Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

Inbound Marketing Strategies for Your WordPress Directory Website

    

Once you’ve installed WordPress,

purchased a theme and spent some time getting things set up just the way you like, it’s time to start thinking about marketing. We both know that generating income from your website will require traffic. The question is: What is the easiest way to attract visitors to your website? While there is no tried and true perfect answer, inbound marketing is a great place to start. The ideal inbound marketing tactics will be different for every website. If you understand the different options that are available, you can start putting together some specific ideas — experimenting until you figure out what works best for your business.

Outbound Marketing versus Inbound Marketing

If you’ve been in business long enough, you might remember the days of telemarketing, door knocking, cold email or even delivering thousands of flyers. For the most part, these types of marketing are referred to as outbound or “push” marketing. In essence, you identify your ideal customers and then make every reasonable effort to get in front of them. Right away, you can probably see the challenges created by this type of marketing. Not to say it’s ineffective, but when compared to inbound marketing, outbound definitely feels inferior.

Inbound marketing, on the other hand, is a strategy that focusses on making it easy for people to find your website and learn about what you offer. Inbound marketing sounds appealing, doesn’t it? Who wouldn’t want an endless stream of potential visitors and customers seeking them out? It almost sounds passive. But don’t mistake inbound marketing as a passive strategy. It still requires a lot of work and ongoing testing if you’re hoping to experience a reasonable level of success.

Typically, inbound marketing focuses on strategies like blogging, search engine optimization, social media, webinars and video — to name a few. The objective being to draw people into your website and eventually convert them into repeat visitors or long terms customers. In this post we’re going to outline 4 specific techniques you can use to build an effective inbound strategy designed to grow your website traffic. Keep in mind that not every one of these techniques will work for everyone. You’ll have to experiment with a variety of different ideas before you find the ones that are most effective for your business.

Content Marketing

Not surprisingly, creating an authoritative and well-trafficked blog is the first strategy that many businesses think of when it comes to inbound marketing. Your directory website should be no different. It doesn’t matter whether you’re creating a local business directory, a travel destination directory or an event directory — content can and should play a key role in your marketing process. We published an article on the importance of creating engaging content which explains how to define your audience and their needs. HubSpot defines content marketing as “a marketing program that centers on creating, publishing and distributing content for your target audience”.

For many businesses, the objective is to attract customers or to sell a product or service. However, when creating content for your directory website, your goal is often to provide engaging content and to create repeat visitors — not necessarily to sell something. With a steady and growing stream of traffic and visitor, you’ll have a lot of options at your fingertips. But without traffic, you’ll find your opportunities extremely limited.

Search Engine Optimization

Now, before you start telling me how SEO is dead (I hear people say all the time), understand that I’m not suggesting anything shady. When it comes to search engine optimization, one of the areas you need to focus on is making sure you on-page SEO is in order — something that is often overlooked or passed over. Yes, keyword research is important for your directory site (we’ll have a post on that coming soon) but when it comes to on-page SEO here are a few of the items that should be in order everytime you click publish:

• A keyword specific URL
• Your title should be wrapped in H1 tags
• Use your keyword in the title
• Use your keyword in the body of your content
• Link your content both internally and externally
• Create a user-friendly meta description
• Make sure you page loads quickly

Social Media

If you’ve spent any time sitting in a waiting room or riding public transportation lately, you probably already understand why social media is important. Everywhere you look people are attached to their mobile devices and more often than not, they’re spending time on social media platforms. No matter how you slice it, social marketing is a powerful tool. Now, you might be thinking that social platforms are simply a great place to post your content and then move on but it’s more than that. Building an audience on a platform like Facebook gives you an opportunity to interact, engage, share and listen.

As with any inbound strategy, success lies in a targeted approach. If you think you’ll be able to dominate, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, Linkedin and YouTube at the same time, think again. You’re much better off choosing the platform where your target audience spends the most time. Over on Moz as part of their Beginners Guide to Social Media, there is a great chapter that discusses the process of choosing the right social network. Done properly, you’ll find that being active on social platforms is a great way to build a loyal audience as well as drive more traffic to your website.

