SmartBug Media Audio Blog: Recent Episodes
SmartBug Media
SmartBug is more than a digital marketing agency—we’re an intelligent inbound marketing agency of inbound strategy, design, web development, public relations, and marketing automation experts. And, we’re the highest rated agency among all of HubSpot’s partners. Listen to our team of SmartBugs as they deliver you our blog in audio form.
How do you incorporate new content into your existing website? Think back to the last piece of marketing content that your team created. Does it target a specific buyer persona? Does it align with a stage of the Buyer’s Journey and move that persona forward to the next stage? If not, chances are that it fell flat because it wasn’t specifically written to resolve the problems people in your audience have at the exact moment they are trying to solve them.
Incorporating new content into your existing website isn’t complicated. However, with careful consideration and planning, your new content can be optimized for greater success by delivering exactly what your audience needs, when it needs it.
When marketing multiple senior living communities, it often makes sense to introduce as much consistency as possible across locations. As a marketer, this is hugely appealing to me. The mantra “Find what works, then do it again” is one that I have shared more times than I can count.
But as a marketer, I’ve seen some funny things happen, particularly for senior living communities, when marketing becomes too cookie-cutter—even for communities under the same brand.
Psychology is a science founded in human motivation and behavior, and is essentially all about what makes people tick.
As a marketer, if you can understand what drives somebody and why someone may behave a certain way, the better you’ll be able to understand them, work with them, and ultimately influence them.
So let’s look at four proven psychological triggers, showing examples of each, and discuss how you can incorporate them into your copywriting and overall marketing.
As a marketing strategist, one of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned throughout my career is that there isn’t always one way to reach your small business goals. I’ve worked with a lot of small accounting firms on digital and inbound strategies over the past decade, and the advice I have always known to be true is this:
- Don’t kill what’s already working
- Get rid of what doesn’t work
- Find new and innovative ways to complement your marketing strategies
A big struggle for most small accounting firms is having the time, budget, and resources needed to be able to execute on all of your business goals. With so many tactics flying around, how do you know which methods will work best for your firm? Here is an approach that I like to call The Three-Legged Marketing Stool, which helps explain the different ways that you should be marketing your small accounting firm.
Case studies are a great and necessary piece of content for your brand. They validate the value of your company and serve as a strong testimonial to prospects and leads. The best part? They’re relatively easy to put together! Outlined below are all of the components that make up a great case study.
At one point or another, every marketer, agency, business owner, and inbound enthusiast has asked this question: “How much of my organic traffic should really be converting into leads?” This question has good reason behind it: organic visit-to-lead conversion rate is a great benchmark of inbound success. Not to mention, leads obtained from inbound activities (such as organic leads) have a much higher closing or conversion rate than their outbound counterparts: SEO leads have a 14.6% conversion rate, while outbound leads (such as direct mail or print advertising) have a 1.7% conversion rate, according to Eric Siu for Search Engine Journal.
How do you fill an open job position at your company? Do you post a job on Indeed, Glassdoor, and LinkedIn, and hope for the applications to start pouring in? How is that working for you? Are you getting a good quantity of applicants, but lacking quality? Or maybe you are getting my personal favorite: applicants with no cover letters. Why does this usually happen? Because they have no clue who your company is.
So, why did I just ask you about eight questions in the first paragraph? HR and recruiting are changing, and it is important to understand where your company stands and where you need to be.
Are you sick and tired of acquiring lists full of potential, high-quality prospects, devising a cold emailing plan, and having no one respond? What if you reach out again, will it be awkward? Is there any hope left to turn even just one of those prospects into a customer? Has all of the hard work and research you put into acquiring those email addresses gone to waste?
Not necessarily.
If you regularly publish on your company’s blog, you may already be seeing the benefits of business blogging. On top of posting regularly and promoting content on social, there are other strategies to increase your content’s discoverability, including posting on Medium, a publishing platform launched in 2012 by Twitter’s former CEO, Ev Williams.
Medium was designed to be a platform where anyone could read, share, and exchange ideas on a vast range of topics in the form of “stories,” or blog articles. Today, you’ll find everyone from freelance writers to well-known brands publishing and engaging with content as part of Medium’s audience of more than 86 million unique monthly visitors.
Like any platform, Medium has its limitations, but there are still a number of reasons to consider adding it to your content strategy. Read on to learn why SmartBug™ publishes on Medium in addition to our company blog, as well as some best practices to help your Medium content succeed.
