Conference focused on new use cases for cryptographic assets

An inaugural conference focused on new use cases for cryptographic assets showcased today how blockchain-based applications that serve actual needs may be on the horizon. But not everyone at Token Summit agreed on the market's direction. As panel after panel of entrepreneurs took the stage in New York, some in the audience remained skeptical – while even the panelists themselves expressed a note of caution. To kick off the event, hosted at the NYU Stern School of Business, one of the earliest innovators in the crypto space, Erik Voorhees – who sold his first bitcoin company, Satoshi Dice, in 2013 – revealed more details about digital currency exchange ShapeShift's new product, Prism. Addressing the critics who say the cryptocurrency boom is little more than speculation, Voorhees positioned the work as part of the foundation for the next Facebook and Google.

Voorhees said:

"The real use cases will come in the future, but if this technology is going to make an impact, there should be speculation today."

Following Voorhees' addressed a number of panels continued with the theme of building real-world applications based on blockchain technology.

To build a real blockchain app

Speaking at the event, Brian Armstrong, co-founder of Coinbase, doubled-down on a years-old theory: that the developing economy would be the first to adopt these distributed applications. His comments came after Coinbase demoed an ethereum-based messaging app, dubbed Token, at CoinDesk’s Consensus 2017 event earlier this week. It's a messaging app built with cryptocurrency tech under the hood – but perhaps more importantly, it also includes an interface that Armstrong described as the "equivalent of HTML", but for ethereum rather than the Web. According to Armstrong, the developing world – and its estimated 2.5 billion underbanked individuals – is the primary target market for the app.

"The main value of cryptocurrencies is bringing financial services to the developing world," said Armstrong. “That’s what we’re going to do with Token." Muneeb Ali, co-founder of Blockstack, which launched its decentralized browser this week, said his startup was seeking a similar goal: facilitating the development of new kinds of apps. To help get there, Ali announced that his company had offered a bounty to anyone who could find a bug between his application and decentralized storage providers IPFS, Sia and Storj. Storj founder Shawn Wilkinson downplayed the potential competition between the projects, instead positioning their work from an enemy-of-my-enemy perspective. "We're all ideologically aligned to crush Amazon and other centralized services," said Wilkinson.

Slow progress

If the event showcased one thing, it's that there's little doubt that the road ahead with be characterized by slow and likely difficult progress. Bitcoin-powered browser Brave has had a service live for months, and in six days will launch its initial coin offering for the Basic Attention Token (BAT). Brave advisor Ankur Nandwani took the stage to explain how the browser startup, which has already raised $4.5m in venture capital, will leverage the token in an attempt to change user behavior. Out of 1.5bn tokens that will be minted, 300m will be set aside in a "development pool" to incentivize content publishers and users alike to download the app, which blocks third-party advertisements.

"Once you have users on the platform, advertisers will come," said Nandwani. Another possible explanation, though, for the slow growth of the technology and adoption came from an audience member and blockchain consultant Tone Vays, an outspoken critic of many decentralized applications. Speaking to CoinDesk during a pause in activity on the stage,

Vays said:

"It's not about the application. None of these applications need decentralization. They are just using the hype of bitcoin’s technology to blow their valuations out of proportion."

Blockchain honeymoon

Indeed, Maker software engineer Andy Milenius cautioned the crowd of investors, entrepreneurs, and students about the potentially painful process that young crypto-investors will likely go through on their way to learning how to properly conduct due diligence on their investments. "They're going to learn, probably the hard way, what makes a good idea worth investing in," said Milenius. Citing the vast separation between what companies like Apple and Dropbox can provide and what their decentralized counterparts can offer, Blockstack founder Muneeb Ali went even a step further, predicting a period of large-scale failures by ICO-backed companies before any kind of decentralized Web becomes a reality.

Ali concluded:

"Right now, we are in the honeymoon phase."

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

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

Blockchain Crucial Tool In Solving Global Financial Deficiency

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

How to Vet An SEO Agency
(and Prevent Failure)

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

How to Create a Comprehensive Inbound Marketing Plan

 Folks who live and breath inbound marketing

are all too familiar with the complexities involved in formulating a full-fledged inbound marketing strategy. Inbound marketing demands that you be more than a jack-of-all-trades handyman. Instead, you need to be a pro at dozens of specific skills – content writing, search engine optimization, social media, website design, conversion rate optimization, pay-per-click, email marketing, the list goes on.

