Ever thought about learning more about a certain marketing topic? Now is your chance! Take time to read relevant blogs, books or magazines that address a business issue that you’ve been wanting to tackle. Fast Company comes to mind as one publication we regularly read or follow on Twitter. Some other good books on a topic many are asking about? Inbound Marketing by Brian Halligan and Twitter Marketing, by Hollis Thomases.
Here at insight180 we get a lot of questions from our clients regarding the importance of implementing social media into their marketing plans. Our answer is always “yes, invest time in this area.” Even if you’re just following and commenting on other blogs or using LinkedIn, social media is one way to stay relevant. However, the information you provide to others via your website, blog posts, LinkedIn communications and Facebook posts should be content rich and relevant. Make sure you are discussing something that followers can relate to or want to learn more about. Your followers are listening a lot more closely than you think, so say something worth hearing!
. . .websites, that is. Is your site up to date? By that we mean, is news truly new? Do all of your outside links work? Do all of the page links lead somewhere? As time progresses and businesses transform, so do their websites. Links are embedded, pages are added, pictures are planted. Have you taken a look at your site navigation lately? Do all of the links still work? Does your site need an overhaul? Maybe have an outsider take a look — they may find things that you miss.
There is something to be said about the necessity of SEO. Search engine optimization is key in getting yourself found. While an eye-catching website and great links are essential, if clients cannot easily discover your site, it is all for nothing. Make your site easy to find. Use applicable keywords or even phrases commonly used around the office and plant them throughout your website. In our case “brand strategy”, “differentiating”, “positioning”, are all words that are important to our line of work as well as the services we offer. If someone happens to be searching for say, branding advice, they just may stumble upon our website and unexpectedly decide they need our services. That is the beauty in SEO. Take time this month to lay the stepping stones for your followers.
. . .In with the New
Time to clean up your act. . . and your email addresses. Check your own contact lists and those that are in your email distribution services (Constant Contact, MailChimp, Emma, etc.). Time to clean out some un-active email addresses from those email marketing lists. While this tip is a rather simple one, it is still important. Do you check your reports regularly? Begin by taking a close look at your bounce reports. Delete any email addresses from the system that are said to be “un-active” and those who have “opted-out”. Doing this will allow you to free up any cluttered space and make room for new potential clients. Happy sorting!
Among our clients and colleagues, we’ve seen more activity and interest in, and asked a lot of questions about, what they might do better or differently in marketing this year. Many are downright giddy that 2010 has come to a close and are looking forward to marketing their companies with renewed vigor. Insight180 has compiled a list of tips to get you started on the right foot. The first is especially appropriate for the new year. . .
It’s the most wonderful time of the year, the holidays are here! When it comes to holiday newsletters, now is the time to spread the cheer. Don’t have much time on your hands? Let us make it simple with a few quick tips:
As our team here at Insight180 prepares to welcome the fall weather, we also would like to extend a warm welcome to our newest marketing associate, Jess Reikowsky. Jess first joined Insight180 as a graduate intern in May after graduating from West Virginia University with a degree in marketing and a focus on brand management. Jess will be coordinating social media efforts, managing client accounts, and assisting in PR and marketing efforts. We believe that she will add great dynamic to our team and are delighted to have her. Welcome, Jess!
5 easy steps to boost creativity
Many of our B-to-B clients still debate the benefits of Twitter for their businesses. Sure it makes sense for retailers, but are other businesses going to follow us? Well, many B-to-B companies are behind their B-to-C counterparts in their efforts to ramp up, but we’re seeing more and more take advantage of social media outlets to gain clients. We understand that for a small company with limited time, it can be a tough call — it takes time to tweet, blog, or create content on Facebook. This is something that has to be developed and maintained with great thought and care. However, there are plenty of potential clients who are already online searching for services and ready to follow.
We are inundated with more than 2000 marketing interruptions per day – whether it be print, radio or TV advertisements, emails we need to sift through despite our filters, banner ads on the websites we visit, billboards we pass on the way in to work. It is a very crowded marketplace and it gets more and more challenging to get your message to your potential customer. So why not allow them to find you more easily? This is the premise of “inbound marketing” – using Google, social media outlets, blogs and other methods to get people to find you. We recommend two excellent books on the topic: Inbound Marketing by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah (founders of Hubspot), and Twitter Marketing: An Hour a Day, by one of our colleagues (and clients) Hollis Thomases, owner of Web Ad.vantage. While the adage “It’s not what you say, it’s what others say about you” is true to a large degree, we would also argue that you had better, indeed, have something substantive to say. You can tweet and blog and reference key search terms ’til the cows come home, but if potential clients land on your website and find little relevant content, a cluttered or crowded site, or an amateur design, you can be sure that they won’t come back. While Halligan and Shah devote a chapter to creating remarkable content, they don’t emphasize enough about the importance of branding and design.
I recently had a client meeting where the basic idea of branding came up as a discussion point. The meeting was with a company owner who was having trouble with business growth and looking for a way to help his sales staff deliver better on every-day meetings and client visits. His concern was a common one: his sales had always come in as a result of a relationship built by a sales people one-on-one with the customer. And the salesperson only had so many hours in the day to feed those relationships.