Video

Video is already playing a huge role in many inbound marketing campaigns and it’s growing quickly. 55% of people watch videos online every day and video accounts for 50% of all mobile traffic (You’ll find more eye-opening statistics over on HighQ). With statistics like these, it shouldn’t take long for you to realize that finding a way to integrate video should be high on your priority list. How about some specific examples of how you could achieve this?

• Jobs Directory –
  Create a series of whiteboard videos that teach people how to put together effective video resumes which increase their odds of landing a dream job. You could even offer a done-for-you video resume service — “send us your raw files. We’ll cut, edit and deliver a seamless video that’ll help you find your dream position”.
• Business Directory –
  Interview the founders of local businesses. Post them “as is” or make the videos part of a detailed business profile.
• Vacation Rental Directory –
  Hire local videographers to film and edit local attractions, hotels, B&B’s and events then post the videos on your youtube channel and on your website.

Inbound Marketing is Critical to the Success of Your WordPress Directory Website

We’ve touched on 4 different ways that you can use inbound marketing to grow the audience for your directory website. As you get started with your inbound marketing, it’s important to realize that not every technique will work well for your business. You might also find that your personality or skillset is more suited to one particular area. Don’t try to master more than one technique at a time, unless you have adequate resources. For example, once you’ve put together a repeatable and scalable plan for content creation, move on to social media. If you find along the way that something isn’t working, either adjust or move on to a different strategy.

Building any successful directory website will require a growing source of traffic and ideally an audience that returns to your site over and over again. The best way to achieve this is by providing valuable content that keeps people engaged and entertained.

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

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

How to generate more qualified leads and turn them into customers

• Get found
  online by more (and more qualified!) visitors
• Convert
  more visitors into leads
• Nurture
  leads with discipline and consistency guiding them down the sales funnel
• Close
  leads efficiently
• Make smart marketing investments
  guided by analytics and ROI

The V2 Marketing Communications inbound marketing strategies combine social media marketing, content development, and search marketing (SEO)  into integrated and measurable marketing campaigns for our clients. By nurturing the potential client with worthwhile, inspiring, relevant information and compelling benefits, when they decide to buy, the consumer with whom you have created a relationship will choose you over your competitor. As an internet marketing consultant, our approach focuses on increasing awareness for your brand, generating qualified leads and building customer loyalty. Our job as your marketing agency is to produce results that impact your bottom line.

V2 Marketing Communications Inbound Marketing strategies include:

Overall marketing strategy & content strategy

• HubSpot website design and integration
• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Content creation and promotion
• Social media marketing
• Lead conversion and analysis

How does our Inbound Marketing Consulting team help you attract visitors and turn them into customers?

• We help you create valuable content
• We create or optimize web pages, blogs, e-books, videos, PR and social media accounts so that they’re attractive to search crawlers
• We help promote your content through social media like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn
• We provide expertise on effective lead nurturing and conversion
• We help evaluate and continuously update your website (keywords, tags, landing pages, etc.) using the analytical data provided by the HubSpot software
• We help you become an expert with inbound marketing services, using tools like HubSpot, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and other social media

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

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

Inbound vs Outbound Marketing:
What's Better for Your Business?

   

The emergence of inbound marketing

in the last decade has created a heated debate in the marketing world – inbound versus outbound marketing; which is better? While we are experts and practitioners of inbound marketing and we have an obvious preference for inbound, we also recognize that outbound still serves an important role in marketing. For some organizations, outbound alone might be the best strategy, and in other cases it might be best to combine inbound and outbound. What we’re here to dive into today, however, is what’s best for your business.

What is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing is a marketing approach adapted to the modern buyer who, on average, does 70% of their research on a product on their own before contacting the company they are researching. Inbound is designed to bring potential customers to your business who are actively in the market. It’s about getting found when they’re looking, rather than forcing your message on people who may or may not be interested. Another way of looking at it is that inbound marketing is designed to better align your organization with the Buyer’s Journey, the natural process a modern buyer goes through when searching for a solution online.

