When creating content, it pays to think big. Publishing online gives us access to a readership that’s almost too large to imagine. Do it right and your words could be read by people in places you might never even have heard of.
While a global readership might seem like something most of us dream of, with a little know-how it’s something that you too can achieve.
Decide Who You Are Talking To
When you write for the web, you aren’t just pushing out content at random. You are engaging with others, convincing them to buy into your idea or product. With this in mind, it helps to know who you are trying to reach and which parts of the world you want to expand to.
For example, your ideal reader could be a female entrepreneur, or you might want to address a young music lover. Going global makes your pool of readers much larger, so your female entrepreneurs might include women in Brazil, and your music loving youth could be reading in East Asia.
Keeping a tight focus on your target demographic as you go global will let you reach more of the kind of people that interest you. It also helps your budget go further. Are you looking to connect with female entrepreneurs in South America but less so with similar women in China? Then make your content culturally and linguistically suited to the South American readers, instead of spending time and money trying to reach everyone.
Embrace the Multilingual Web
Forget the idea that everyone online speaks English. Although English is often used in the corporate world as a linguistic go-between, internet users are a far more diverse crowd. The web is also more informal and driven by social connections.
Even people in countries who have strong English skills as a second language will prefer to engage with others in their native tongue. In fact, a 2011 survey by the European Commission found that although 48% of non-English speaking Europeans occasionally read English-language content, 9 out of 10 users preferred to visit sites in their own language.
This makes translation of your content a priority. Make good use of your budget by first figuring out which languages need to be top of your list. In our South American example, Spanish and Portuguese would be essential for getting your message across. If Europe is your key market, you’re likely to find German or French better languages to start with.
Take Languages Seriously
If you don’t get serious about translation, your foreign-language readers won’t get serious about your content. They will be too busy laughing at your language slips, if they stick around at all.
We all know of corporate giants who managed to offend or became a laughing stock thanks to poorly-translated slogans. The rest of us needn’t think we will do any better. Unless you are genuinely bilingual and up to date with current usage, you will miss hidden meanings. It’s also easy to opt for what seems the right word choice, when in fact it means something entirely different (for example, in German the word Gift means poison).
Native speaker knowledge will make sure you don’t sound out of touch or leave readers confused. Accurate linguistic choices will also help your SEO by keeping your keywords relevant. Cutting corners here, on the other hand, could leave search engines as confused as your foreign-language readers.
Understand Cultural Differences
The 2012 Edelman Trust Barometer reveals that while people worldwide are becoming less trusting of what they read, ‘a person like yourself’ has become the most trusted source of information. Your job is to be that trusted person to your reader, no matter where in the world he or she is.
Localization is an essential part of becoming ‘one of us’ in another culture. Using words and expressions that local people use makes your content more accessible. Being in touch with important cultural events or hot topics can be useful too. Of course, offending people is never a good idea and cultural knowledge also can guide us around dangerous topics or inappropriate language.
Show You Care
Now that you’ve opened up your content to overseas readers, make them feel welcome. Avoid anything that places your English speaking crowd above foreign-language speakers. For example, aim to respond to all comments, not just those in English. If you offer a way for people to contact you, make sure it doesn’t exclude certain time zones or languages. Showing you care about all your readers helps you to build a good online reputation.
Write with other cultures and languages in mind and you’ll be saying Wilkommen, bienvenido and yōkoso to international readers in no time!
About the author:
Christian Arno is the founder of Lingo24, Inc., one of the world’s fastest growing translation services. Launched in 2001, Lingo24, Inc. now has over 180 employees spanning three continents and clients in over sixty countries. In the past twelve months, they have translated over 60 million words for businesses in every industry sector, including the likes of MTV, World Bank and American Express. Follow Lingo24, Inc. on Twitter: @Lingo24.
Did you asked yourself what future customers will find when they research your industry for products and services you also have to offer, will they find you or your competitor?
Millions of businesses competing for paying customers and it have become a difficult task for most of them to stand out of the crowd and to make future customers aware about their offers.
Content and social media have become successful ways to get attention from future buyers.
On the web you are what you publish… What are you?
Original content builds you trust, customer loyalty and can position your business as trusted experts in your field.
