small business marketing | inBlurbs Inbound Marketing Agency

July 11, 2011October 7, 2011

Attract your buyer persona with article marketing to generate more business leads

Article marketing or we can say content marketing is a very interesting way to attract customers online.

Article marketing is a great way to generate business leads for your businesses.

Writing customer attractive articles helps in bringing new customers for your business and by generating quality leads.

How Article marketing works for your business

Article marketing doesn’t cost much, what it costs is just effort and to invest knowledge about how to write in the best possible manner.

Content writing or article writing can be done by a hired professional also in lieu of some fee. Giving them information about your business and article requirement helps in getting some quality articles done that are related to your niche.

Small business owners can also hire writing professionals or recruit them, so that they could compete with the competitors more effectively as they will then have in-house writers always available.

How to promote your business using Article marketing

Promoting your business using article marketing is easy if you know what’s required to attract readers to your site. Some basics of article marketing to generate more business leads are:

— Subject line of the article should be attractive for target audience
— The articles content must be precise and up to the point
— Closing of your article should help readers get a final decision about particular product or business

Once you start using article marketing, you can reach to top pages of search engines for your keywords and also start generating huge leads for your business.

Marketing Takeaway Tip: Article marketing for small businesses is successful if you are able to identify your buyer personas and write content which is of value for them. Article marketing and keyword marketing goes hand in hand and you should be aware of your keywords which can help your business reach top pages of search engines and to get found of your target audience.

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June 14, 2011June 14, 2011

The Number ONE Inbound Marketing Success Secret is Content

It is no secret that companies who publish valuable content on the web get more attention from their existing and potential customers.

Companies that utilize the opportunities of publishing valuable content get more attention, traffic and generate more leads.

As attention of the target audience is important to gain trust and credibility, the best way to do this is to show expertise and to be helpful.

Companies that publish content online in their corporate blog and social media make them self more visible to their target audience.

Search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing are indexing the content which is distributed online through social media and increase the chances for a company to get found when potential customers looking for products and services they also have to offer.

A HubSpot study made of data of 4,000 companies shows: The more content you have the more traffic you get. This evaluation shows that companies who blog daily (20x a month), with 400+ indexed pages and 31+ landing pages get the most traffic and leads online.

Here are some tips how you can produce content and landing pages to increase, traffic and leads

Look out for content sources and ideas in your company.

Useful sources to get content ideas are:

— FAQS
— HOW-TO’S
— WHITPAPERS
— E-BOOKS
— VIDEOS
— BLOG!
— SUPPORT REQUESTS FROM CUSTOMERS

With these valuable sources you can do 300 word blog articles or write How-to papers or do videos which you put behind landing pages to generate business leads to help your customers to solve their problems and to show your products in action.

Engage all employees to produce helpful content with your target customer in mind. The more employees are engaged the more content your company has to offer.

The more helpful content you produce the more your chances will increase to position on the web to get found when people are looking on the search engines for products and services which you also have to offer.

You simply increase your visibility and get you better found from your target audience!

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May 27, 2011October 8, 2011

Why numbers count for Facebook lead generation success

New studies show that B2B businesses with over 1,000 Facebook fans received 6.5 times more leads and B2C business with over 1,000 Facebook fans received 16 times more leads than those with lesser fans.

Facebook is a valuable source to showcase your business and to get in touch with your audience.

With its more than 600 million users worldwide Facebook offer great opportunities to generate leads and to reach new customers globally. Facebook has about 1.7 million business fan pages. Facebook is growing about 700,000 users daily.

67% of B2B and 41% of the B2C companies say, that the get new customers through facebook.

The companies who say that Facebook is important to critical to their business have increased up to 83% within the last two years.

With its valuable set of features facebook offers various ways to get seen there like:

1. Facebook Fan Page

2. Facebook iFrames

3. Facebook Video

4. Facebook Photos

5. Connect your Twitter with your Facebook Fan Page

6. Connect your Blog with your Facebook Fan Page

7. Connect your Slideshare with your Facebook Fan Page

To be active on social media sites like facebook can be essential for a business to get found and get leads!

Presentation: Brain vs. Budget = Inbound Marketing

Search engines do index social media content, and when a business is distributing their content in social media, the chances are good that there content appears in the next search results on Google, Yahoo and Bing on the first page.

Social media is also called the NEW SEO!

Get going on Facebook:

Get started on Facebook and listen to relevant conversation and build relationships.

When you publish brand relevant and helpful content for your audience than take one problem at a time and offer a solution to your buyer personas.

Engage your audience to discuss and rate your possible solution or even to offer a better one.

Ask your audience about their experiences with your solutions.

This starts a conversation and attracts more interested people to your solution, content and in the next step to your products and services. All of them without pushing or pitching your audience. Simply by showing expertise and gaining trust.

Start to generate business leads the smart way!

How have been your experiences with Facebook for business lead generation? I am looking forward to your feedback below in the comment section.

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May 19, 2011October 8, 2011

7 Facebook Fan Page features to get more customers

Facebook has 600 million users worldwide and about 1.7 million fan pages. Facebook is growing about 700,000 users daily.

