What You Need To Understand About The Inbound Marketing Process.

Competing for online presence demands a focused strategy and solid blueprint.

Online marketing is constantly changing and those that understand the process are the ones that experience more success. As an experienced and expert inbound marketing consultant and service provider, I see that the biggest challenge today is understanding the demands and the process. I speak to many business owners and the common thread is simply not knowing what to do and how to do it or a false understanding of older methods.

Many years ago, simply having a website would trigger activity and help a business secure new business. Today, there is much more competition for "online real estate". The Internet offers a more level playing field and does allow a business to compete with a larger competitor at a much more affordable marketing cost. The difference between 5 years ago and today is that the level of competition is much more serious and challenging. This means much more attention is required to compete for visibility and Internet presence. Any business that is serious about competing online must recognize this fact and commit the appropriate budget but just as importantly, must also commit the appropriate time, effort and attention to their online marketing strategy.

No matter how you decide to build and configure your solutions/blueprint, here are the fundamental elements that need attention. Your overall goals are to:

• Get found (increase traffic)
• Convert (engage the new traffic)
• Analyze (study your results and modify based on data)

Below Is A Case Study That Highlights All Areas Of A Comprehensive Inbound Marketing Strategy. Your website and blueprint is obviously unique but these are the components required to develop an Internet marketing strategy that addresses all critical areas. If you apply attention in all of these areas, you will succeed and will compete at a much higher level.

The first order of business is have an thorough marketing analysis so you can better understand the "current condition" of your website & marketing efforts. A great tool to generate a complete analysis can be used at no cost here: Inbound Marketing Evaluation

Case Study

Summary: Developing the online element of your business takes time and attention. I only say this because there are still businesses that feel that once they post their websites, prospects and customers will come. This simply isn't true anymore. There is a lot of competition for "online real estate" today and those that understand this and apply the required effort, are the ones that achieve the goals of visibility, credibility, authority and increased revenue growth. I do see an important, missing links in your business development by not having your current website configured to work more effectively for you by including all the elements the search world is using to evaluate and find you. We only need to make a regular effort to first improve the condition of your online presence, then strategically develop this presence using a carefully created online marketing blueprint that include as many of the items that I have outlined below.

My specific observations & recommendations:
1. Based on the data generated in this report, I recommend that we continue our discussion and talk about the resources available to develop a strong, efficient and effective, new marketing strategy.

2. Try to view a strong marketing blueprint as a funnel with 3 parts. The top, middle and bottom. The better you can develop these 3 sections of your marketing funnel, the more successful you will be. The top end represents the ability of getting potential customers to "find you". This is the section achieved by successful search configuration. The more people that find you are the more that enter the top end of your funnel. The middle section represents your conversion strategy and the better this is built, the more people entering the top end, will convert into leads or prospects. This is where you have the ability to nurture leads and create the mechanisms for the top end people to engage with your site, content and information. The bottom end represents a regular and strong analytics sections where you can analyze the raw data, make adjustments and better decisions that result in a better top and middle section of your funnel.

3. You will see that the analysis (report) I sent is broken up into these 3 sections of your marketing funnel and the remainder of my observations are based on these 3 sections.

4. Your total score is 54 out of 100 with the weaker elements being the top and middle sections of your funnel. This makes sense as Wordpress does provide excellent technology to address the bottom section of complete analysis. The initial work needs to be applied to the top and middle sections of your marketing funnel.

5. Top Of Funnel: Although a blog does exist, it could be configured much better.
    There is virtually no engagement through your twitter or facebook accounts.
    The frequency of your blog could be more. An average of 1 blog every 19 days may not be   enough.
    The SEO elements needs considerable attention.
    Google is recognizing 47 pages. This may be a good start but we do need to create a significant increase in the total number of pages. This is done in a few different ways.
    Most of the images on your pages have not been optimized. This is one of many elements that make a website much more search friendly.
    All titles need attention from a keyword perspective
    Descriptions are completely missing.
    There are only 7 Inbound links. This is a critical element of building online success and needs significant attention.
    No Twitter account recognized or connected to your website.

6. Middle Of Funnel:
    Engagement is a big problem here. We need to create a strategy that allows visitors that enter the top end of the marketing funnel to engage more. Otherwise, any traffic we do create will disappear and not hold any real value.
    Automation software missing. Hootsuite may be a nice solution to creating many of your missing engagement components.
    Blogs are not using a related landing page to increase engagement and CTA (call to actions).

7. Bottom Of Funnel:
    Google Analytics is a good tools coupled with Wordpress but are you using these resources to answer the important questions that arise from your marketing efforts?
    

For a no cost evaluation and analysis of your website, just complete the form located on our marketing analysis page.