Content marketing has established as a powerful way to engage customers. An increasing number of B2C and B2B marketer are faced with the challenge to produce and publish buyer persona oriented interesting and remarkable content to attract customers to their products and services.
There is no question content is king! And Remarkable and helpful content brings customers and business direct to your front door the smart and cost effective way, this is for sure!
New studies show that companies utilizing the content marketing strategy in a serious manor report an up to 2,000% lift in blog traffic and 40% boost in revenue!
Infographic: A Brief History of Content Marketing
Moreover remarkable and helpful content is also a great way to build trust and customer loyalty. It offers the so called value ad for customers.
An open minded communication culture and authenticity mixed with credibility beats any old school – yesteryear nonsense marketing and saves your business a truckload of marketing cash!
The great success of content marketing is the result of giving away valuable information – remarkable content for free to attract the RIGHT people to your business like a magnet in an ongoing and steady growing stream.
Content marketing works 100% for any industry and business!
Content marketing can also work for you to attract new customers to your business like a magnet is you are willing to do it right!
The best way to start content marketing for business is to start a corporate blog.
But how and where to get the ideas to write remarkable blog articles who drive visitors to your business?
Here are five ways you should use to get blog content ideas:
1. Set up Google Alerts with your industry keywords
2. Search Blog Directories for your industries topics
3. Subscribe to other industry related blogs and on articles there
4. Go through your customers email communication, especially service, product and support questions
5. Participate in industry related social media groups and forums
These five points will bring you a ton of content ides to write helpful articles for your recent and future customers.
And yes, this is additional work but it is worth every minute you invest in your content marketing.
By taking this challenge you can expect these advantages for your business:
- Blogging companies get up to 55% more Traffic
- Blogging companies get up to 97% more Inbound Links
- Blogging companies get up to 434% more indexed pages in search engines
- Blogging companies get up to 25x times more business leads
…and more LEADS mean more revenue! It’s up on you.
Millions of businesses competing for paying customers and it have become a difficult task for most of them to stand out of the crowd and to make future customers aware about their offers.
The customer chooses by himself through research on search engines like Google, with the help of friends, relatives and his social networks which product to buy and which not.
Did you asked yourself what future customers will find when they research your industry for products and services you also have to offer, will they find you or your competitor?
How many people hit your site and how many business leads do generate daily?
Businesses who publish and share content on the web do not only increase the number of “digital outpost” but moreover increase their visibility and build trust with the future customers. Trust is the main motivation to buy. When your audience trusts you, then you they are willing to do business with you.
Actually the best way to increase visibility is content marketing. With content marketing businesses demonstrate thought leadership; prove themselves Trustworthy and Boosts SEO by increase Backlinks to their website.
Remarkable and helpful content is also a great to build customer loyalty. It offers the so called value ad for customers
Content marketing has established as a powerful way to engage customers. An increasing number of B2C and B2B marketer are faced with the challenge to produce and publish buyer persona oriented interesting and remarkable content to attract customers to their products and services.
A seriously executed content marketing strategy can be responsible for 25x times more business leads and boosts your revenue by up to 40%!
With great content you position your business and the people of your business who create the content as trusted experts in your field. Content Marketing is great to build your online reputation.
Here are some marketing tips you can use right away.
Give away free content
Give away free content in form of a corporate blog where you write about topics your audience is most interested in. You can get great ideas for blog articles when you go through email and support requests. This will give you a ton of possible blog article topics.
You can also take a camera and explain a task, for example how to use one of your machines and what to take care of. Or you can use photos and testimonials of satisfied customers and publish them too.
You need to invest time/ money to produce content
To find the time to produce remarkable content is the most common problem business face. But as you need to spend time for your business you also need to understand that marketing and content creation is an important part of your lead generation. Therefore you need to set time free to produce remarkable content which will attract new customers to your business.
No matter if you do it by your own or you hire an Inbound Marketing Agency, content marketing is not free. You have the choice, do you want to invest your time or do you want to set a marketing budget and hire a professional Inbound Marketing Agency.
Give away GREAT content
Great content is valuable. It is worth reading and sharing it. Therefore you need to be specific with information which should benefit your future customers. Don’t be afraid to give away “secrets” because this kind of content attracts the most people. And be the end you are the professionals and the future customer will turn to you when he is ready to buy.