The Buyer’s Journey

1. Awareness Stage –
   Prospect has a problem they want to solve or an opportunity they want to seize.
2. Consideration Stage –
   Prospect has researched their problem, understands it, and is aware of potential solutions.
3. Decision Stage –
   Prospect has narrowed down the products/services and must decide which one to purchase.

As an example, let’s talk about Mary.  Mary owns a company that sells fancy dress socks. Cool, right? Mary is looking understand how she can use different marketing strategies to drive sales for her growing sock business. After reading several marketing blogs on the topic, Mary decides that inbound marketing is the best strategy because she’s looking to invest in long-term revenue growth. In her research, she found several agencies who can help her implement inbound marketing and reached out to a few whose service offering aligned with her needs. Sound familiar? 😉 Typical inbound marketing tactics that help take someone through the buyer’s journey

include:

• Blogging
• Social media
• Email marketing
• Content creation
• Lead magnets
• SEO

Inbound marketing tactics like these are designed to help prospects discover your business in the early stages of the Buyer’s Journey and to educate them on the benefits of your solution, all while building trust throughout the process.

What is Outbound Marketing?

As opposed to marketing to people who are already looking for a solution like yours, outbound marketing aims at trying to reach as many people as possible, whether or not they are active buyers. In general, outbound marketing tends to market to a larger volume of less-targeted people,

using tactics like:

• Commercials
• Pay Per Click ads
• Print ads
• Billboards
• Cold-calling
• Direct mail

Unlike inbound marketing, outbound normally doesn’t take the Buyer’s Journey into consideration.

Choosing Between Inbound and Outbound

Anyone who says that either inbound or outbound is always superior is giving you a biased answer. To determine which one is best, you have to consider your specific business, audience, and your marketing objectives.

What Makes Inbound the Best?

One of the biggest strengths of inbound marketing is that it is focused on providing value to your prospects. It’s educational and often non-promotional. Since inbound marketing aligns with the Buyer’s Journey, it builds a relationship between your prospects and your brand. This also attracts prospects to your brand at the right time, as opposed to interrupting them at a time when they are NOT in the market for what you offer. For this reason, buyers prefer inbound marketing over outbound marketing. Instead of being annoying, it helps them. The other major strength of inbound marketing is the long-term ROI.

Generally speaking, inbound marketing requires a higher upfront investment and brings slower results for the first several months. However, those initial stages are necessary to build your digital marketing assets, increase your presence online, and rank higher in search engines. Over time, the value of those assets increases at a higher rate than they cost to maintain or improve. Digital assets like blog posts and premium offers can continue to generate leads years after they were originally created without costing an additional penny.

What Makes Outbound the Best?

The biggest strength of outbound marketing is its ability to get in front of a large number of people quickly and build awareness. If done correctly, you can launch an outbound marketing campaign, get seen by millions, and have new customers within a few weeks, however, the results are more dependent on the money you invest. Usually have to spend more to see more results and when you stop spending money, the benefits stop. Unlike inbound, you don’t get many tangible, long-term assets that continue to generate leads with outbound marketing.

Also, outbound marketing tends to be more disliked.  

In fact, entire businesses have been built on the premise of regaining the control that buyers have lost to outbound marketing. Take, for example, Netflix’s attractiveness over TV's advertisement laden programming or the incredible success of AdBlock on the web.  

Determining the Best Fit for Your Business

There are businesses that have found tremendous success by exclusively using inbound marketing or outbound marketing. There are also plenty who have done well by using both. Ultimately, you have to figure out what’s right for your company by considering the following:

Your Market

First, you have to consider who your ideal buyers are and how they normally shop for what you offer. Where do they go to learn more about the types solutions you offer? To get a better idea, take a look at your industry as a whole and your direct competitors. What marketing tactics are most common and seem to be most effective?