As a result, when we assist marketers with inbound marketing strategy, the conversation often evolves into a discussion about building a marketing plan – how to prioritize, what to do, what not to do, what works best for specific business models and how to implement the proper infrastructure to facilitate inbound lead generation. Whether you’re launching a new startup company or looking for quick ways to revamp your enterprise marketing activities, a solid plan can make the difference between treading water and an achieving exponential growth. Following this guide will help you put the proper inbound marketing plan in place for your organization, prioritize each aspect of your strategy and focus on what drives the best results. In a world of instant gratification where there isn’t much time for planning so this guide is designed to help you really hit the ground running.

Define Your Buyer Personas

Where Buyer persona is the foundation of all things inbound marketing. Understanding exactly who you are marketing to, what makes them tick and how they communicate will help you craft messaging that truly resonates with your ideal customers. For those of you who are not familiar with the concept of a buyer persona, they are a fictional representation of your ideal customers. For instance, within your target market, there are likely numerous types of buyers. Your product or service may frequently be purchased by CEOs, Marketing Managers and Directors of Sales. Buyers in each of these roles have very different interests, priorities, and goals. Taking the time to define and understand the characteristic of each of your buyer personas will help you focus your content creation on topics that attract ideal customers.

Outline Your Marketing Triggers

Once you have identified who your ideal customers are and what makes their world go round, the next step is to identify the events and pain points that cause them to search for information about your product, service or industry. These events are known more formally as marketing triggers. Trigger-based marketing aims to meet potential customers at a point of need by being reactive, and targeted, rather than arbitrarily pushing out messages to big audiences.

Let’s consider the marketing triggers for an office furniture company. Office furniture is most often purchased by organizations that experience rapid company growth, geographic expansion, are undergoing building renovations, currently have outdated office furniture or just have the desire to stay up with new trends in office interior decor. Companies that experience any of these events may identify the need for new office furniture and begin to conduct research online. This is the perfect point in the purchase decision to provide a potential customer with a top-of-funnel offer that speaks to their needs and introduces the value of your product or service.

Create a List of Keywords

Now that you understand who your buyer personas are and what causes them to search for information, the next step is to figure out how people are searching for information about your product or service. Keyword research allows you to see the estimated search volume by location, how difficult it is to rank for certain keywords and estimate of the cost of purchasing search traffic through pay-per-click advertising. When creating a list of target keywords try to choose search terms with relatively high monthly search volume and a medium to low competition level. Google’s Keyword Planner is a great resource to quickly generate a list of relevant keywords and identify search terms that are in your sweet spot of competition and search volume.

Through this research, you can create a list of key terms and phrases to create content about. Crafting keyword rich content that speaks to the common questions that your buyer personas have when they encounter a marketing trigger ensures you are attracting the right people, at the right time, to your website.

Set Your Inbound Marketing Goals

The first step towards measuring the return on investment of your inbound marketing activity is identifying exactly what you want to achieve and when you expect to see the results. As outlined in the SMART Goal Framework, goals should be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and timely. To set your inbound marketing goals, begin by assessing your website’s current ability to attract traffic, convert leads and close business. Some of the key performance indicators may include:

1. Monthly unique website visitors
2. Number of inbound leads / month
3. Sources of traffic – PPC, SEO, Blogging, Social Media, Email

It can be helpful to create a series of scenarios and calculate the results for a number of potential outcomes. The following is a hypothetical example.

Tip: For a quick competitive analysis put your website and your key competitors into Marketing Grader. This tool reveals how your site stacks up against the competition in terms of filling the top-of-funnel with qualified leads and nurturing them into customers.

Outline Your Content Strategy

As we break down the inbound funnel you can see that leads typically fall into one of three stages:
Top-of-funnel Awareness:
leads at the top of the funnel are typically searching for general information about a subject
Middle-of-funnel Evaluation:
leads in the middle of funnel need to be introduced to your brand and learn what it is like to do business with you
Bottom-of-funnel Purchase Decision:
leads at the bottom of the funnel are most often looking for information that communicates the functionality and benefits of your product/service

The goal of top-of-funnel content is to attract as much awareness as possible and convert those visitors into leads. Social media, blog posts, videos, infographics and SlideShare presentations are all examples of top-of-funnel content that can easily spread amongst a large audience. Middle-of-funnel content begins to position your product/service. Branded webinars, case studies, free samples, catalogs, FAQ sheets, spec sheets or brochures can be used to effectively introduce your brand while providing value to the viewer. Leads at the bottom-of-funnel have shown signs that they are specifically evaluating your product/service. Sometimes these leads just need a little taste of what it is you have to offer – this might be a free trial, a live product demo, a discount or a complimentary assessment, consultation or estimate.