As many marketers and businesses I use Slideshare, DocStoc and other document hosting sites to upload content to make it available to different audiences.
For a couple of years now I used DocStoc to upload more than hundred documents for the reason of content marketing which in exchange brought me a small amount of interested visitors to our website and blog.
Today I went again to upload information to several document hosting sites and also on DocStoc. After I have done my upload successfully I discovered that only thirty documents are visible in my documents library.
I try to research what happen with the other documents which I have uploaded in the past years. Because all documents uploaded on other document hosting sites are still there, visible and deliver targeted traffic to our blog and website.
I was not able to find my remain articles so I decided to send an support request to DocStoc to clear what happen with my document where I have put time and effort to produce ant to upload to DocStoc.
Here is the email I have sent to DocStoc:
Several hours later I received a response mail from DocStoc:
Yes, you read it right. By the way you are able to read, obviously “Jane” from DocStoc was not…
DocStoc deleted my account!
Nobody asked them to do so. “Jane” from DocStoc didn’t answer my support request but deleted my work.
When I started out with document hosting sites, my first choice was the market leader Slideshare, which has been acquired from LinkedIn several weeks ago. After some research I discovered further document hosting sites and registered there to spread the inBlurbs content, like whitepapers, articles and press releases.
We use a paid Slideshare account which offers also a lead generation and analytics feature. As I used Slideshare and the other document hosting sites like issuu.com and scribd.com I never discovered any problems.
Marketing Tip: Ensure that sources where you invest time and effort to spread content are reliable to not waste your time.
Did you had the same experiences with DocStoc?Post them here in the comment section below.
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UPDATE 06/22/12:DocStoc Restored my account. Thanks DocStoc.
Content marketing has established as a powerful way to engage customers. An increasing number of B2C and B2B marketer are faced with the challenge to produce and publish buyer persona oriented interesting and remarkable content to attract customers to their products and services.
A seriously executed content marketing strategy can be responsible for 25x times more business leads and boosts your revenue by up to 40%!
In a March 2012 poll of more than 400 US marketers and agencies content curation services providerCurata found that 95% had curated content in some way over the past six months by sharing a link, blog post or other content type with their target audience.
Curata results also showed that 85% of those marketers focus their main objective of content creation to establishing a thought leadership, 80% of those marketer see also brand building and buzz as a goal of their content creation strategy.
Main content marketing objectives of marketers are:
One of the most difficulties when doing content creation is the time investment. About 70% of marketers say they did not have enough time to devote to the process of content creation and content marketing. Also the marketers stated that is difficult for them to create original content to share with their audience.
Main content marketing challenges of marketers are:
• Understanding how it fits in overall marketing strategy
The most popular channel to share content is social media. About 76% of marketers say they used a social network as the main channel for content distribution.
To share published content in social media is not enough. Content creation and content marketing as a holistic strategy must be performed on regular basis to gain measurable and profitable results on the long term.
Only those activities performed on a regular basis pave the way to get found online by an increasing number of future customers and keeping them coming back to company offers and information.
Infographic: The Rise of Content Marketing
Companies utilizing content marketing strategy report an up to 2,000% lift in blog traffic and 40% boost in revenue.
New studies of Google and Compete found out that that 28% of US B2B C-level executives used mobile devices to research business purchases.
By the growing use and demand of mobile apps companies also become more dependent of them. Popular services like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Yelp, Foursquare, Groupon and other are using apps to stay in touch with their audience.
A new way of search has emerged where B2B executives to look out to find future business partners the more efficient way. Mobile devices have spread around the world and statistics show that about 260 million devices are in use actually and this number will grow by 2014 to more than one billion.
The peace of mobile use among B2B executives is much higher compared to consumers, as they are always looking for ways to do their purchasing process easier and cost efficient.
When B2B executives are on their mobile device they do not go to the web browser to research for products and services your business also as to offer!
According to research data from Oracle and Endeca, from November 2011 one-quarter of B2B ecommerce professionals worldwide agreed that mobile is one of the most influential to get in touch with their customers.
By taking into account the complete penetration of mobile devices among B2B marketers, it is logic they use these devices for their purchase decision making process. They use these mobile devices during their purchasing process to save time.
