Business Growth Blog

Here’s an analogy: The main reason you go to a networking event is to meet people and get to know them. You don’t sit in a corner by yourself checking emails on your phone with your head down (at least you shouldn’t be!). You’re working the room, introducing yourself to people and getting to know them by asking thought-provoking questions.

Sales and marketing content is vital for communicating your value to potential customers. However, creating it can be arduous: and bad content is worse than no content, so it has to be good.

When I first started inbound marketing, I tried to create everything myself. I quickly realized that it was inefficient and expensive. That may sound counterintuitive: How can it be MORE expensive to do it yourself vs. hiring someone? That's easy—if I'm doing jobs that I'm really not skilled for, it takes me longer and doesn't turn out as well, so I don't get the best results over time.

One of the biggest problems businesses face is figuring out what to say to take a prospect from “Who the heck are you?” to “I want to do business with you!”

How do you get on your prospects’ radars and capture their interest? The first step is to clearly understand your buyer journey. The second step is to create and promote the type of information prospects need at each stage.

A landing page is a lead capture web page. It has a form that a website visitor has to fill out in order to get a special offer, like a coupon, discount, ebook, video, or some other type of valuable content.

The landing page conversion rate is the percentage of people that fill out the form.

Here's the most important part: Once a website visitor fills out the form, they get entered into your database and can be followed up on by a salesperson or furthered nurtured until they're ready for a sales call.

Landing pages are the lifeblood of online lead generation.

Here's an example of what a landing page looks like:

One of the main reasons to have a website is to get people "into your world." By that, I mean they’re actively engaged with your company at some level: they’re on your email list, connected with you on social media, or are in conversations with your sales team.

The only way to get someone into your world is to get them to willingly give you their contact information. It’s a little counter-intuitive: we usually think of prospects running away from salespeople as fast as possible, and yet here I am saying that they need to self-select into the sales process.

How in the world does that happen?

I found this infographic on the HubSpot Blog that breaks down a bad prospecting email. It really caught my attention because I have recently seen an email that looks just like this one. I think the author, Leslie Ye is right on with this analysis. Writing good prospecting emails is hard work, and this is a great example of how NOT to do it.

If you ask any stand up comedian what the most difficult part of his or her job is, they might say, “Reading the room.”

This phrase refers to the comedian's ability to analyze information from the audience and use that information to improve their act. They have to be able to perceive what jokes people are loving and what jokes aren't hitting the mark, so they can factor that into the rest of the set.

On a base level, inbound marketing has to be able to do the exact same thing.

Just like a comedian, a marketer has to to know what their audience will be into and what they will likely ignore. It makes sense if you think about it: you can't appeal to an audience that you don't understand.

So what is the best way to understand what your readers want? To many inbound marketers, it's content curation.

Simply put, content curation is finding and sharing articles with your audience. What exactly does that mean to a business owner? It means that if you know how to curate valuable content and analyze your audience's response, then you can learn what interests your current readers and what can potentially attract new ones.

One fall day I jumped on my bike (bicycle that is) to take a nice 15 mile ride in Northern Michigan. As I was enjoying the fall colors, I turned on my tunes to Octane on Sirius radio. The DJ was interviewing Flyleaf about their new album, Between the Stars.

As I was listening to the interview, a thought popped into my head: these songs are content, with a goal of driving a following and increasing sales.

That's the same exact thing any company needs to do: Create content that drives followers and sales.