If you have great top-of-funnel content but you have nothing to offer leads in the middle and bottom of the funnel you won’t be very efficient at moving leads through the sales cycle. To identify where you may have obvious gaps in your content begin by evaluating your existing content and mapping it to each stage of the inbound funnel. Do your buyer personas have all the information they need at each point of the buying cycle? Understanding the questions, concerns, and objections that each of your buyer personas has, during the three stages of the inbound funnel will help your content strategy take shape.

Design Your Lead Nurturing Process

Some leads reach a decision to purchase a product or service much quicker than others. This can happen for a variety of reasons, but often the primary reason for a lead is to stall in the sales process is a lack of information. If a lead has unanswered questions, they are likely not ready to progress down the marketing funnel. The best way to reach out to leads and answer their questions is through a series of automated emails. Email automation gives leads a little nudge or reminder that you have valuable content available at their disposal. This encourages leads to re-engage with your content and move further down the inbound funnel.

The emails that you send to top-of-funnel leads should answer the most common questions that arise during your sales process. Once you have proactively reached out to answer these common questions, your leads will be better informed, more qualified and more receptive to accessing further information about your product or service. As leads progress to the middle of the funnel you can begin to position your product or service by delivering brand specific information. This might include a series of emails that address common questions and concerns about your business. Once a lead has acted on a bottom-of-funnel offer they are considered to be sales qualified. At this point, leads should be handed over to your sales team to be contacted directly and closed into paying customers.

Create a Conversion Focused Blogging Strategy

Conversion focused blogging strategies are designed to attract highly relevant traffic to your website with the goal of converting traffic into qualified leads. Each blog post supports an exclusive content offer by answering your buyer personas common questions and encouraging them to access your exclusive content. For instance, let’s think about our office furniture example.  If you write a top-on-funnel whitepaper about “The 10 Benefits of Open Concept Offices” you would then write a series of closely related blog posts that help attract traffic to that exclusive offer.
These might include:

• Is Your Office Environment Crushing Creativity?
• 4 Companies Leading the Open Concept Office Trend
• 5 Design Trends Changing the Work Environment

Within each of the blog posts, you would feature a call-to-action to download “The 10 Benefits of Open Concept Offices” whitepaper.

Implement an Inbound Marketing Platform

While the bulk of the work in crafting an inbound marketing plan is routed, in strategy and content creation, the technology that facilitates inbound lead generation should not be overlooked. When considering infrastructure to facilitate inbound marketing choose platforms and approaches that will let you focus on your business, rather than the nuts-and-bolts of connecting disparate systems.

Recruit a Team of Inbound Marketing Experts

As we previously mentioned, inbound marketing requires a very diverse, yet specific skill set. Depending on your in-house expertise, capacity for additional work and the size of your budget it might make sense to hire for specific roles or outsource certain aspects of your inbound marketing execution.

A well rounded, Inbound Marketing team will have access to all of these skill sets:

• Inbound marketing strategy
• Copywriting
• Blogging
• Web Analytics / data analysis
• Front & back end web development
• Web design
• Search engine optimization
• Pay-per-click marketing
• Conversion rate optimization
• Email marketing
• Social media / community management
• Project management

Conclusion

Making the switch from traditional, Outbound dominated, marketing programs to inbound dominated marketing investments can seem like a leap of faith, but the benefits are indisputable. The sooner you can put this plan into action, the sooner you will be reaping the rewards of inbound marketing – more leads, at a lower cost, generated by a completely Scaleable Strategy.

Key Take-Aways:

1. Define your buyer personas
2. Identify your marketing triggers
3. Create a list of keywords
4. Set your inbound marketing goals
5. Outline your content strategy
6. Design your lead nurturing process
7. Create a conversion focused blogging strategy
8. Implement & Align infrastructure & business processes
9. Recruit for the skillsets you need

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

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

A Step By Step Guide to Inbound Marketing Strategy

   Are you new to inbound or think your current campaigns could use some direction?

Over at OverGo we’ve come up with a pretty foolproof and seamless process of creating a marketing strategy. It’s really quite simple, all you need to do is set the goals, create the basics, automate the processes, and analyze the results. Let’s dig deeper!

Setting Goals

The first step to creating an inbound marketing strategy is to define your business goals. Based on where you are and where you want to go, it’s important to create a roadmap of how to get there. Along with this road you can define the KPIs that tell you how your inbound marketing campaign is doing. You can look at your competitors, your industry market, and where you are in that market to create realistic and attainable goals.

Discovery Session 

The first step in setting a direction is to set customized goals during a discovery session. Conducting a meeting with you and your team to identify your ideal customers is the best way to go about this. In this meeting, you can discuss your key metrics, revenue goals, and your sales process to produce the best-customized strategy. 

