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VIA Idea #27: Improve your Sales Strategy with Inbound Marketing

Back in the day, advertising was simple: TV and print ads pushed products or services and we responded by buying those products or services. Those days are gone. Prospects of all ages now Google items or brands they’re interested in, visit the company’s website and ask Facebook friends for advice.

To thrive, businesses large and small must continue to evolve their sales strategies by employing inbound marketing. Effective inbound marketing engages early-stage potential customers as well as fosters relationships with established customers. Inbound marketing includes a variety of “pull” tactics:

  • Web content
  • Blogs
  • Webinars
  • Videos
  • Reports (inc. white papers and ebooks)
  • Podcasts
  • Newsletters/ezines
  • Press releases
  • Social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Twitter, etc.)
  • Infographics
  • Mobile offers/coupons
  • Apps

Note that none of these are “pushing” customers to buy; each serves to demonstrate your company’s expertise, builds trust and encourages conversations. Because you want to engage existing and potential customers, the key is to generate fresh, relevant content often enough that they pay attention. Everything you generate should be optimized with your top keywords. Search engines love inbound marketing tactics and done right, will reward you for your participation with higher rankings.

The goal is to structure inbound in ways to get someone’s permission to capture data such as a name and email address. This is a great way to fill your pipeline with leads for follow-up programs. The beauty of inbound marketing is that once you create strategic content, it works for you as long as it’s active. You have an asset that keeps on giving.

 Inbound Marketing needs to accomplish these four goals

Our industry says many businesses are currently budgeting an average of 30 percent (up from 26 percent) of their marketing dollars to inbound tactics. They also say many businesses haven’t even begun to work in this arena. HubSpot, the company who literally wrote the book on inbound marketing, revealed that inbound marketing’s cost per lead is 60 percent lower than traditional outbound marketing.

How do you know which inbound marketing tactics are best for you? Ask yourself the same questions that you would before starting any marketing initiative; keep in mind that marketing must be about customers and prospects, not you.

Who are you trying to reach? Why do they need you? What message, information or offer would entice them to start a conversation with you? How are you going to follow up? How often are you going to post or email an offer?

If you need help in sorting through what to do first, contact Julie for a free consultation on how we can create an action plan.

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VIA Idea #26: Communicate Effectively with Consistent Email Marketing

Businesses like yours send out emails to customers/clients all the time. You might have hundreds or even thousands of email addresses on file. But are you using the ability to connect with those people to your company’s best advantage?

There are lots of ways to “touch” a customer via email: newsletters, special incentives, coupons and white papers come to mind. It’s likely that a contact who is interested in getting a white paper doesn’t care about coupons. You may want to give your current customers one incentive but offer past customers a different offer.

By letting you call out different groups and adding the same person to more than one group, email services such as Constant Contact, Mail Chimp or Emma allow you to manage your database without investing a lot of time. (You can import data from Outlook, Excel and other programs; you don’t need to re-enter data!)

As with any marketing effort, you first need to define the audiences and objectives. Do you want to promote a service or product? Do you want to inform or share advice? Do you want to build or cement a relationship? Knowing these answers will drive the type of emails you send and how often you send them. Communicate too seldom and you won’t get noticed. Send out emails too often and/or to the wrong audience and your customers will unsubscribe.

Strategies may be fine-tuned by accessing reports that track data like bounces, opens and click-throughs. Armed with this kind of information, you can see trends such as the best day of the week and the best time of day to send the emails. A report can also show you the email addresses that unsubscribed. You’ll also be in compliance with the Federal CAN SPAM Act, which mandates that a sender give the receiver a way to opt out of future mailings.

Email service software allows you to use a custom-designed template (VIA created our own) or you can choose one from their library. You can also include icons that make it easy for your email recipients to share your correspondence on their Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other social networks.

By now, we hope you are thinking about ways to connect with your customers by using email marketing. If you want help to get started or would like to discuss strategy, content writing or a custom template, get in touch with us.

Communicate effectively with consistent email marketing

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VIA Idea #25: Responsive Web Design

Let me introduce you to Responsive Web Design. It’s relatively new on the scene and is so practical that you will love it and embrace it easily. Responsive Web Design is crafted to provide a fluid layout that resizes across multiple viewing devices and screen sizes (from desktop computer monitors to mobile phones). We build and maintain one single website, where previously you needed a separate mobile website.

Answering to the Popularity of Tablets and Mobile

Mashable is calling 2013 the year of Responsive Web Design because the mobile market is growing so fast. The global sale of tablets is expected to exceed 100 million this year. The shift to smartphones and mobile usage is happening at an extraordinary rate of speed. Even though the debate about web or app continues, we think a small business can’t possibly keep up with the diversity of mobile devices on the market today or the amount of app stores to contend with. With Responsive Web Design, you can make sure your website works easily on all devices.

How it Works

Flexible images and fluid grids re-size themselves to fit the screen. Examples are seasonslandscapeinc.com (VIA developed), xpointchurch.org (VIA developed), sony.com, and disney.com. If you view these websites on a desktop browser, try making your browser window smaller. The images and content column will shrink, and then the sidebar will disappear altogether.

The fluid grid concept calls for page element sizing to be in relative units like percentages or EMs, rather than absolute units like pixels or points. Flexible images are also sized in relative units (up to 100 percent). Designers love pixels. Photoshop loves pixels. But a pixel can be one dot on one device and eight dots on another.

So how do you approach Responsive Web Design if everything is pixel-based? You stop using pixel-based layouts and start using percentages or the EM for sizing. You turn everything into relative sizes. We will also include dynamic functionality with JavaScript and HTML5 to give you performance. We can also program device-specific functionality and features where they fit.

The latest research from Google tells us that “90 percent of people move between devices to accomplish a goal, whether that’s on smartphones, PCs, tablets, or TV.” The three most common ways users move between devices are:

  1. To search again on the second device
  2. To directly navigate to the destination site
  3. Via email, that is, to send themselves a link to revisit later.

 

Reduces Future Maintenance

Responsive Web Design allows future updates to be made in one place at one time. That saves you time and money each time a revision is needed.

The Benefits are Obvious

Build your website once, and it works seamlessly across today’s multi-screen world. Contact us today to discuss how you can move to Responsive Web Design in 2013.

Call us at 219-769-2299, email, or go to viamarketing.net.