Steps in Inbound Marketing Strategy That’ll Get You Non-Stop Sales

   

Inbound-Marketing-Strategy
You may have heard of the phrase “inbound marketing” before. You may not be sure what it means. If that’s the case, you missed my blog last week that defines and outlines what inbound marketing is, and why it’s so valuable. Go check it out! Back? Awesome.
So, Inbound Marketing encompasses SEO, Social Media, Content and Email Marketing. Whoosh. It’s a big umbrella that covers so many distinct topics. If you’re just getting into marketing, and you’ve heard inbound marketing is the royal road to more customers, then you heard right.

If you read the above, or my previous post, and broke out in a cold sweat, that’s ok too. It’s a lot to take in. This week, I want to give you a step-by-step roadmap to what you can do to set up an inbound marketing strategy, rein in all those different elements, and make sure all your work is pulling together toward one aim: more customers.

Inbound marketing methods come in many forms, yes, but they follow the same broad approach across every touchpoint. This immediately makes it easier. Whether it’s action, romance, superheroes or indie drama, all films follow a three-act structure. Similarly, no matter whether it’s SEO, Social Media, Content or Email, there are eight steps you should follow in strategizing your inbound marketing efforts.

Decide Who Your Target Audience Is

Inbound Marketing is all about getting quality leads and targeting a specific type consumers is the first step to that. Before you think it, “Everyone” isn’t a target audience. If you fire an arrow, sure, it goes forwards. But the target isn’t ‘everywhere’, it’s a specific point. In archery, the more accurate you are, the more points you get. The same goes with marketing. The more accurate you are, the more customers you’ll get. Look at your product. Think about who it is for. Who will it help. Now think about the details of their lives. What motivates them? What gets them up in the morning? Why will the product help? Put yourself in their position. Think about how much money they make, their relationships, their aspirations. All this will be invaluable in marketing to them down the line.

The Result

Now you have a target demographic and user persona. You know who you’re aiming at, which will inform every aspect of what you do next.

Discover Their Pain Points

Your target consumer will have a unique set of problems. Identify them and you’ll know how to produce the right contents. There are two things that will motivate people to buy. Reason is one. Emotion is the other. You need to use both where they’re most effective.

There’s only one answer to that:

PAIN

In the 21st century, pain has shifted from its evolutionary roots. It used to be that fire would relieve the pain of cold, food the pain of hunger, shelter the pain of the exposure. We have those needs pretty well covered. Now, the pain of inconvenience is one thing. The pain of things taking too long. The pain of complexity. The pain of imperfection. Of limitation. These are the modern pains. What pains do your audience endure? How does your product help remove those pains? Once you understand that, you can structure your approach to inbound marketing across any touchpoint. This is the key to unlocking the ‘sales’ element.

The Result

Now you’ll get some ideas on what type of content you need to create to address specific problems faced by your target audience.

Find Out Where They Look For Solutions

There are lots of place online where your target audience will look for answers. Identify and list them down as places you need to have presence in. Creating a website that has comprehensive resources to help people find solutions is one thing. It’s a good thing, even! But even better is to go to where people are already looking. Go and find out what sites your target audience uses to find the solutions they need. Some people will ask around on Facebook. For others, Google will be their first port of call. But go deeper – what do they find when people respond? StackExchange is a programming hub where programmers ask all sort of coding problems. Quora is a popular site where people go to get just about any questions answered. There are hundreds of niche forums available online for specialist interests. LinkedIn is better for professionals looking for service recommendations. You need to know where people are already looking so you can offer your solution in a place people will find it.

The Result

By doing this research, you just identified your ‘channels of approach’ and can now diversify your strategy in a targeted way.