The trend shows that search engine search traffic will decrease and companies who are active on mobile devices, social media and location based services will get an increase of traffic as B2B executives use them preferable.
Here is a great opportunity for businesses to get in touch with these B2B executives to establish a relationship which can help to make business together. Companies should establishing a mobile web presence and optimizing their communication to reach those B2B executives.
Infographic: Mobile Marketing
If you are not active in mobile marketing than you miss a large opportunity to make B2B executives aware of your company. Take action before your competitor does.
What can you do to get in touch with B2B executives the mobile way?
1st Register with all important location based services like Yelp, Foursquare, Neer, Loopt and SCVNGR. Engage here with your audience, build and customize these digital outposts.
2nd Be active in social media sites like Facebook, Linked, Twitter and others important to your audience.
3rd Jump start your mobile marketing the smart way. Collect the mobile phone numbers from your customers. Establish a database where you store all important information about them to later have the ability to custom tailor personalized messages to reach them the right and human way. Look out for a two SMS marketing software which enables you to do and to control your messages.
4th Optimize your website be reachable in mobile devices and give those interested B2B executives the opportunity to get with in touch quick.
We all know them they request information or better a quote for products and services, you invest time and enthusiasm to help them and they do not come to the point or even to a deal!
When you have this kind of situation than a special sort of criminal is approaching your business, times thieve!
But don’t panic and remain calm.
Sure he is not a real criminal in the sense of law, but he steals your valuable time, and time is money, so on the end of the day he steals you the opportunity to talk to a really interested future customer, right?
You protect your home from thieves but do you protect your time?
Here are some tips how you can protect your valuable time from time thieves:
Ask them to register on a landing page to get more info. So you sort out the most of them and save time on lead qualification.
If you need more info and other than you can ask on the landing page, sent them a questionnaire to complete and to return to you. If they do not do it, they are not serious and would never do business with you. You safe your time on evaluating his stuff.
When they send you the questionnaire back, but not complete try to get the missing info from them and ask by email. If they are serious, they will reply, if not you safe time again and have not to try to convince them of anything, because they are not serious and will never buy from you.
Ok, now all questions are answered from the lead, but the leads brings up new excuse- doubt, when the last was cleared from you through facts, so you get the feeling “time thieve” than he is probably one.
At this point the time has come to say him good by. You can say to him “Your ideas are interesting, I will keep them in mind” that is how to end a conversation with a time thief.
Infographic: Lead Generation
How are your experiences with time thieves? I am looking forward to your comment.
“Worldwide social network ad revenues are still going strong and set to grow nearly 50% this year, according to eMarketer estimates.” by Emarketer.com
The revenue spending on social networks are increasing this is a fact. More and more businesses discover that social networks are a great communication tool to get in touch with their audience.
B2C and B2B have realized that the business decision makes are active in the social web and try to reach them by paid advertising.
It is a good approach to be visible where your audience is around. But the way how you are visible is more important than a big ad budget.
Moreover a big ad budget does not mean you will be successful with your lead generation campaign. The opposite is more likely the result.
Smart marketers use PPC only for short campaigns, and not as a substitute of a holistic strategy.
Why? Because PPC has no log term value for marketing, when you stop your PPC your lead flow also stops. Another point is that you do not earn any trust in the market with PPC. Anybody can bid for the highest keywords. You can’t buy trust and reputation by bidding the highest price per click!
When it comes to led generation than “nothing beats the inbound marketing strategy”!
Studies from the past five years revealed that a seriously executed inbound marketing strategy results in up to 62% lower cost per lead an in an up to 55% higher lead conversion rate.
Inbound marketing consists of content creation, content distribution, content marketing, Social Media communication, Lead generation, Lead Nurturing, Lead Conversion, and Closed-Loop Analysis to refine and improve the activities.
Furthermore companies who execute an inbound marketing seriously build trust, their brand and are recognized as a reputable source on the web. They get found on the web when future customers are looking, instead of pushing them with dump old fashioned sales pitches.
Infographic: Inbound Marketing on the rise
Companies who utilize inbound marketing simply leave their competition behind them in the dust. Inbound marketing is brain versus budget, and in the long term the brain always wins!