How well do you know your buyer personas? Do you thoroughly understand their needs and pain points—and why they decide to purchase from you instead of your competitors? This information is the cornerstone of a successful inbound marketing strategy. With it, you can fine-tune your messaging so that it truly speaks to your audience and their needs. Without it, you run the risk of sending a generic or off-target message that doesn’t resonate with your audience. Which would you rather have?
Generating new move-ins is the ultimate goal for any senior care community. Paid social is the ideal channel for driving cost-effective brand awareness campaigns and top-of-the-funnel leads. Ads can also be used to move potential residents further through the Buyer’s Journey. Let’s take a look at some of the campaign objectives and strategies that senior care communities can use to support marketing and sales goals.
Imagine you’re looking to buy a new product but you aren’t quite sure which brand to go with. You research a bit online before realizing a few of your friends just bought the same product. What’s your next step? If you’d pick up the phone and ask for their opinion, welcome to the club. We are all creatures of habit—constantly looking to others for advice and validation. The people we surround ourselves with become examples without us even realizing it.
Interested in implementing an inbound sales methodology? There are several steps you can take to make the process smoother while transitioning your team from an outbound to inbound sales approach.
Let’s start by defining outbound sales. Outbound sales is an older, more traditional approach to sales. It is where a sales rep reaches out to a prospect, whether by networking or by cold-calling a list, to sell a particular product or service. The actions of the sales rep may be outlined in a sales process document and tracked in a sales tool such as a CRM (customer relationship management).
In the old days of recruitment marketing, you put a job posting on your careers website, Indeed, and maybe LinkedIn, and that was it. However, job applicants today are looking for more. Are you giving it to them?
In today’s age, there are so many options for a job seeker that you have to work harder to stay relevant and top of mind.
Today, you are probably on par with many other organizations if you are still only posting jobs to job boards. But will you soon be outpaced? What does the future hold for recruiting and recruitment marketing?
Let's take a look.
Paid media is a great opportunity for just about anyone—especially businesses that are just getting started in the world of digital marketing. If your contact database is lacking and you are looking for a relatively quick way to expand your contacts, a cost per lead (CPL) campaign may be perfect for you.
A CPL campaign is when an advertiser pays a publisher any time a user takes an action on the publisher’s website that generates a lead for the advertiser. It is one of several types of pricing models you can choose from in the paid advertising space.
“It’s all about content.”
You’ve probably heard this phrase uttered from your agency or marketing department sometime in the last several years, but it’s one that can’t be overstated.
Today’s consumer spends more time researching before making a purchase than ever before, and companies who are willing to provide the best and most helpful content to these consumers are usually the ones rewarded over time.
But creating a successful content marketing strategy takes time, planning, analysis, and repetition—all of which take a commitment from your content marketing team.
In this blog post, we’ll show you step by step how you can build a content marketing calendar that you and your team can use to create successful content that drives traffic to your site and improves your website’s SEO over time.
Having personally worked with distributors in a variety of industries, I have a great appreciation for the business model and, specifically, how user-facing content can be of great value to those that work in this field. Your distributors may sell to other distributors, or they may sell to end users. Regardless of the ideal customer profile, even those that sell to other distributors are still marketing to people, and people are users. User-facing content answers questions and helps solve problems for end users of a particular product or service, but it also is a great way to gain trust from distributors (if they are the main customer). As with any content marketing initiative, it’s critical to analyze the Buyer’s Journey, but when your customer is actually a distributor, user-facing content can sometimes be forgotten—resulting in a missed opportunity for your organization.
Whether you’re a privately owned credit union or small town bank, competing with big banks can be a daunting task. Although big banks often have much larger marketing budgets, you likely have an edge on them for more reasons than one.
Here are eight ways you can gain new members while competing with big banks.
When’s the last time you optimized your Google My Business profile? During the last 6-9 months, Google has been testing new features that local businesses can use to enhance their local search presence. With last month’s announcement from Sparktoro about mobile click-through-rate (CTR) plummeting over the last couple of years, every business needs to think about how they are going to provide accurate information to their customers, regardless of whether users are researching you in Google My Business or on your website.
Case studies are vital content marketing tools because they tell a compelling customer story and provide the same authority as white paper marketing, but in a format short enough to capture most prospects’ attention.