Figure Out How They Phrase Their Questions

The same question can be asked in many different ways and getting the right one matters. For anyone who follows this blog, this one will feel at least a little familiar. In SEO, Keywords are the words and phrases people use when they search for things. By mirroring this language back in the content you create, you target your content at the people looking for it. So how do you do that? Well, you have to identify what keywords they use when Googling. You have to know if they create questions on Quora, or browse existing questions. Then how are those questions composed? On forums, are there specific threads, or even sub-forums? What are the titles? Do people speak publicly about these needs or do they communicate primarily through private message.

The Result

By deepening the research you started during point three, you will develop a set of targeted keywords for inclusion in your future marketing. You’ll also gain a better understanding of the best methods of engagement, and create a to-do-list for yourself.

Get Your Answers Ready

Now that you know what questions your target audience have, you can prepare in-depth answers in form of contents. Before you go barging in with your product as the solution to all your audience’s problems, you need to consider that this will almost certainly be unwelcome, putting off potential customers instead of engaging them. Remember the wide umbrella we talked about at the beginning? Well now it’s your toolbox. You’ve identified who your audience is, and how your product can be the solution to their problem. Now, you’ve researched how people find their answers, you can use the appropriate models to create them.

These include blog posts, in-depth articles, videos, emails, e-books, and more. By maximizing the variety of your content, you stand the highest chance of attracting customers who prefer different types of content. By being consistent in your delivery, you’ll begin to develop an audience that will trust you. This trust cannot be underestimated in the modern economy. Make sure all this content is geared toward your audience and their problems.

The Result

You now have a suite of blog posts, videos, infographics and even webinars ready to go, all by using research to make sure this content is relevant to your audience.

Be There, Be Everywhere

Now that you have your contents ready, time to spread them and make them easy to find by your target audience. Now it’s time to get mechanical. This part is all about getting your content and voices heard. Implement your SEO strategy based on what you’ve discovered, and you’ll rank your content highly to be found by people typing the right question in search engines.

This is how you start down the road to becoming an authority within niche communities. Mix around and be known. Start answering questions, participate in discussions to demonstrate your expertise in the field. Syndicate your blogs to their forums to provide readers a detailed answer. Look at Facebook groups, Twitter and Instagram influencers, even the traditional press and media. Promote your content to them. If it has real value, it will get shared. More people will discover your product.

The Result

You will now be developing links and getting traffic to your websites from strategic places that will benefit you most, together with targeted exposure to audiences that are most likely to want what you’re offering.

Nurture Visitors Into Leads

Offer visitors looking for your contents exclusive offers to convert them into leads so that you can stay in contact. Once you have backlinks and SEO established for your high quality, targeted content, you’ll soon have no shortage of visitors. The difference between a visitor and a lead is how much visitors know, like, and trust you. This is where you have to establish a relationship to your audience. You do this by satisfying their needs. Provide useful answers, empower them, and nurture them. Offer them exclusive tips, tricks and techniques. Give them in-depth studies in form of e-books. Maybe even let them try your product for free to demonstrate how well it works (and how much you trust them to see the difference). If you do any of this, you’ll be converting a disengaged audience member into an engaged potential customer. Offer them value in exchange to get them enlisted as your email subscriber.

The Result

A series of leads and email subscribers you can reach out to whenever you want to. People who respect and trust you, and accept your authority.

Market To Your Leads

Marketing to the leads you distilled from the whole inbound process will be highly effective and yield better amount of sales.Leads are the ones in your audience with a strong interest in your offering. Leads are people who have habitually taken an action to engage with your content. Leads are your potential customers, and they are the evangelists who will spread by word of mouth the quality and value of your product or contents. As such, these are your prime targets. They will be the best possible return on your investment of time and energy. That time and energy is much better spent identifying them than it is in blanket marketing at anyone and everyone.

Marketing your products
to them through email is a fine balance. You mustn’t annoy them by being too salesy or overbearing.

Strike the balance between
exclusive content that does them a favour, and advertising which is asks them to do you a favour. This is known as the ‘thank you’ economy. Indebt people to you with gratitude, then demonstrate how they can repay you.

