Inbound Web Design

Nurturing leads might not be as glamorous as social media, or as thrilling as writing an eBook, but it’s dang important, and it works. Nurtured leads produce, on average, 20% more sales opportunities than non-nurtured opportunities. 35-50% of sales opportunities go to the vendor who responds first. Honestly, you can’t expect to keep your company afloat on revenue from the 4% of your first-time website visitors who are ready to buy. You need a strategy in place to draw the other 96% through your sales funnel.

• Dharmesh Shah
• Mike Volpe
• Marc Benioff

Profile: One of the most well-known online media and marketing software companies, with a blog that is as ubiquitous as Facebook in the social networking sphere was co-founded by Brian Halligan. HubSpot, who has since raised tens of millions in funding, starting out as a humble marketing service company serving up websites, hosting, and other marketing tools for the early stages of online marketing. However, HubSpot was named one of the fastest growing technology companies to date, with the statistics to back it up. Halligan was part of that extreme growth, eventually becoming CEO of a highly profitable--and well known--company, earning him to be on the list of best inbound marketers.

Rapid-Fire TOFU Creation

If there is any single factor that unites small business owners worldwide, it’s that they want scaleable growth, profit and more leads from their website. While fabulous web design and easy navigation can keep your future clients from hitting the dreaded “back” button and heading to a competitor’s website, you’ve got to capture their interest while it’s still fresh. Your website needs TOFU, which is a silly acronym used by marketers to refer to “Top of the Funnel Offers.” We’re talking free eBooks, eCourses, checklists and templates. You need to trade something of value for your website visitors’ phone number and email address.

But really, who has the time?

The simple fact is, on-page optimization doesn't necessarily rank first in the journey for top-10 rankings (#3 on our list). According to many SEO experts across the web, the process you may want to adopt for getting that coveted first position probably should look something more like:

#1. “Crawl-ability” – Super-optimized, carefully crafted, otherwise amazing content that the search engines can't see, cannot be indexed properly. The Google “Gods” have passed down the following (and fairly straight forward) tip for making sure your site’s pages are “crawl-able”:

Some of our June Favorites from the Magnetic MarCom Weekly Web Roll Call…

• The Jedi Master Approach to Content Marketing that Converts
• The Most Successful Email I Ever Wrote
• 10 blog post ideas that are so quick and easy you could finish them on a bar napkin
• CTA – Calls to Adventure: How to Make Your Posts More Heroic
• Infographic: How Online Marketing Drives Offline Success.
• Nobody Cares about your Business…But that’s OK.
• How to NOT Talk Yourself Out of your Goals and Dreams

If you would like to grab even more Inbound Marketing and #HubSpot links that we find useful ourselves during our web travels, join @MagneticMarCom on Twitter.
 
June was an awesome month…  

A common thread found in comments from our fellow Inbound Marketers is “I know what tools I have at my disposal and how they are used…but, I just don’t have enough time in the day to do it all. What channels should I focus on?

Well, Twitter may be one of the greatest all-time innovations in content sharing, LinkedIn is a wonderful place for making B2B connections, and Facebook is the single place where everyone on the web naturally congregates…but I would suggest that the space you should be putting most of your time and effort into is “none of the above.”

Many times CTA’s are written a bit too much like a wedding invitation. As soon as your guests open the envelope and see the velum and calligraphed “You are cordially invited…” they know exactly what they are looking at, and are free to begin creating preconceived notions of what may be in store.

But what if instead, you had slipped a scrap of paper under their door, a ransom note, giving strict direction, a command, on what they must do? Something like:

We have all been there: Staring at the blank screen, the blinking cursor…taunting us.

It can become a daunting task to continuously create timely, fresh, topical and useful blog content on a day-to-day or even week-to-week basis. Sometimes inspiration strikes and you effortlessly create a topical masterpiece, almost unconsciously. But on other occasions, frustration sets in as you struggle to even develop a topic…let alone a useful and sharable post.

Again, we’ve all been there.

The good news is, as inbound marketers and bloggers, we have at our disposal the greatest tool EVER created for collecting blog topics, researching ideas deeper, even connecting with other authors on a one-on-one basis…

Even in today's changing marketing landscape, we could stand to learn a thing or two from those who came before us.

Modern-day marketing...meet timeless design.

Many of you may already be familiar with the Mad Men television series and its protagonist, Donald Draper, the prototypical, charming (and troubled) 1960’s ad man.

If you haven’t yet seen the program, imagine back to the days where a hunch and a catchy tagline could shape the way America made its purchasing decisions for decades to come. Our preconceived opinions on virtually everything from vodka to Volkswagens were shaped during these “golden years” of advertising.

Ahh…the good old days.

While the traditional ad-shop will probably always have a place in how we conduct business, there is absolutely no denying that the divide between Madison Avenue and Main Street USA is atrophying with each day that we better understand the true power behind the internet. Namely, the web’s amazing knack for speeding up the process of creating meaningful relationships.

However, we can still learn from the traditional advertising greats...

As of April 2012, Facebook has over 900-million users. Needless to say, Facebook is doing just fine. It's time to build your readership.

It never ceases to amaze me how many of the world’s most mammoth corporations can be found “setting up shop” on someone else’s social media property rather than fortifying their own home-base...their website.

The fact is, this line of thinking flies in the face of what inbound marketing experts have consistently campaigned; that the greatest online “asset” your company has is its own website. An asset that is built from your hard-earned visitors, who are (of course) frequently visiting your site in order to consume the amazing, targeted content found there. This is your “captive” audience, your true fans, the life-blood of any growing business.

So, why would these otherwise smart people ever think it a good idea to incorporate a social media marketing strategy that drives that lusted-after traffic away from their websites and to those sites owned by the likes of Facebook, Twitter and Google+?

Let's explore this a bit further.