The first step to an effective case study is research. Conducting a case study interview with your customer will ensure you have accurate, detailed information, which will be the basis of your final piece of content. To unlock the most important kernels of information during a case study interview, try adding these five key case study interview questions to your list:
If you’re actively publishing relevant blog posts on your company website, you’re already making big strides toward stronger SEO for your site’s domain. Blogging can be a huge driver of SEO—especially when you know how to set up each post for search engine success! To get started, here are seven tips for writing SEO-friendly blog posts.
You may have heard the terms “smarketing” or “sales and marketing alignment” but do you really know what these terms entail when it comes to implementation? For many organizations, there are a variety of reasons why it is difficult to align the sales and marketing departments. This is especially true for larger organizations that may have several locations across the company or even across the globe that make meeting more difficult.
Quality traffic is an outcome of providing the right content and experience for your visitor. It is only with clearly defined business and marketing goals that you can measure the quality of your traffic. Traffic, leads generated, interactions, and sales are a few ways companies measure the success of their website.
By defining what success looks like for your website you can then identify which signals are most important for reaching your goals.
Once your goals are defined, here are 5 signals that can help you measure the quality of your website traffic.
Your customers seek validation before they buy. The more risk involved with the purchase, the more sources of validation or trust signals they need to feel safe buying from you.
Here are 12 trust signals to boost your conversion rates:
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Case studies
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Testimonials
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Social proof statistics (number of customers, number of users, number of widgets you’ve sold)
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Industry association logos
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Client/customer logos
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Logos of publications where your company is mentioned
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Employee certifications
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Number of five-star ratings from industry review sites
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Real-time social proof notifications
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Financial trust badges
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Social media proof
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Partnership and co-branded logos
If you’ve been doing marketing in a professional capacity for any bit of time (three months, 20+ years—you get the idea), you’ve probably dealt with the case of misaligned resources, expectations from stakeholders, and a whole bunch of tasks and deliverables to complete with not enough time in the day. Although things will always fall through the cracks from time to time, there are easy ways to simplify your organization’s marketing project management tactics.
We’ve heard this question before, “I’m looking for ‘X’ and I need it done by ‘Y’”. Where do you begin? How do you answer those questions?
Forty or fifty years ago, you would either call information, look in the yellow pages or the newspaper and hope that something relevant was available. Nowadays, we can find everything with an available connection and a couple of clicks. With this kind of power in the hands of consumers, more and more people are doing basic and extensive research on the almighty ‘X’ before the purchase process even begins. Within the buying process and in all aspects of marketing, there’s a decision making process. Whether you’re buying groceries for your family or a multi-million dollar piece of equipment for your organization, there’s a process and model around that decision. Let’s create an example and walk through some of the steps associated with the decision making process, create an example to follow along and pull away some tips for your team’s process.
More than 67 percent of respondents in a recent survey indicated that online reviews impact their purchasing decisions in some way, shape, or form. Although online reviews can help tell a part of story for your organization, a case study can help tell your audience an entire success story (start to game-changing) of one of your customers using your products or services.
Whether you’re selling hang gliders in Hawaii or lead generation services in Georgia, marketing is everyone’s job—and we mean everyone.
Although the belief that customer-facing employees are the only ones responsible for marketing your company has been around, basically, forever, this strategy couldn’t be further from the truth or best practices. Yes, it’s crucial for the C-suite, marketing, and sales to pitch your product and sell your service like pros, but the rest of your team plays a crucial role, too.
If you are a marketing executive or mid-level manager in your organization, you know how important your marketing campaign tactics and the all-encompassing strategy behind them are to your continued success. With all of the tools and mediums at your disposal, it’s easy to overlook certain pieces of your marketing as you take your campaigns from inception to execution.
Is your SaaS startup looking to drive more traffic to its website? Establish itself as a thought leader in the industry? If so, marketing should play a significant role in your product-first SaaS company. Blogging is a great place to start.
When was the last time you purchased new software without researching it first? More importantly, where do you go for your research? You look online. One of the best ways to establish an online presence is to include a blog on your website—and, there’s never been a better time to start blogging. In October of 2017, only 11 percent of SaaS companies were investing in content marketing. That means less competition and more opportunity to rank in search engines. So where do you start?
Is business blogging a part of your financial institution’s marketing strategy? If the answer is yes, continue reading to learn how to utilize this tactic to boost organic traffic. If the answer is no, keep reading to learn how blogging can help drive traffic to your website.