Social media has become a significant part of serious marketers lead generation strategy.
Companies who engage in social media increase their reach massively. And there is no matter if they are B2C or B2B.
Social media is public communications channel where companies can get great unfiltered feedback.
Companies need to understand that social media is not for “pushing your messages out “.
To be successful and to reach a positive ROI with social media, companies need to communicate and to listen to their audience.
It is simply untrue when someone claims that his customers are not active in social media. They are active in B2C and B2B and they research online for products and services.
The only question is: What will they find when they research for products and services you also have to offer, will they find you or your competitor?
Studies prove that B2C and B2B profit likewise from social media engagement.
A study from Wildfire Interactive shows that social media helps grow brand awareness, increase sales and partnerships and helped to reduce marketing costs.
Engaging in dialogue with customers via social media has become an important part of successful companies.
Smart marketers measure the value of social media channels as well. They want to know which one has the best results for their business. One of the most popular channels is Facebook. About 44% of surveyed marketers say that “Facebook is valuable because they help with new customer recruitment”.
Moreover they have stated that Facebook fans have higher conversion rates and they make more frequent purchases.
How can you measure the ROI of your social media marketing?
• At first you can do this by increase of your revenue
• As a second way you can measure are “Likes”
• You can measure social media mentions of your brand
A great way is to add lead capture pages to your in social published articles and to track the traffic, leads, lead to customer rate and revenue per generated lead. So you get a good picture of your cost per lead and adjust activities to increase your profits.
Studies show that companies which relying on online lead generation are two times more profitable than those who do not. Those companies achieve an up to 62% lower cost per lead.
In the past years eBay is an established platform to buy and sell goods. Millions of people day visit eBay to research and to buy products. Hundreds of thousands of businesses utilize eBay to get new customers and to make revenue.
But there is another side of eBay. Increasing fraud, increasing sales and listing fees and the decreasing image value of eBay.
But there is good news for businesses. Ebay is a traffic machine when it comes to target traffic. Moreover the eBay traffic is laser target.
How can you use eBay to lead a ton of laser target traffic to your business? Because this is the only way how you can profit from eBay in the long term, when you build your brand not theirs!
Here are eight easy steps how you can squeeze out eBay traffic and increase YOUR profits:
First: You should change your mind and not use eBay of your primary source of business. This decreases your sales and listing fees and focuses your audience to your website and the listed offers.
Second: When you are listing your offers on eBay you should ALLWAYS include your website and your blog URL in to your listing, so your audience get the chance to visit your website.
Third: Only list offers on eBay as special offers, do not list them in your website and shop at the same time, so the visitors can’t compare. Use eBay to introduce new products for a short time and then only offer them in your shop.
Fourth: Design your website and shop in greater marketing strategy in mind and build it as marketing hub to canalize your traffic to leads and your leads to sales.
Fifth: Build your own email list to keep your audience updated. Include a call to action to your audience to subscribe to your newsletter on your website, so you own your list.
Sixth: Setup a lead nurturing process to keep your audience informed, but do not bother them only with sales offers. This leads to higher unsubscribe rates.
Seventh: Start a corporate blog to open a two way conversation hub for your audience to build trust, position yourself as a credible source and to publish remarkable content.
Eighth: Start a facebook business page and add Facebook special, especially for your FB fans. Start a Twitter and add special offers for your Twitter followers.
These steps above ensure that you build your brand in the longer, drive a massive amount of traffic to your website, generate a ton of business leads and increase your revenue and sales and decrease your dependence of eBay and your eBay costs.
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Free report: Get found and get leads the smart way.
An increasing number of companies like Intuit, Sysco, Cisco, GE Healthcare and AT&T are using social media for effective business lead generation.
A recent study from Sagefrog Marketing Group shows how companies have learned to leverage social media. Leveraging social media for branding and building awareness helps B2B companies.
4 Ways how companies can leverage social media:
• Increase brand awareness
• Humanize B2B companies
• Establish as thought leader
• Connecting with customers and prospects
What sites, tactics and strategies are B2B marketers including in their social media outreach?
To do their social media outreach B2B marketers include professional networking sites like LinkedIn which have proven to be an effective way to generate business leads. Furthermore they utilize social networks like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube also which are helping them to reach customers in new ways.