The Result

Paying customers and brand advocates to take your business to the next level. The payoff for all the efforts that have brought you to this point.

Is It All Worth It?

If you were wondering how to do inbound marketing, wonder no longer.

This is how.

While a whole blog post could be written on every one of these points, what I’ve attempted to do here is show you the ladder that leads to the diving board that leads to Scrooge McDuck’s pool full of money. And speaking of money, inbound marketing has its place. Specifically, it’s for those who have time to invest instead of money, which is the case for most startup and SMEs.

Throwing money on ads works. But they works as long as you keep spending. The second you stop, it disappears. Time works too. And time works long after its been invested. Content lives forever. Evergreen content attracts new users for as long as it’s out there to be found. A one-time effort that can result in continuous sales. So, if you want to subscribe to customers, go for paid marketing. If you want customers to subscribe to you? Inbound Marketing is your solution. And now you know exactly how to do it.

Be sure to grab the ebook below to learn the secrets of a great inbound marketer!
Guide in Becoming The Perfect Inbound Marketer

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

                                          

Welcome Brian Payne

The City of Bloomington's Economic & Sustainable Development Department is pleased to welcome Brian Payne as its Assistant Director for Small Business Development. Brian began in his new role on Monday. Payne's duties include leading and coordinating a broad range of small business and entrepreneurship advocacy, retention and recruitment activities for the City and the Department to support the growth and sustainability of the small business and local economy. In addition, Payne will lead key major Departmental projects and, upon appointment, will serve as Executive Director of the Bloomington Urban Enterprise Association.

Payne is a career public servant who comes to the City of Bloomington with broad experience working for the federal government. Most recently, he served as a Policy Advisor in the Obama Administration, liaising with Congress and public stakeholders on priority legislative and behavioral health policy issues for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). Prior to that, Payne was a Legislative Counsel to two members of Congress, providing strategic advice and engaging with constituents on a wide variety of legislative issues. He also worked on the 2012 presidential campaign, running field offices and coordinating volunteer operations in central Ohio.

He earned his Juris Doctor degree from the University of North Carolina School of Law in 2012 and holds a bachelor's degree in English and Philosophy from Lawrence University. Before attending law school, he worked as a case manager, coordinating social services for adults with developmental disabilities, and as a substitute teacher and high school athletics and forensics coach, both in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. He loves sports and the outdoors and looks forward to exploring Indiana's natural splendor with his fiancée and his dog. Payne's salary will be $58,000.

Chuck Reynolds
Contributor
Please click either Link to Learn more about – Inbound Marketing.

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

Offered A New
Business Development Job?
These Signs You Should Turn It Down

In the world of business development, opportunities often arise for corporate leaders take on an executive role at another company. These organizations recognize exceptional leadership skills and business vision, and will frequently head hunt C-level talent to help them get to the next stage of growth.If you've been asked to consider an executive position, you're likely feeling flattered and honored. But as with any career move, it's important to consider all the pros and cons of the new role before you jump ship.We asked members of the Forbes Business Development Council to share some red flags that might dissuade you from taking the new job.

 

Lack Of Control Over Resources

If you're charged with hitting a goal, but have no way to affect the necessary change to reach that goal, then you're setting yourself up for failure.

Egotistical Team Members

The biggest red flag when evaluating a team is if there are one or more people who are "in it for themselves," rather than the benefit of the company or team overall. This type of team member can work at cross-purposes to the rest of the team and company and can lead to failure, other team members leaving, and decreased productivity.

You're Not Excited About The Company

I think this advice is important for everyone looking to make a career change. Is this a good fit for you? If you don't feel the excitement and passion in your gut after meeting the team, your new manager, and your new job description, you may want to continue looking.

Poor Alignment Of Personal Values And Culture

Most people just look at the salary before evaluating an open position. Other people just get excited about the challenges. Yet, if you are looking for a company where you will be comfortable and growing, you need to be aligned with it on a personal and professional ground.