Your Goals

What are you trying to achieve? Do you want to build brand awareness? Drive traffic? How many customers are you aiming to get and what’s your timeline for that goal? Inbound marketing is the best long-term strategy, but it’s probably not going to dramatically increase business in the first few months. Outbound marketing, on other hand, can help you get customers in the door quickly, but it comes with diminishing returns. More often than not, the best strategy is to combine a little of both, while taking an inbound approach to both – meaning you are measuring results accurately and you’re aiming for long-term brand-building alongside short-term growth.

Your Brand

Finally, you should consider how the marketing tactics you deploy will affect your brand’s image. Launching an aggressive cold-calling might get some sales upfront, but how will it affect your reputation long-term? You only want to use marketing tactics that your brand can be proud of and that your customers would approve of if they knew how you executed them. More often than not, the truth comes out and it’s incredibly difficult to overcome a bad reputation.

Being More Inbound About Going Outbound

We believe in an inbound-focused approach that also uses outbound marketing when appropriate. This means using outbound tactics to get your company in front of potential buyers, while focusing more on helping than selling upfront. For example, if you sold fancy mens socks, you could run a PPC (pay per click) advertising campaign that promotes a free guide on matching fancy socks to your business attire, instead of promoting the product directly. This works because people are more likely to engage in a brand that helps them understand the buying process, instead of asking simply asking for their money. Or let’s say you were purchasing a booth at a local conference. You could use inbound tactics to gather leads and promote your presence leading up to the event.

Is Inbound or Outbound Better?

Inbound and outbound marketing are two separate approaches that can be used effectively on their own or even together. Each one has its unique set of advantages and disadvantages. Outbound is a better short-term solution with higher long-term costs, while inbound marketing tends to be the better long-term solution with slightly higher short-term costs. The strategy most businesses find most effective is to use both inbound and outbound marketing, while maintaining an inbound approach.

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

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

How To Use Funnels For Your Inbound Marketing Strategy

Funnels have been a focal sales strategy for decades, serving as a general model for anyone looking to get the most out of a given lead pool. By breaking down the sales process into a series of steps, starting at the wide end of the funnel and working to the narrower end, salespeople can more effectively target their potential customers and see higher sales growth as a result.

Today, inbound marketing has replaced many businesses’ sales efforts altogether. Instead of hiring a dedicated sales force to sort through leads and juggle them through the stages of a sales funnel, companies are dedicating their resources to building and preserving a highway system that can accommodate multiple inbound streams of web traffic and put them in the best position to eventually convert. Part of that conversion-optimization process depends on a funnel system that can ultimately produce the most qualified pool of potential leads.

The Mouth of the Funnel: Capturing the Most Attention

The widest part of the funnel demands the greatest amount of possible leads to work with, and as a result, you should step up your efforts to appeal to the greatest number of people. Gaining visibility on the web is a somewhat straightforward process, but it does take a significant amount of time—usually on the order of months just to break into the scene.

Most inbound marketers are already using a large-scale strategy to produce this volume of visitors and potential leads. Through content marketing, you’ll build a name for yourself and increase your authority with major search engines, through SEO, you’ll optimize your website for a series of industry- and topic-specific keywords, and through social media, you’ll build and grow a network of followers who read your content and visit your site regularly. The more users you have coming in through the mouth of the funnel, the more users you’ll eventually have coming out the more relevant, narrow end. Pay attention to your key demographics at this stage, but don’t try to sort your leads; let your automated funneling tactics do that work for you.

The Middle of the Funnel: Filtering the Most Relevant Audience

The middle of the funnel is responsible for sorting through the first stream of leads and filtering out some of the less-relevant audience members. For example, if a pet supplier is looking to sell cat-specific products, it might want to filter out all exclusive dog owners and instead focus on the cat owning portions of its inbound audience.

