INBOUND ACCELERATOR

When it comes to B2B marketing, your social media strategy must include LinkedIn. You may not necessarily need to use paid promotions, but carefully crafted organic content can be key in establishing your company’s brand position, as well as driving traffic to your website.

Do you know what your email campaigns look like when the reach the intended targets? Consider all the different places that your emails may be opened — even B2B emails are no longer opened strictly on desktop or laptop devices.

Inbound marketing relies on a number of processes to pull together complete campaigns that drive website traffic, capture leads and convert leads into sales.

Inbound marketing is a holistic approach. You can’t focus strictly on one aspect (for example, an advertising campaign to increase website traffic).

Developing and implementing a complete content marketing strategy that delivers results comes with its share of challenges, as Semrush discovered in a survey of nearly two thousand marketing pros. When asked what they found the most challenging and time consuming tasks, the answers ranged from developing content that resonates with the target audience to finding places to publish their content.

I’ve talked recently about using conversion rates to pinpoint your most effective inbound marketing elements — which offers, landing pages and blog posts most consistently generate new online leads — so let’s continue geeking out about metrics and numbers for just a bit. While I love the creative process of developing marketing strategies and campaign materials, I also love seeing the results in cold, hard data.

How do you recognize a great partner? One thing to look for is a company that continuously looks for ways to improve not just its own bottom line (all companies want to do that) but to improve the products, services and experiences it provides so that its own customers and partners are more successful.

While marketing involves a certain level of art, in the creativity needed to develop messaging and craft visual elements, it is in many ways a numbers game.

Those numbers should begin with the goals you set for your marketing, determined by working backward from the needed customers and revenue, through the leads needed to close those sales, to the contacts and web traffic required to generate the necessary number of leads.

If you’ve been reading the Inbound Accelerator the last few weeks, you’ve heard about how important it is to monitor your business blog’s performance in order to stack up actual results against goals, make decisions to improve future performance, and prove the ROI of your inbound marketing efforts.

What makes marketing automation so beneficial?

The list of benefits is long, but the features of automation that are most essential for inbound marketers are those that improve performance of marketing campaigns, increase conversion of leads into sales, provide objective measurement of marketing efforts to prove ROI and attribute sales accurately.