Create a Buyer Persona

A deeper understanding of your audience provides direction for the content you create and keeps your visitors coming back for more. You can create a research-based representation of who your buyers are, what they want to accomplish, pain points that shape their behavior, and how they make buying decisions.

Industry Research

An understanding of your competitors and what other companies are doing in your industry is ideal. You can pinpoint your specialty and see where the holes are in your industry that could be filled.

Getting Found

Keyword Research

Once we get an understanding of your audience, it’s important to find out how people are searching for your content through keyword research. This allows you to see the estimated global and local search volume, ranking difficulty and also predicts the cost of running paid campaigns. Through this research, you can decipher which terms and phrases to target in order to attract the right visitors to your website.

Onsite SEO

This consists of all the factors on a website page that influence search engine ranking. In order to get found for the keywords that are chosen in your keyword strategy, it’s important to optimize every page that is created on your website. All pages should include the appropriate keyword within the content, page properties, and the image tags. Performing onsite SEO for all current and future pages that you build out for your website is very important.

Editorial Calendar 

Before beginning your blogging campaign, come up with an editorial calendar to ensure that you are publishing and promoting content on a regular basis. An editorial calendar will not only make it easier to schedule content, capitalize on upcoming product or service launches, but it will ultimately encourage discipline in the running and updating of any blog.

Blog Writing, and Posting

Blogging is the basis of bringing traffic to your website and relevant visitors will come to your site when you blog about the right content. The key is to create content around your buyer personas pain points and main industry topics. Keeping up with blogging is a high priority in getting your website found online, the more frequent you blog the more visitors you will attract.

Pay-Per-Click

PPC campaigns give you an opportunity to put your message in front of an audience that is seeking your product or service. Through keyword research, strategic bidding, and a compelling advertisement you can get the results you want. PPC is no longer limited to search engines, you can also run PPC campaigns on various social media platforms.

Social Marketing

Social media is THE platform for sharing content and odds are your audience is engaging on at least one social media platform. Sharing content on your social media accounts allows you to reach your audience on multiple channels- Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn. Social media acts as a gateway for potential prospects to find your website so it is important to be relevant, active and engaging in this sphere.

Getting Leads

Premium Content Production

Premium content converts visitors to leads on your website. Specifically, premium content is an offer that contains unique informational value to your target audience. Visitors are willing to fill out a form with their contact information in order to gain access to your premium content. Examples of premium content are eBooks, Webinars, Whitepapers, Case Studies, etc.

Landing Page Design

Landing pages are where premium content lives. Sending your potential clients to landing pages where you capture their information and create new leads for your sales team is a best practice. A good landing page is eye-catching, properly designed, and attracts new leads. The basis of a good landing page is to have the desired user action, which is what you want your visitors to do once they land on your page.

Call-to-Action Creation

A call-to-action (CTA) can make or break your website's lead acquisition rate. CTA's direct visitors to your premium content landing pages. We work with the branding of your website in order to create professional and exceptional graphic buttons your visitors will be compelled to click. We think of CTA as mini billboards positioned on your website to direct visitors to the next steps you want them to take. To facilitate lead generation you can design A/B CTA test groups and position them on various pages throughout your website.

Acquiring Customers

Alignment of Sales and Marketing 

Utilizing CRM integration allows you to provide your sales team with information that will make them better equipped for sales calls. With CRM systems you can track every action a lead takes on your website, your email marketing and on social media. This kind of information puts your sales team one step ahead on a sales call. They will be able to prepare themselves for the type of product or service the lead is interested in, and build on the trust the lead has already established with your business.

Lifecycle Communications

Getting to know your potential clients better is also important by creating a lead lifecycle plan based on your website content and sales funnel. Lifecycle plans segment leads based on who they are, how much interaction they've had with your business online, what kind of content you want them to receive, and at what part of the sales funnel you want them to receive it.

Lead Nurturing

The best way to move a lead through a sales funnel is to launch lead nurturing campaigns. You can do this with a workflow which allows you to trigger a follow-up email or a series of emails based on the action that a lead may take. This helps nurture and educate leads so they are prompted to take next steps and prepared before they even talk to a sales person.

Automated Workflows

Workflows are more than just a lead nurturing tool. They help you automate common marketing processes, moving leads through your funnel in an efficient way. Sending marketing emails, changing contact properties, and sending internal notification emails, are all possible with workflows. They bring marketers the same kind of automation a sophisticated CRM system provides to sales, bridging the gap between both processes.

Closed-Loop Reporting

Closed-loop reporting gives sales an opportunity to report on what happened to the qualified leads we provided, helping further understand your best and worst lead sources. With closed-loop reporting, you are able to plan more strategically for the future by focusing on your best lead sources, those with the best lead to customer conversion rate.

