - (marketing analysis) Evaluate all elements and data to improve your inbound marketing
 strategy and plan of action.
   

Accurate analysis of all important metrics and KPIs (key performance indicators) is a critical component of a healthy inbound marketing strategy and inbound marketing technologies. A very significant luxury that a well constructed inbound marketing analysis & strategy can provide is real time numbers and measurable ROI. With the availability and integration of the front line inbound marketing applications, we are able to perform a marketing analysis daily and understand exactly what is working and what needs attention or even termination. If you have ever used an application like Google Analytics, you know that it's not very hard to view very detailed traffic statistics. However, many of these metrics aren't very useful and just because it can be measured, doesn't mean it has value. We feel a good marketing analysis application should include these metrics and KPIs:

• Traffic Sources
• organic traffic flow 
• paid traffic flow
• direct traffic flow
• referred traffic flow
• email campaign traffic flow
• social media traffic flow
• Twitter
• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• You Tube
• Social Media Conversations
• Know what is talked about on Twitter, LinkedIn and the blogosphere that relates to your important keywords.
• Reach (how many subscribers & followers do you have on:
• Facebook
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Blog email subscription
• Blog RSS feed
• Site converted leads
• Lead Conversion Rates
• Landing pages
• Specific offers
• Specific CTAs (call to action)
• Main site pages
• Leads:
• Where they converted
• When they converted
• What they downloaded
• What to do next
• Prospects: What organizations have reviewed your site (not leads)
• Blog
• Number of post views
• Number of comments on each post
• Number of inbound links generated
• Number of subscribers both email & RSS feed
• Keyword Performance
• Master keyword database
• Monthly traffic per keyword
• Level of competition per keyword
• Page ranking for each keyword
• Change in ranking for each keyword
• Related value of each keyword
• Competitive Marketing Analysis
• Website grade
• MOZ Rank
• Traffic rank
• Blog grade
• Inbound links
• Bookmarks
• Search engine indexed pages
  

With the ability to perform your marketing analysis using these key performance indicators, you are then able to watch and evaluate your marketing strategy as it unfolds. These metrics enable you to make faster, better and more powerful decisions and in turn, take better advantage of all your marketing your resources.

Lead Conversion: How Do I Convert Traffic To Leads?

 Inbound Marketing: Get Found, Convert, Analyze

This article is part 3 in a series on the philosophy behind effective inbound marketing. If you haven't read the previous 2 articles, please feel welcome to do so here:

Article #1: Inbound Marketing Methodology - Part 1, Get Found, Convert, Analyze.
Article #2: Inbound Marketing Fundementals - Part 2, Get Found.

Part 3

Lead Conversion:

In summary, our view of a powerful, integrated and effective inbound marketing strategy needs to include 3 main elements:

1. Get Found - Have your content optimized for search engines, blog articles & social media)
   
2. Convert - Make it easy for the traffic you created to engage and become a lead
   
3. Analyze - Evaluate all elements and data to improve your inbound marketing
   strategy and plan of action

Getting found is a critical to success and becomes the result of a good web page & blog SEO strategy and the execution of that strategy. Write articles, produce videos (creating remarkable content), develop a large database of keywords and apply SEO (optimize). Then use all the social media sites and run email and PPC campaigns (when appropriate) (Promote). At the end of the day, however, we aren't in this for fun. We're also not in this for traffic. The goal is quality sales leads and customers, so the next step is to focus on converting as much of your traffic as possible to leads and customers.

Understand that there is potentially, huge value if you can increase your conversion rate and generate more leads from existing traffic. If you only get a few hundred visits per week, increasing your conversion rate by 1% could generate 10-15 more leads per month. If you get a few thousand visits a week, you stand to increase your lead flow by 100-150 leads per month

Landing Pages
 to targeted already established traffic (identified and/or isolated) can draw your audience to a specific page that has a very specific message, language & keywords. For instance, if you email everyone you met at a trade show and offer them a free trial of your product, that is a "targeted" traffic source because all the visitors have something in common - they are all from your trade show.

Converting a targeted stream of traffic requires two things:

1. A well-crafted offer on a landing page that is designed specifically for the audience you will be driving to the page, and
2. A stream of targeted traffic that you drive to the page.
   

If we compare this to the "organic" traffic from natural search (e.g., Google), social media sites, and other sources, we have learned that for "organic" traffic that finds you through SEO and social media, our conversion tactics need to be a little different because the audience is so much more diverse, and more difficult to target an offer that is designed especially for a particular visitor type.

Website & Blog: 
As you produce remarkable content, optimize and promote it, you are then able to generate traffic from variety sources, like Google, social media sites, the blogosphere, etc. You will have essentially created a magnet that attracts & pulls in prospects from throughout the web.

Conversion through the main pages on most websites is challenge. When someone hits a page on your site or your blog, you don't actually know where that visitor came from or what is on her mind. Because of this, it's sometimes hard to design an offer specifically for that person. For these reasons, your approach should consider the following:

• What is the range of conversion paths on your site?
• Where might people land
• What paths through your content might they take?
• How do we put offers and calls to action along the most common paths?
• How do we gain the maximum chance of getting the "right" offers in front of a given visitor? 
• What are all the methods available to maximize the chance of converting these visitors into a lead?
  

Article #4 in this series (Analyze) will be posted next week.

Inbound Marketing Fundamentals

Inbound Marketing Methodology: First, you need to "Get Found".

The phrase, "getting found" translates to the art, science and process of having your best possible prospects find your website or blog messages (attraction marketing). This process starts the sales cycle and is designed to feed the top of the sales funnel with qualified traffic using focused SEO as well as other components that are appropriate and are in line with the overall inbound marketing strategy.