“67% of B2C and 47% of B2B companies report to have acquired new customers through Facebook.” “47% of companies who use Twitter report to have acquired new customer through it.”
Online Marketing strategies like banner ads have been replaced through proven buyer persona oriented content creation which also brings better ROI than pay per click marketing (PPC).
A corporate blog has become the number one content marketing tool for companies. The importance of blogging is growing and people are adding nearly 3 million blogs per month. [Technorati 2011 State of the Blogosphere Report]
In this report, Technorati shows that 8% of the corporate bloggers which responded to blog full-time as part of their job or are contracted to blog full-time for a company and that 13% of entrepreneurs responded to blog for a company or organization they own.
Studies show that companies who operate and update a corporate blog frequently have 55% more website visitors. From those companies 57% which operate a corporate blog report to have acquired new customers through their blog.
There is no question content marketing, corporate blogging, is definitely a revenue driver for B2B companies.
Today customers no matter if the are B2C or B2B are overwhelmed with information and offers. This makes it very hard for a business to stand out and to get found online for their future customers.
The increasing competition and the decreasing marketing budget make the recent situation and the future outlook more difficult.
Businesses who want to be and to stay successful need to rethink and to reposition their strategies.
It is not enough anymore to be there. Moreover when you are there, but not where your target audience is around than you are nowhere!
What makes a business to stand out of the crowd and secure their share of the market in the long term?
Like anything humans do there are several ways to achieve goals. One thing is try and error. This takes time and can consume a lot of budget. The other thing is to do it like you have done in the past, because it worked “in the past”. But what worked in the past is not necessarily working in the future. Or you use a proven system which has demonstrated thousands of times that it works and is able to bring in positive ROI.
Such proven marketing system is inbound marketing.
What’s inbound marketing?
Inbound marketing is the marketing strategy that focuses on getting found by customers when they research online for products and services your business also has to offer.
What’s does inbound marketing help me to do?
With inbound marketing businesses earn their way to the customer, by publishing helpful information on a blog, in social media and forums.
What does inbound marketing consists of?
Inbound marketing includes Blogging, Social Media, Lead Conversion, Lead Nurturing and Closed-Loop Analysis.
The MIT Sloan Institute found out that businesses which use inbound marketing are more successful than businesses which do not.
B. Makes a business stand out of their competition
C. Helps to generate a massive amount of business leads
D. Helps to get up to 55% higher lead conversion rates
E. Helps to increase customers and sales
To jumpstart your own inbound marketing system just starts with a corporate blog and publish remarkable and share worthy content. Distribute this published content on the internet and in social media. Measure your results, improve your doings and you are on your track to success.
Today as I went through LinkedIn a group got my attention. It was the group about Online Lead Generation which I am a member of and where I contribute if there is a topic where I can help?
But today I went through the posts and I thought OMG, they are talking about buying leads. The word “Business Suicide” went through my brain.
Especially one provider caught my attention and I went to look into his background. This provider claimed to „generate thousands of real time leads in just about every vertical”!
Puhh I thought, this is a tough proposition and let’s see what’s behind them! I checked his website and guess what?
- An Alexa Rank of only 2,170,186 (means about 5 -10 unique visitors daily)
- 13 Google Indexed Pages (lesser pages means, lesser chances to get indexed and found on the search engines)
- Only 92 Backlinks (Qualified back links are one of the SEO strategies to get found, the more the better)
- No Corporate Blog (content marketing through blogging is the key to get found and to get leads)
- No presence in social media: no Facebook Business Page and no Twitter (43 percent of all online consumers are social media fans or followers, if you are not there you are missing them)
No Web DNA…. (maybe a ghost )
I asked him two question, I am curious if I will get any educated answer.
Q: How did you establish a business relationship to those leads?
Q: Why should those leads do business with the people who buy those leads from you?
Disussion Update
If you like to follow this discussion on LinkedIn, you can find it here.
Why did I done this you might ask?
Simple answer: I was shocked by that proposition made there and more shocked me that businesses believe this kind of fairytales and put their business on risk without to know what they are doing!
To buy leads is a waste of time and money and WILL harm the reputation of your business FOR SURE!