Retaining Customers

Closing sales and getting customers are great goals to have. But I think the inbound marketing mentality supports the fact that the relationship with your customers doesn’t need to end there. After you bring in leads from online tactics you can focus on turning customers into promoters of your business. After all, the best advocates of your products or services are those that have experience with them. Options for continued retention processes include implementing referral programs, continued customer education pieces, and segmenting customer newsletters in order to keep your customers coming back for more. 

Continued Education Pieces

Inbound allows you to segment your customers into lists based on their needs and implement marketing automation. You can communicate information on any additional needs they may have as a customer. Perhaps there is an opportunity to cross-sell but your customer was not aware of it, these communications will make sure they are well educated on the full scope of your products and services.

Segmented Customer Newsletters 

Newsletters aren’t just for leads and potential customers; you can send segmented customer newsletters so they continue to see you as experts in your industry. Customers receive newsletters that contain updates on current events in your industry, as well as press releases and product and service announcements.

Referral Programs 

A referral customer comes at a much lower cost and has a higher potential for retention and loyalty. If applicable for your business, you can create referral programs that make it easy for current customers to promote your product or service.

Account Analysis

Marketing Benchmarks  

Always analyzing your main marketing benchmarks is key. These metrics include customer acquisition cost (CAC) and ratio of customer value to CAC which is the total value that your company derives from each customer compared with what you spend to acquire that new customer. You can also look at the time to payback CAC which is the number of months it takes for your company to earn back the CAC it spent acquiring new customers, marketing originated customer percent which shows what new business is driven by marketing, and the marketing influenced customer percent which takes into account all of the new customers that marketing interacted with while they were leads anytime during the sales process.

Onsite Analysis 

Consistently performing a full onsite analysis of your website is also important. You do this by looking at keyword performance and rankings, organic search traffic and conversions, search engine optimization, blog performance, page performance, email click-through-rates, and much more. 

Offsite Analysis 

The offsite analysis goes hand in hand with onsite analysis. You can perform an offsite analysis which is the measurement and analysis of your online presence away from your website. This includes paid search campaigns, social media accounts and paid social campaigns. 

Monthly Reporting

Lastly, you can keep track of your unique business goals with in-depth reports based on your custom key performance indicators. Your reports are designed to foster communication and collaboration within your company so customizing it to your goals and with your sales and marketing teams is very necessary.

Takeaway

Setting up your strategy the right way might take a little bit of time, but in the end, it’s worth it and will produce the type of results that turn into leads and customers for your marketing and sales teams! If you want to learn more about how this can be applied to your business, I invite you to download our resource below!

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

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

Inbound Marketing Helps Generate More Leads:
 Hubspot reports that inbound marketing techniques generate 54 percent more leads than traditional paid methods. Before the Internet, marketers obtained the names of potential buyers and passed them on to the sales team. Typically, the sales staff would have to educate early stage buyers that may not be qualified. Today, buyers have access a broad array of online resources and can conduct their own research about products and services,
including:

• Search Engines
• Case Studies
• White Papers
• Webinars
• Social Media

The success of your organization requires you to have a long-term, strategic lead generation plan to help your target audience find you so that you can build a relationship. Organic search marketing provides one of the most effective strategies for generating leads. An effective SEO strategy consists of executing a number of elements well, including website design, keyword selection, optimization, content marketing, social media, and conversion rate.

Inbound Marketing Costs Less: 
According to this Marketing Profs infographic, content marketing cost 62 percent less than traditional marketing and generates three times as many leads. Content marketing comprises one of the most critical elements of a successful inbound marketing strategy. Fresh useful content improves the probability of keeping visitors on your website and converting them to leads, and hopefully customers, but this requires patience. You will have to focus on a strong and effective long-term approach that improves your brand’s visibility online and helps you build a more lasting bond with your customers. You will need to produce content in multiple forms, with the sole objective of helping your audience.
These distribution channels include:

• Blog posts
• Whitepapers
• Email newsletters
• Social media posts
• eBooks
• Infographics
• Videos, webinars, and podcasts

Remember that your content needs to stand out, educate, inspire, and entertain your audience. In fact, one of the best ways we have found to communicate content marketing is through the use of videos. Here's an example of an explainer video, centered around content marketing, that has helped us educate beyond blog posts for individuals who have more of an interest in the visual content. Inbound Marketing provides a powerful tool that businesses can utilize to empower people and give them the information they are looking for at the right point in the buying cycle. Companies that practice this type of marketing can build strong awareness, trust, and loyalty for their brands.

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

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

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