You’ve been working with a marketing agency for the last year or so, and things seem to be OK. The only problem is, you have a nagging feeling that’s making you wonder if you’re working with the right agency. Because this is such a significant investment—in terms of not just the expense of your engagement, but also the opportunity costs associated with your overall revenue enablement plan—it’s important to be confident that you're partnering with the right people. Take the time to stop and consider these four signs that you’re working with the right agency:
So, you’ve been hired as the in-house talent for a company specializing in dental mouthguards or a brand known for its award-winning supply chain software. Congrats on the gig! However, if you’re already experiencing night sweats wondering how you’re going to write day in and day out about the world’s most technical or boring industry, I promise you, it will be OK.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that if you’re reading this, there’s less than a 50 percent chance that you are ready to implement lead scoring, and yet there is an 80 percent chance that either you’ve already done it or it’s on your to-do list. OK, I completely fabricated those statistics, but the reason for my boldness in this hypothesis is I have had countless conversations with marketing and sales leaders who don’t need lead scoring as much as they need lead qualification.
So, what’s the difference between lead scoring and lead qualification? Let’s get a quick refresher on these two similar (yet, functionally, quite different) tactics:
As your SaaS company matures, the development of a partner program is one enhancement you’ll likely want to make to your go-to-market strategy. You’ve proven product-market fit, you have a predictable direct sales pipeline, and your customer success team is growing your existing customers while keeping churn at a minimum. Adding a partner channel is a very natural next step as you scale.
If you’re not already running Facebook and/or Instagram ads for your business, there are probably six different people who have encouraged you to move some of your advertising dollars to paid social. But where should you start? And if you are advertising on Facebook and Instagram, are you following a sound strategy that mirrors successful inbound marketing principles?
Facebook and Instagram advertising is both an art and a science. You need to think like a scientist when it comes to testing, while using your creative brain to generate fresh ad copy and design. That’s what makes it interesting and challenging.
Marketing teams all over the globe use content to make users aware of products and services or to nurture a prospect through the Buyer’s Journey—through content, they meet the buyer on their terms in a way that feels natural. Salespeople can pull from these same pieces of content when engaging with a prospect. For example, a marketing department may send out a weekly newsletter with all of the content that was published on its blog. That same week, salesperson Sally may be conversing with a prospect and be able to utilize one of those recent blog posts to help further her message about the product/service they’re discussing. Same content, multiple applications. Same content, multiple departments. Anyone who says content marketing doesn’t fit into the sales model is flat-out wrong. In reality, content marketing nicely aligns with sales enablement practices, and whether or not content marketing can be a big success for an organization really comes down to what processes are in place.
Hey, you! Yeah, you! The one that’s been living under the rock! Did you know that video is a great way to increase visitors, convert leads, nurture the qualified, and even help promote your awesome business? Okay, okay, it’s 2019. I’m pretty sure that almost everyone knows that. But in all seriousness, almost 50 percent of internet users look for videos related to a product or service before visiting a store, according to HubSpot’s Ultimate List of Marketing Statistics for 2018. So here’s the question: Why haven’t you dipped your toe in the water and experimented with video marketing yet?
There seem to be a lot of misconceptions about what it takes to create great video content—but great video doesn’t have to break the bank and not every video needs award-level production value. In this blog post, I talk about the business case for why your organization should be leveraging video and share different ways you can use video in your marketing efforts.
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If you’re the leader of a product-first SaaS company, it can be easy to make the mistake of ignoring marketing and believing that it isn’t necessary for the success of your organization. This is a common occurrence in the SaaS vertical where marketing has a tendency to be not only held at bay while the product is perfected, but flat-out ignored post-funding when initial investments are made in sales and sales alone. That is, until revenue plateaus and marketing is brought in to boost performance.
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It’s been a long time since people sat down and read blog articles word for word. In fact, it’s possible people never did this, but, as marketers, we convinced ourselves they did.
Content best practices have run the gamut since the advent of the blog—from writing short, keyword-packed 300-word blog articles full of sales and self-promotion to writing long-form, 1,500-word blog articles that avoid keyword stuffing, focus on education, and only sell at the end of the post.
Either way, the reality is that people don’t read online content—they scan it. In fact, only 16 percent of people actually report reading every last word of every piece of online content they consume. People read more slowly online, with less accuracy and less understanding, than they do when reading something they’re physically holding in their hands. They also miss secondary ideas entirely.
Kids and fur babies are distracting enough, but when you’re on your phone or computer running a variety of apps and getting pinged with distractions every few seconds, it’s hard to focus. If you’ve made it this far into this article without a child demanding more Veggie Straws or a WhatsApp or Facebook notification popping up and sending you down a rabbit hole, congratulations!