Nonexistent Mission, Purpose Or Values

The first thing I look for is the mission, purpose, and values of the company I wish to dedicate my life to. If it is nonexistent or my intuition tells me that their values are not practiced, then they simply are not evolved enough to merit my participation.

Chuck Reynolds
Contributor
Please click either Link to Learn more about – Inbound Marketing.

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

Bitcoin rival Ripple is suddenly sitting on billions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency

• Blockchain start-up Ripple built a digital payments network for real-time financial transactions.
• It suddenly has billions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency on its balance sheet.

  

Blockchain start-up Ripple is in a precarious position for a 5-year-old company.The business is still in its very early days but suddenly has billions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency on its balance sheet.Ripple, which built a digital payments network for real-time financial transactions, is also the creator and biggest owner of Ripple XRP, a digital currency that has increased in value by 40 times this year.There's a total of 100 billion XRP in existence, each priced at about 26 cents. The $26 billion of total value is second among cryptocurrencies, behind bitcoin, which is valued at $41 billion.

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

Launching its own cryptocurrency called Kin

Kik Interactive Inc., the maker of anonymous chat app Kik, announced today that it is launching its own cryptocurrency called Kin in order to push back against what Chief Executive Ted Livingston calls the “copy-and-crush strategy” of giant Internet companies.

“We’ve reached a worrying point in the evolution of the internet: More and more of our everyday digital activities — from talking to friends to ordering food to share photos — are controlled by fewer and fewer companies,” Livingston wrote in a blog post. “The biggest companies use their scale to  mass advertising dollars and give everything else away for free, making it nearly impossible for smaller competitors to find sustainable business models.” According to Livingston, Kik’s new cryptocurrency will allow developers to “link arms to compete with the giants together, building a better future for society while also making money.”

Kin is based on the Ethereum blockchain, and it will be integrated directly into Kik for in-app purchases, which Livingston says will help generate demand for the cryptocurrency. He noted that Kik’s existing digital currency, Kik Points, has already demonstrated that Kin could be successful. “Despite its intentional limitations, Kik Points saw a transaction volume three times higher than Bitcoin’s,” Livingston said. “As the default currency inside Kik, Kin will go far beyond Kik Points by allowing people to participate in an economy based on buying and selling stickers, hosting and joining group chats, creating and using bots, and much more.”

Livingston said he hopes Kin will help create an open, decentralized digital ecosystem, which would allow consumers to move to other platforms without losing apps or services that they have already paid for. Kik users will be able to earn and spend Kin through the app, which could allow the app’s predominantly younger user base to spend money without having to use a credit card. Kik will have also parental controls for Kin to prevent underage users from spending the currency without permission. Each day, an algorithm will also distribute Kin to developers through the Kin Rewards Engine based on how much their service contributed on the platform. The idea behind this rewards program is to compensate developers without having to rely on an advertising model, which Livingston says will “lead to a virtuous cycle in which the ecosystem grows in both size and quality.”

To oversee the new cryptocurrency, Kik is founding the Kin Foundation, an independent not-for-profit organization that will operate the reward engine and manages transaction services and a decentralized user identity. “It’s like Mozilla for the mobile era, but with payments built in,” Livingston said. Livingston did not name any names when describing the big “copy-and-crush” companies, but one of the most likely candidates would be Facebook Inc., which has been increasingly expanding its products to compete directly with newer social apps. For example, Facebook-owned Instagram has introduced a number of features over the last year that gives it functions similar to Snapchat.

Chuck Reynolds
Contributor
Please click either Link to Learn more about – TCC-Bitcoin.

 

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

The bitcoin
and cryptocurrency
bubble is just getting started

  

 I attended one of the most important events in the blockchain world

The consensus is an annual blockchain technology summit in New York where industry leaders discuss all things bitcoin and blockchain, and where new blockchain companies come to pitch their ideas. Regular readers are familiar with bitcoin and blockchain. Bitcoin is digital money that is created and held electronically. At the core of Bitcoin technology is a super database called the “blockchain.” The blockchain contains every transaction in the history of bitcoin and is accessible to anyone. A lot of people think that blockchain will eventually be used to process everything from stock trades to voting.