This stage of the funnel requires attention and setup, but once in place it should be fairly effective at filtering out your inbound leads. Traditional means of middle-funnel sorting might require individual contact, lead by lead, while the automated means creates a situation that naturally predisposes your different audience segments to behave in specific ways. Here, you won’t necessarily be focused on volume. The success of the middle portion of your funnel is dependent on how successful it is at filtering out the audience segment you have intended to filter out. You’ll need to run occasional diagnostics to ensure its effectiveness and make tweaks if necessary.

The End of the Funnel: Appealing to the Most Interested Leads

At the end of the funnel, you’ll introduce your now highly-qualified leads to a purchase (or simply a conversion opportunity) they may be interested in. At this point, your lead pool should consist exclusively of your specific target demographics, and as a result, your potential to achieve conversion should be much higher than through an ordinary system. In order to be successful, the end of your funnel must be compelling. Even the most qualified leads won’t convert if they’re not interested in what your selling. That means you’ll need to step up your efforts in terms of design, copy, and value if you want your audience to have the highest propensity to convert.

Using Content as a Funnel

Content is going to serve as the best and easiest funneling system for your campaign. It provides an excellent introductory mouth, since it will generate large volumes of traffic from increased search engine rankings and returning readers, but more importantly it will give you the opportunity to easily filter your audience through topics and suggestions. For example, if you’re a pet supplier and you’re looking to focus on cat owners for a specific campaign, you can use cat-related content as an introductory means to filter your audience. Exclusive dog owners likely wouldn’t click on your cat-focused article, so you can be assured that your primary reading audience for these articles falls within your demographic specifications. Your demographic needs may be more complicated than this, but you can use the same principles to write appropriate content for each segment of your audience.

Once you’ve got your topics in place, you can use helpful leads in the middle or near the end of your articles to guide your leads to relevant places. For example, if you’re trying to appeal to cat owners who are concerned about the dental hygiene of their cat, you can link to cat dental health articles, resources where people can learn more about feline dental health, or if you’re ready to end the funnel, your feline dental health product directly.

Using Landing Pages as Funnels

You can also set up landing pages to do the funneling work on your behalf. Rather than simply producing a line of content to be syndicated and eventually discovered, you’ll be pouring leads to your landing pages and letting the rest take care of itself. For example, you could set up four separate landing pages (each intended for a different segment of your audience), and use careful wording to syndicate appropriate links to those landing pages on social media or through a paid advertising program. Your landing pages could ask your users for some basic information—such as name and age—if you wanted to funnel your leads further, but the fewer steps your leads have to go through, the better. Instead, try to use your landing pages to qualify your inbound leads on their own, and then direct them to the appropriate funnel ending.

Make an Offer

Once you’ve got your highly-qualified lead pool confronted with an opportunity for conversion, you’ll need to finalize the deal. The best way to do this, especially for B2B companies, is to make a valuable offer. Most people won’t hand over their personal information voluntarily, so you can offer something worthwhile—such as a whitepaper or a research report—in exchange for that information. If you’re offering something more tangible, like a product, you can use testimonials or persuasive copy to increase the perceived value of the item you’re selling. The point is to make the deal as valuable to the user as possible—this will ensure that the greatest number of filtered leads end up converting at the end of your funnel.

Creating a funnel that can complement and enhance your current inbound marketing efforts should increase your total number of eventual conversions and thus, your total ROI. By using automated funnels instead of a manual step-by-step sales procedure, you’ll save yourself the time and stress of the procedural formality, and your potential leads will

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

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

Stages of an Effective Inbound
Marketing Strategy

   

                                              Inbound Marketing Strategy

Inbound marketing has been proven to be one of the most effective ways to promote and do business online. In fact, a survey revealed that 93% of companies who used inbound marketing experienced an increase in traffic and lead generation! The beauty about this strategy is its ability to draw quality prospects to your content. Its centers on providing valuable content that your ideal customers are naturally interested in. No more chasing or using antiquated methods like buying email lists. Inbound marketing is win-win for both parties involved as you offer solutions to your niche while your prospects glean value from your content.