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Account-based marketing (ABM) seems to be on everyone’s minds as we move into the new year. There are endless ABM tools and technologies to evaluate, events around ABM best practices, and strategies that can be put in place to grow your ABM program. In this post, we're going to delve into one piece of the ABM puzzle: social media.
If you’re reading (or listening to) this, you probably already use social media to share your content with relevant users, build your network and thought leadership, and research prospects and buyer personas. Now it’s time to apply some ABM-specific strategies to your social media marketing.
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I’m sure we’ve all received a customer survey—whether it be from a store after we’ve made a purchase or from a doctor’s office after a recent visit. These are common, and businesses find a ton of value in the resulting data. However, if we look at the success of this type of initiative and try to translate it into a sales and marketing function, there’s an interesting opportunity that organizations of all sizes are beginning to capitalize on: sales team surveys. Maybe your sales team has hit a wall or maybe they’re entering a new market. A survey can uncover gaps in strategy and identify potential areas of need before problems arise. When we look at using sales surveys through an inbound marketing lens, there’s a massive opportunity to identify weaknesses in content, answer more customer questions before they’re even asked, and find cohesive strategies for sales and marketing teams to collaborate more effectively.
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According to Google, more Google searches take place on mobile devices than on computers in 10 countries, including the U.S. and Japan. With all those eyeballs coming to your website from a mobile device, it’s a good time to capture their attention and converting them into leads. Sure, you probably have some type of conversion mechanism on your website, such as a white paper or free demo ... but have you thought of ways to increase your conversion rate from your mobile visitors?
Here are five ways you can make sure your website is ready to capture those leads from mobile sources ...
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Inbound marketing is more than a buzzword. It’s a way of life for marketers, and it’s undoubtedly the most effective form of marketing used today. The question is, where did inbound marketing come from? And how did it evolve into the marketing powerhouse it is now?
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Let’s cut right to the chase. The answer to the question, “At what point in the Buyer’s Journey should sales get involved?” is simple. Sales has the opportunity to get involved at every stage in the Buyer’s Journey, although the way in which sales engages should change based on where the buyer is in his or her journey.
Before we dig into some tactical examples of how sales can engage at each stage of the Buyer’s Journey, let’s take a step back and make sure we’re on the same page when it comes to the Buyer’s Journey.
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Marketing professionals are always fighting to stay up to date on search engine optimization (SEO). Google’s frequent algorithm changes put a significant amount of pressure on SEO specialists to react quickly in order to avoid any drastic dips in search engine ranking. With so many “experts” on the web claiming to be top-notch SEO gurus, the plethora of SEO content can be overwhelming for companies looking to take positive steps forward. Who should you trust? Are you getting a fair price? Are these strategies going to be relevant six months from now? All of these questions are great ones to ask, but what about SEO tactics that don’t require an expert to implement or manage? Let’s discuss some of these tactics that can be efficiently implemented.
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According to InsideSales.com’s The State of Sales Development” report, the sales development (SDR) role lends itself to more automation than any other role within the sales team due to the very nature of the position. In fact, as part of the report, companies shared that their average spend on sales technology was $3,827 per rep, per year. That’s a lot of technology.
While a powerful and agile tech stack is fundamental to any sales and marketing strategy, the technology alone won’t help your team achieve its goals. Here are three tips for setting your inbound SDR team up for success:
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Just like a chef tailors their cooking style and menu items to the clientele, a marketer must adapt to specific situations and target unique personas with applicable messaging. The context we will discuss today is e-commerce—something that we are all familiar with, largely due to internet giants such as Amazon and Jet (Walmart). What these companies do incredibly well is build a data set about their audience and continue to market to them with personalized messaging and content—all at the optimal times and on the channels that the audience is most comfortable with. If you look in your inbox right now, you’ll probably see emails like “We thought you may like...” or “Because you purchased X, here are a few other items that customers have ordered.” This approach is common practice, but a strong e-commerce lead nurturing strategy involves much more. Here are three strategies that e-commerce businesses of all sizes can put into place to start moving the marketing needle:
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I get this question a lot, so I’m excited to shed some light on the subject. Pinterest presents an interesting opportunity for B2B companies to drive traffic to their websites and convert those visitors into leads.
Users on this platform tend to be well-educated with above-average income, and 93 percent of them utilize Pinterest to plan purchases, while another 87 percent of users indicated that Pinterest helps them decide what to buy. Sounds great, but what if you aren’t selling visually appealing jewelry or cute dog toys?