When you buy leads it is the same like you open the yellow pages and start cold calling from A-Z.
The people you reach do not know YOU, they did not requested to be contacted from YOU and they did not explained an interest in YOUR products and services previously!
By buying those leads – their addresses and bother those people you only show one thing, that your business has no USP and your products and services have no value for them.
You ask why?
If it would be the opposite you wouldn’t be dependent on paid leads! Instead of you would generate leads and customers automatically!
Boooom. You don’t like what I say!
So before you think about to pay for addresses, you should ask yourself why do you need to buy them and why do you not generate enough recommendations and leads from your existing customers actually?
To purchase leads is only a drip onto the hot stone. This will not solve your long-term issue and will not bring you closer to your business goals.
The opposite is the fact: The longer you depend on bought leads the more your chances will decrease to gain a competitive advantage!
Believe it or not you will loose business in the long term!
Stop buying leads and start build relationships. Build trust and credibility through content publishing (blogging) and two way conversations in social media. This is where you can generate highly valuable target leads with an PROVEN up to 55% conversion rate.
Start inbound marketing strategy by starting your own corporate blog ASAP!
Inbound marketing is the marketing strategy that focuses on getting found by customers when they research online for products and services your business also has to offer.
With inbound marketing businesses earn their way to the customer, by publishing helpful information on a blog, in social media and forums.
Inbound marketing includes Blogging, Social Media, Lead Conversion, Lead Nurturing and Closed-Loop Analysis.
Inbound marketing can help you to:
A. Save up to 62% of your marketing budget.
B. Stand out of your competition.
C. Generate a massive amount of leads.
D. Get up to 55% higher lead conversion rates.
E. Increase your customers and sales.
“Get seen and you get visited! “
— How about you? How are your experiences with bought leads?
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Most people who are interested to market their business on the web and especially in social media become overwhelmed of the necessary tasks which need to be done to achieve any serious results.
They feel that they need to handle an avalanche of information and requirements to get the necessary steps done.
And I fully agree with this. Inbound marketing which also includes, content creation as blogging and marketing this content through social media channels is a very time consuming business!
As any other marketing activity you cannot expect to do all the necessary tasks at once. You also need a strategic plan where you set timeframes to do your necessary inbound marketing tasks and which you can stick to. Discipline is a key factor!
Above in the title I ask how to eat an elephant? This is very simple, bit by bit!
As any other work you need to split your inbound marketing in daily tasks. You have five working days you can use. You need to determine how much time you can invest daily and from this point you can start.
Inbound marketing includes Blogging, Social Media, Lead Conversion, Lead Nurturing and Closed-Loop Analysis.
Content creation – blogging
As blogging is a key factor for lead generation we suggest to blog no matter which kind of other content you have or want to publish!
Which kind of content is the best fit for your target audience, your buyer personas?
Can you reach your audience with video, eBooks, reports, whitepapers, and pictures, blog commenting or any other piece of content?
Find out which kind of content has the best opportunities in your industry, and this does not mean it must be the same old way like your competitors do it! Be creative. When you competitor does eBook, than you can do video! When they do video than you can do eBooks! To get ideas and inspiration just look through other industries how and what kind of other content thy produce.
Social Media / Forums
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and industry related forums are great place to get seen from your future clients. These places are also great to improve your of page SEO. When you are active there, means when you get into the conversation and share your content there than you increase your chances to found in the search engines!
Lead Generation / Conversion
Content creation and social media marketing are great tools to drive interested visitors to SEO optimized landing pages (lead capture pages) to get them into you database to follow up and to make them paying customers through the time.
Lead Nurturing
As you generate leads you should stay in touch with them. But avoid sales pitches. Instead of do the same which whom you have generated your leads. Inform them with interesting and share worthy content, solve problems, answer questions and simply stay in touch with them, stay visible!
Closed-Loop Analysis
Analyze your doings to determine where your lead and revenue coming from measure refine and improve your content creation, social media marketing, lead nurturing and analysis.
Repeat this process above!
Example: The daily inbound marketing tasks!