The major component of inbound marketing is the process of nurturing a “stranger” to an eventual promoter of your business. In other words, your target market starts off not knowing anything about your company. They visit your content, become interested enough to subscribe to your list (become a lead), are cultivated through your email messages that they purchase your product, then are so enamored by your ongoing life-changing value that they essentially promote you and your brand from their customer experience! This is achieved through tactics such as your content marketing, social media, SEO techniques, and email content, just to name a few.

Each of these elements play a huge role in your overall inbound marketing success. You can’t just focus on generating leads and sales if you want a long-term sustainable business. If you do it right, inbound marketing will position you to create lots of loyal, happy customers. The following are the four marketing actions you must consider to generate desired results in your business.

Attract Visitors

The prerequisite to driving quality traffic to your sites is being clear about your target audience is and what interests them. Knowing the pains, problems, needs, and questions of your buyer personas prepares you to create a content marketing strategy that resonates with them by solving their problems. This is how you attract visitors by sharing information that speaks to your ideal customer.

Here are some of the most common ways to draw visitors to your content online:

• Social Media
  Learn the networks where your target market “hangs out” to focus your marketing efforts there.
• Blogging
  This an important facet to inbound marketing and the best way to attract visitors to your content. Your blog also positions you as the expert and authority in your niche. No business should be without a blog!
• Video Marketing
  It’s predicted that by 2017, 74% of content viewed online will be from video; a compelling stat to motivate any business to boost their video strategy.
• Email
  Even when visitors become leads, continue to send them to your content by sharing recent posts in email messages. This keeps them coming back to your brand and improves your search engine rankings.

Convert Visitors into Leads

Now that you’re attracting visitors, it’s time to convert them into leads and capture their contact information. The best way is through an exchange; you offer something valuable and enticing where they are compelled to give you the goods. This freebie could be a checklist, eBook, how-to video, guide, bootcamp series, webinar, discount/coupon…anything that would be deemed valuable to your audience.

This works great when the freebie is congruent to the message they’re viewing. Therefore, if you’re sharing content on how to lose 10 pounds in 14 days, a good offer would be a daily checklist that helps them to do just that! Align the offer to get better results. Finally, (and this is very important), to capture leads from your content, you must leave a call to action (CTA) or tell the visitor what to do next. This can be as simple as telling them to click on the link directly below a video, or to leave a comment for feedback, or even to share your content with their network. The key is to give them directions to take your desired action.

Close Sales & Gain New Customers

The next key element is converting your leads into sales. The good news is that your leads are qualified and have expressed interest in your company. Moving forward, using tools like your CRM system to help you enrich your list that brings them closer to the buying decision is essential.

Below are some ways to increase sales conversions within your list:

• Use social proof, customer testimonials, case studies and tests findings to illustrate that people are getting results from your product/business. Testimonials are excellent because your lead now believes it will work for them too!
• Create deeper levels of target marketing by segmenting your email list. By separating your list even further based on certain criteria like interest, age, etc., you can increasingly personalize your messages to speak specifically to someone. It is one of the most overlooked features in email marketing software.
• Reduce or remove risk. Most businesses have a 30-day money back guarantee that gives consumers some comfort prior to purchasing. Make sure that your list is aware of your risk-free policies.

Engage & Delight with Value

This is where you build raving, loyal fans who gloat about your business to their networks. How does this happen? By continuing to give value that relates to your audience. You want to be so well in-tune with your audience that you can provide fresh, relevant content that keeps them in the know. Surveys work fine because you can directly ask what your customers want. Use social media feedback as way to improve your customer initiatives and create great experiences.

Studying and staying abreast with your buyer personas positions you to upsell and create new products centered around them. You are literally giving the people what they want…and they will love you for it! The key to your inbound marketing success lies in focusing on these four key elements and getting really good at them. Hubspot offers invaluable training, tools and resources that will shorten your learning curve and give you the action plans to excel. As you start to implement this strategy into your marketing, undoubtedly will you see an increase in traffic, leads and sales.

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

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member