Another way to explain the process of "getting found", is that when your potential clients or prospects perform any search or research on Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Technorati, Digg, Stumbleupon or anywhere else (including the blogosphere), they find you (pull marketing). Research is one of many reasons individuals and businesses look for information, advice, entertainment, thought leadership, analysis, projections, resources, data or conversation. The trick (and priority) is that they find your content, your people, your brand, your products, your services and your company.

As a certified HubSpot partner, we recommend these Inbound Marketing fundamentals to improve your ability to "get found".

1. First, create remarkable content. That's the core of inbound, attraction, search or pull marketing.
2. Optimize the content for the major search engines (SEO) and other audiences.
3. Promote this remarkable content in the blogosphere, social mediasphere, email marketing, and other appropriate channels.
   


A. Content Creation
The first and most important part of “Getting Found” is creating remarkable content. This means creating blog articles, web pages (updating existing pages & creating new landing pages), videos, photos, webinars, whitepapers, and other resources that are useful, interesting, thought provoking, controversial, and entertaining. This may be the most critical step in the development of a powerful inbound marketing & SEO plan and generating more traffic and qualified leads.

Create a content creation strategy and schedule, and then try to stick to it as closely as possible.

Every web page has the potential to rank well in search engines and draw traffic from other sources, like social media sites and the blogosphere. Of course, whether a page draws traffic (and links) depends on whether it's optimized and how remarkable (useful, interesting, etc.) it is. But in general, most pages do "well" and contribute to the cause, so it's both a quality and a quantity game.

Consider a 10 page website. This site has 10 unique pages that could rank on the major search engines as well as other places. 10 unique opportunities to draw traffic. Now compare that to a 100 page website. The 100-page site has 10x more opportunities to draw targeted traffic, and on average will be drawing 10x the amount of actual traffic. Thus, content really is king, and creating great content is the first challenge in any inbound marketing strategy.

B. Optimize Content

After content creation (which you need to continue through the entire inbound marketing process), you need to optimize that content for search engines (SEO) as well as for other channels, like YouTube & Twitter.

The foundation of any successful inbound marketing program is compelling content creation. Optimizing that content is a key step to ensure you give your valuable content the best chance possible of drawing traffic from the web.


Focus on two major components of your Search Engine Optimization (SEO):

1. On-Page SEO is the process of placing selected keywords in the right places on the web pages so that Google and other search engines know what each page of our client’s website is about, and what keywords to rank the different pages for. On-Page SEO makes up about 25% of how well you rank in the major search engines.
2. Off-Page SEO is the process of building links and authority, getting other sites on the Internet to link to you. The more links you have from other popular sites, the more important your site appears to be to Google and other search engines. Links are your online reputation from the perspective of the search engine. Off-page SEO makes up about 75% of how you rank in search engines.

The "conversion" element of inbound marketing will be covered in our next blog post.

Internet Marketing Methodology

Is your Inbound Marketing methodology complete, flexible, effective & measurable?

A well conceived Internet marketing methodology will dictate all of your activities, measurements and evaluations. I true methodology gives you the road map and solid reasons for doing what you do each day, week and month. If you don't believe in your own marketing methodology, I suggest you start over and develop one that you buy into. I see too many organizations throwing darts or following limited advice and experience of others and end up taking shots in the dark at SEO, PPC, blog posts, atricle submissions, email campaigns, social media reach and a myriad of other tasks they feel are part of the big Internet marketing picture.

A well thought out inbound marketing methodology may be simple or complex. One not being better than the other.

This is the Inbound marketing methodology we suggest:
(Note: Inbound Marketing = Internet Marketing = Pull Marketing = Attraction Marketing)

1. Get Found

2. Convert

3. Analyze.

 This may sound over simplified but sometimes, focusing on the basics will help you strip away any elements of your current plan that do not fit or support these main objectives.

To be clearer we begin by explaining that based on our experience and expertise, SEO is one (1) of three (3) major segments of a complete and successful Inbound Marketing campaign. To be even more specific, we believe that SEO or major search engine (on-page) optimization is approximately 39% of the Internet marketing pie. We don’t point this out to minimize the importance of a strong search engine optimization plan, in fact, we believe all else is fueled by, and relies on strong page optimization and good search results.

To expand on this point we point out that SERP (search engine result pages) now include blogs, images, local listings, videos and soon social media results. This simply translates to less real estate for straight keyword search results through on-page optimization. Couple this fact with some of the new search technologies about to be used (Google Caffeine) and you will see actual search results will differ from place to place and computer to computer. These are some of our reasoning for applying the blog and social media development components to a comprehensive Internet marketing strategy.

We believe that understanding your own approach, methodology and philosophy is critical to understanding how bring success to your business or client's business.

First, we feel it is absolutely critical for you or your clients to learn how marketing has changed and the older efforts connected to outbound or interruption marketing have become more expensive and much less effective. To illustrate this point further, we explain to our prospects and newer clients to think about outbound (traditional) marketing as a hammer and inbound marketing as a magnet. Would you rather try to hammer your message into and at your target markets or would you rather attract or pull qualified prospects into your messages?

One reason we stress this point is because marketing directors, business owners and others that are responsible for an organization's marketing success now depends on their direct involvement. One of the first conversations we have with our prospects and new clients was designed to gauge how ready they are to change some of the older ways they approach and support their own marketing efforts. Nobody understands their services and products better than the client and we encourage them to contribute to the process. Their expertise coupled with our high level of marketing skills will bring real and measurable success.

Although Inbound marketing has become much more effective and efficient than the more traditional outbound marketing, some elements remain constant and our methodology was designed to focus on these 4 main objectives:

1. Generate Leads
2. Track Leads
3. Nurture Lead
4. Convert Leads

This covers the concept of Internet marketing methodology. We will discuss in detail the three main anchors of this suggested methodology... Get Found, Convert & Analyze.