Monday
Facebook 15 minutes
Twitter 15 minutes
LinkedIn 15 minutes
Forums 15 minutes
Check email / Leads 30 minutes
Blog commenting 30 minutes
Draft blog article 30 minutes
Tuesday
Facebook 15 minutes
Twitter 15 minutes
LinkedIn 15 minutes
Forums 15 minutes
Check email / Leads 30 minutes
Blog commenting 30 minutes
Draft blog article 30 minutes
Publish blog article 30 minutes
Market blog article in social media
Wednesday
Facebook 15 minutes
Twitter 15 minutes
LinkedIn 15 minutes
Forums 15 minutes
Check email / Leads 30 minutes
Blog commenting 30 minutes
Draft blog article 30 minutes
Thursday
Facebook 15 minutes
Twitter 15 minutes
LinkedIn 15 minutes
Forums 15 minutes
Check email / Leads 30 minutes
Blog commenting 30 minutes
Draft blog article 30 minutes
Publish blog article 30 minutes
Market blog article in social media
Friday
Facebook 15 minutes
Twitter 15 minutes
LinkedIn 15 minutes
Forums 15 minutes
Check email / Leads 30 minutes
Blog commenting 30 minutes
Draft blog article 30 minutes
Check analytics 15 minutes
Refine tasks 30 minutes
———
To effectively profit from your web marketing efforts you should plan to invest about 2.5 hrs. daily and more, this depends on your business goals.
You also can split this work to different persons in your company.
– What do you think and how get you the daily web marketing tasks done?
Every day we generate leads through our various landing pages online. We offer helpful information for free download. The most traffic, about 60% we receive from Google to our blog articles.
When the visitor lands on our landing pages we ask some question for lead pre qualification. Questions like “What’s your biggest marketing challenge?” and we get various answerers to this important question.
Answers like:
Attracting new clients
How to put it all together? I need to find a resource that puts all the pieces together in one place.
Being seen
Reaching the various audiences within multiple age groups
Getting new clients
List building
Traffic
Leads
Consistent source of qualified leads.
Reaching the right customers
Finding clients
Get new clients
And some much more!
These above are all legitimate answers.
But today one answer captured my attention. On the question “What’s your biggest marketing challenge?” the lead wrote “none”.
Mhhhh. No marketing challenges?
It is a challenging thing to know about issues and to fix them but it can become dangerous to even do not know you have a problem. That’s what I thought when I read this “None”.
So when you are in business and you want to grow it without losing an arm and a leg on marketing spending than you need to become aware of your marketing challenges ASAP!
Today you can compare your performance with your competition very easy online. You can identify very quickly where you stand and what to do to improve your market position to grow your business better than your competition.
The internet offers various opportunities for businesses to get seen from their target audience. No matter if you sell locally or globally your audience is online researching for products and services you have to offer first.
You need to get found to get them as potential new customers. You need to be visible when they are looking and be there when they want to buy.
Do a test drive and type some of the most popular keywords and phrases in to the Google search and see what’s coming up. Look out for your competition if they come up as well.
Try all keywords and phrases your customers would look for to find your company. Write down how often your business is displayed in the search results for each search term.
When you are done you will have a much better picture what to improve for your business to get seen on the web when your audience is looking.
As soon you have the certainty what and why you have to take action you have done the first step to get seen better from you potential new clients when they are looking on Google for products and service you also have to offer.
One of the easiest ways to increase online visibility is to start your own corporate blog.
Companies who blog get:
Up to 55% more Traffic.
Up to 97% more Inbound Links.
Up to 434% more indexed pages in search engines.
Studies show that 57% of companies who blog get customers through their blogging effort!
These above are pretty good reasons to take action before you competition do.
The inBlurbs Inbound Internet Marketing blog covers all of
inbound marketing - SEO, Blogging, Social Media, Landing
Pages, Lead Generation and Analytics.
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en creating content, it pays to think big. Publishing online gives us access to a readership that’s almost too large to imagine. Do it right and your words could be read by people in places you might never even have heard of.
Christian Arno is the founder of Lingo24, Inc., one of the world’s fastest growing translation services. Launched in 2001, Lingo24, Inc. now has over 180 employees spanning three continents and clients in over sixty countries. In the past twelve months, they have translated over 60 million words for businesses in every industry sector, including the likes of MTV, World Bank and American Express. Follow Lingo24, Inc. on Twitter: @Lingo24.
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