Hopefully you weren’t expecting a direct yes or no answer, because like most things in marketing and business, the answer is “it depends.” I put together a list of questions to think through that will help you determine whether or not Pinterest is worthwhile for your B2B organization.
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For social media managers, community managers, or anyone else responsible for the social media success of an organization, tools such as HubSpot, Hootsuite, and Buffer are important components to daily operations of a marketing team. These tools save hours each week by allowing social media managers to publish and schedule posts to multiple social channels at once. Until recently, however, many of these tools have not offered the ability to publish to Instagram. For those of us who drink the orange HubSpot Kool-Aid, we’ve been eagerly awaiting the ability to publish social content to Instagram. In February, inbound prayers were answered and HubSpot announced that all users of its social media publishing tool will be able to add Instagram publishing to their strategy. What does this mean for marketers and, more specifically, HubSpot users? How should this affect your social media marketing strategy? Let’s discuss.
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If you’ve ever been on Pinterest, you know what I’m talking about when I say the Pinterest rabbit hole. No matter what you’re into, Pinterest is a visual smorgasbord of beautiful, inspiring images tailored to your interests.
Apart from being a great way to kill one hour of waiting in line at the DMV, Pinterest can drive traffic to your website and help you generate leads. How, you ask? I’ll share real advice on the best strategies for using Pinterest as a viable platform to drive visits and leads. But first ...
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Have you ever ended up on a company’s email list and for the life of you couldn’t recall ever subscribing or filling out any sort of form on that company’s website? Alternatively, have you ever looked at a list of new contacts added to your marketing automation system or CRM and noticed there were new contacts that were added via “offline sources?” If you’re like me, you probably answered “yes” to both of these questions—or perhaps you haven’t been paying attention, and answered that you don’t know. Here at SmartBug, our marketing strategy is 100% inbound, but that doesn’t mean every new person we meet has gone through the ideal process of submitting a form on our site. Here are some typical reasons you might see new contacts pop up from offline sources, even when you’re executing true inbound:
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Buyer personas. You’ve heard about them over and over again. You know you need personas in order for your marketing to be successful, but you still haven’t created them. What’s holding you up? Is it because you don’t know where to start? Or perhaps you’re just not quite sure what a finished persona should look like ...
Well, it’s time to take off your procrastination pants and put on your persona pants, because I’ve put together three sample personas that you can use as a guide to build your own.
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Over the past year, Facebook organic reach has dwindled. Even pages with thousands of followers had to think through different strategies for trying to outsmart the algorithm, or others have given up and moved their focus to Instagram. On January 11, this Facebook Newsroom article confirmed marketers’ fears and finally put in writing the algorithm changes that have started to and will continue to more drastically impact Facebook organic reach. Mark Zuckerberg took to Facebook (naturally) to inform people about the update.
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Marketers are known for their gift of gab. After all, a marketer’s job is to persuade, to influence. If you’re familiar with DISC assessments and have ever reviewed team profiles, you know your marketers will likely exhibit a high “I” (influence) on their reports. Enthusiastic, warm, and persuasive, a “high I” thrives on engaging with others. We (yes, we, as I’m a proud, “high-I” marketer) thoroughly enjoy convincing others to see it our way. However, sometimes the best thing we can do for ourselves and our teammates is stop and listen. Hear me out (I get the irony of this).
What is the buyer’s journey? It is the journey buyers go through to become aware of, evaluate, and purchase a new product or service, and it consists of three stages: awareness, consideration, and decision. Analyzing the buyer’s journey through the inbound marketing lens allows marketers to conceptualize the path of a prospect as a framework. The result? Persona-targeted content for each stage of the buyer’s journey. (Of course, this means you need to have buyer personas in place to begin.)
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Game of Thrones. Lost. Arrested Development. Downton Abbey. All TV shows I’ll admit I totally binge-watched. Can you blame me? Such great storytelling and acting, and the next episode would queue right up, without me having to lift a finger. So what do these TV show-watching behaviors have to do with your inbound marketing efforts? In both cases, the audience is expecting to consume content on demand and, potentially, en masse. Netflix has mastered the art of catering to the on-demand audience; one episode ends and the next is queued up for you. How many times have you thought you were calling it a night, and then decided “just one more”? Or, have you ever logged into your account and discovered a new series you hadn’t yet heard of that piques your interest? Here are some inbound marketing techniques to apply that will keep your audience bingeing on your quality content.
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