I first recommended buying bitcoin back in March. Over the next two and a half months, the price of bitcoin soared 72 percent. Earlier this week, I reiterated my recommendation to buy by saying: “stop procrastinating!” Guess what? Bitcoin is up another 20 percent since then. But the rollercoaster ride isn’t done yet. One of my biggest takeaways from Consensus was that the boom in bitcoin and blockchain is just getting started. Everywhere I looked, conference attendees were on mobile phones and laptops trading cryptocurrencies throughout the course of the conference. Here are just a few of the things I learned at the summit:

The bitcoin boom is fuelling more cryptocurrency rallies

The market capitalisations of the two largest cryptocurrencies, bitcoin, and ether, have increased by nearly US$40 billion in the past three months. The total cryptocurrency market cap is up by $65 billion (a nearly 300 percent gain) to US$85 billion. As a result, holders of these currencies are sitting on huge wealth and they are now looking to “diversify” into other cryptocurrencies. This means that instead of being 100 percent in bitcoin and/or ether, investors are looking to take 5 or 10 percent of their cryptocurrency portfolio and buy other cryptocurrencies. This is fuelling a boom in second-tier cryptocurrencies.

Rampant speculation

As I listened in on pitches from new blockchain businesses, the most common single question was this: “when is the ICO?” (ICO means “initial coin offering”, the cryptocurrency equivalent of an IPO, or initial public offering, for a stock). Market participants are expecting immediate multiples of return on capital, regardless of the business case (if any). ICOs are viewed as near-guarantees of immediate big gains. I see a lot of parallels here with the tech bubble of the late 1990s. And there will be some spectacular blowups ahead.

But let’s be clear: at the peak of the dot-com bubble, the market cap of the NASDAQ index was near US$6 trillion. The entire cryptocurrency market cap right now is currently less than 1.5 percent of that. The point is, for all the noise in the media, the level of general public participation in bitcoin and cryptocurrencies remains extremely low. Just think about your own group of friends and associates. How many of them even own bitcoin? So this bubble is just getting started.

Regulators at the gate

The legal and regulatory system is far behind what’s actually happening in the cryptocurrency space. How do you treat cryptocurrencies? Are they securities? Currencies? Assets? Something in between? Remember, all cryptocurrencies offer different characteristics. Some offer the equivalent of a coupon or a distribution of profits, for example. But at some stage regulators (most likely the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)) will step into this market. Especially as the financial stakes increase. There are scam-like cryptocurrencies taking advantage of the huge boom. When investors start crying foul, you can expect the SEC to start weighing in. When they do, you can expect increased volatility and big drops in the scummier cryptocurrencies out there. But SEC participation will only make this industry more mainstream and bring in more money.

In the meantime…

This was just a quick wrap-up of what’s going on in cryptocurrencies. I’ll be bringing you more insights on this space in the future. But for now, everyone should be accumulating a little bitcoin. A few hundred dollars, a couple thousand… whatever you can afford to allocate in the super-speculative portion of your portfolio. Now, bitcoin will not keep increasing in value at its current rate of growth forever. At some stage, the market price will correct.

But everyone needs to familiarize themselves with the process of buying, trading and storing cryptocurrencies. Blockchain and Bitcoin are here to stay. This technology will only grow in scale and opportunity. And being on the outside (and not understanding it) will limit your ability to profit from it. Remember, this rollercoaster ride is just getting started. So there’s no reason not to be buying now.

Chuck Reynolds
Contributor
Please click either Link to Learn more about – TCC-Bitcoin.

 

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

Ontario Canada’s Kik Interactive will dive into the cryptocurrency market with Kin, an Ethereum-based ERC20 token.

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member