Inbound Marketing Blog

The More You Understand The Dynamics Behind Your Website's Activity, The Easier It Is To Improve Your Inbound Marketing ROI.

If you are in the process of researching, learning or improving your current inbound marketing strategy it might be helpful if we offer you this baseline inbound marketing formula created by HubSpot, a top software developer in the inbound marketing industry.

1. Attract: The process of attracting your target audience(s) into specific landing pages, primary web pages, blog posts or social media posts. There are other components available but these are the basics. This is the primary difference between traditional marketing and this new form of marketing online also known as attraction marketing or digital marketing. Traditional marketing is sometimes referred to as interruption marketing within the digital marketing industry.
2. Convert: This is the next step in a successful inbound marketing strategy and will filter out a more qualified lead or prospect from the larger database of contacts you gain from the first element of this formula. As with all the steps in this formula, each step will result in fewer connections than the previous step. Your are filtering down a much broader marketing into a very targeted audience that is much more likely to purchase your product or services. Understand that depending on the particular product or service your business is marketing, there may be more than one conversion stage. For example, a business may convert a website visitor into a lead or expressly interested prospect, then have a second conversion where the lead converts into a customer. All of these steps need to be recognized, measured, evaluated and modified if an improvement is forecasted.
3. Close: This step can be looked at as a conversion step but probably the most obvious step of all. The inbound marketing strategy must account for obtaining the customer and that is what this stage represents.
4. Delight: A great inbound marketing strategy will also take advantage of the happy customer. In this day and age (and popularity) of social media platforms a good marketer will make it easy for the satisfied customer to share their experience on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, You Tube, Pinterest or any of the other social media websites that are appropriate.

Here is a great illustration created by HubSpot that illustrates the entire inbound marketing process:

Once you get a firm grip on the inbound marketing formula explained above, you must develop an effective method to evaluate, analyze each stage and modify any elements that your analysis highlights. As the title of this blog post recognizes, the better your inbound marketing analysis, the more you can expect your ROI to react.

We created a very complete eBook for you to effectively know all you need to about improving ROI through better inbound marketing analysis. Just use the link or any image on this blog post to get your copy. This eBook or guide to improving your ROI through better inbound marketing analysis will provide you with very detailed information on elements like:

• Landing Page Tracking
• Form Tracking
• Segmenting Your Traffic Into Measurable Lists
• Measuring Your SEO Efforts
• Tracking Your Social Media Activity
• Measuring Your Email Marketing Campaigns
• Improving Your Lead Nurturing Process

This detailed Ebook will further educate and encourage you to understand why a world class marketer never makes decisions based on feelings. Even though we would never suggest to ignore a marketing hunch, most good marketing decisions should be based on accumulated data. Where does your data come from? There are many applications that allow you to capture data including free versions like Google Analytics. This points out that capturing data may be the easy part. But how you identify and measure that data is something else.

Download and read this eBook completely to understand more.

And always remember that using a well equipped inbound marketing agency is an alternative to implementing solutions on your own. Feel welcome to contact us at any time for a no cost consultation. In fact, we would also like to provide you with another eBook cover the process of attracting and converting a targeted audience(s) to your web pages so you can start to build your valuable data. Just use the image below!

 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 Methodology: First, you need 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.

I hope that as an Internet marketer, you consistently ask yourself these questions when considering your Internet marketing projects:

1. What is the real condition of my web site?
2. What do the search engine see when they evaluate rankings for a chosen keyword?
3. What is the marketing effectiveness of my web site?
   

One way to get a quick accurate and snapshot of your condition and some of the answers to these questions is to use a tool called website grader. You can request a free website grade report from Virtual Support Systems or go directly to website grader.

HubSpot has created a cutting edge software application for use by Inbound Marketing Agencies like Virtual Support Systems, that enable us to apply all of the new and revolutionary marketing systems to our clients Internet marketing projects. Therefore, our clients subscribe to the HubSpot software and retain Virtual Support Systems to apply and manage all aspects of this application. Virtual Support Systems is a Certified Inbound Marketing Partner with HubSpot.

Okay, now that I have explained how to generate a real time report showing the condition of any given website, You should read a recent post on the HubSpot blog with examples of other companies' reports.