67% of B2B and 41% of the B2C companies say, that the get new customers through facebook.

The companies who say that Facebook is important to critical to their business have increased up to 83% within the last two years.

1. Facebook Fan Page

Do you have one already, to show your business and to communicate with your audience?

On your Facebook Fan Page you can introduce your business to your audience, show your products and services post events and do promotions to attract new customers and to stay in touch with your recent customers.

2. Facebook iFrames

With iFrames you can design your own very custom pages (Landing Pages for lead generation) which you can administer from your content management system. So you can update or change them as you need.

3. Facebook Video

Video is a great way to show your products in action. Also you can upload videos of customer testimonials, interviews and events.

4. Facebook Photos

Upload your company photos of products, events and your company offices. Photos are a great way to give your audience a little view into your company this increases trust.

5. Connect your Twitter with your Facebook Fan Page

When you have a Twitter account you should connect it to Facebook, so your tweets will be visible on your Facebook Fan Page.

6. Connect your Blog with your Facebook Fan Page

When you connect your blog to Facebook, your blog posts will be visible on your Facebook Fan Page too.

7. Connect your Slideshare with your Facebook Fan Page

Slideshare is a document hosting and sharing platform where you can upload documents, presentations and videos as well. You can connect your Slideshare account to show your documents on your Facebook Fan Page.

All of these features can help you to get the attention from your target audience. Use them and increase your chances to get more customers.

How do you use Facebook for your business? I am looking forward to your comments below.

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April 26, 2011October 8, 2011

Why not use inbound marketing to increase revenue?

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 helps businesses to:

A. Save up to 60% of their marketing budget.
B. Stand out of their competition.
C. Generate a massive amount of leads.
D. Get up to 55% higher lead conversion rates.
E. Increase your customers and sales.

A MIT study shows inbound marketing simply helps businesses to increase their revenue up to 13%.

So why some companies do not use inbound marketing to get more exposure, get found on Google an increase their revenue and sales revenue up to 13%?

One main reason is to not to be visible too much…

You maybe ask yourself: Why does a company avoid be more visible?

That’s the exact same question I ask myself.

I have one theory about this: Only somebody who has to hide anything doesn’t want to be much in the spotlight.

Have you been contacted by companies the old fashioned way, through cold calling, mass (SPAM) email, snail mail or mass fax broadcast?

Did you check them through Google and found nothing more worst some complaints?

Did you respond to their offer?

Ask yourself, why did you do not respond to their offer. Was it because of lack of trust?

Did they had an offer which simply sound too good to be true? Than it probably was!

And this is their reason why they not do inbound marketing which is some kind of “trust management business”!

They only want to make the fast dollar without care about their customers, and if they would do inbound marketing they would not attract anybody because they are not trustworthy!

Social media would reveal that and there for they keep away from it.

10 business tools for small business

So the next time when you get a sales pitch the old fashioned way, through cold calling, mass (SPAM) email, snail mail or mass fax broadcast you can add a further company to your blacklist to not do business with them.

How are your experiences which such “phantom companies” and how do you handle their old fashioned way, through cold calling, mass (SPAM) email, snail mail or mass fax broadcast? I am looking forward to your comments below.

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April 13, 2011October 8, 2011

How to combine SEO and social media to generate web leads

When businesses research for research for lead generation opportunities then they are often directed to social media.

Social media is often sold as the only way to sustain and to generate business leads.

But nobody tell those businesses that social media is only one piece of the puzzle.

To attract future customers to a business it needs a little bit more than a facebook page or a Twitter account.

It needs interesting, helpful, remarkable and share worthy content. To get this kind of content businesses need to understand their audience in full.

This is best achieved by taking the effort to research the different buyer personas which are interested in the products and services of a company.

Such a research shows that those future customers are, where they are around on the internet, which kind of solutions they are looking to solve their specific problems and some more.

When a business has done this kind of buyer persona analysis, then they know how and where to approach the right future customer.

With this buyer persona analysis businesses become able to produce SEO ready content which attracts their buyer personas and publish and distribute this content on social media as well.

Search engines do index social media content, and when a business is distributing their content in social media, the chances are good that there content appears in the next search results on Google on the first page. Social media is also called the NEW SEO!

To gain profit from content creation and distribution there should be effective lead capture – landing pages with compelling offers and clear call to action be in place to convert those prospects to leads.

Now when they are leads they should be nurtured to make paying customers out of them during the time.

It is clear that social media is an important part of the puzzle, but only one part. To get the right picture on the end of the day businesses need to use the whole above mentioned tools. This ensures a social media profit on the end of the day.

The best strategy to get all of this done with a positive result is inbound marketing. Inbound marketing has proven that it offers an up 62% lower cost per lead than traditional advertising.

How do you manage your content creation to increase your lead rate? I am looking forward to your comments below!

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March 23, 2011October 8, 2011

Get targeted web traffic for small business marketing

Internet has become a platform for business entrepreneurs to find their customers from all over the World.

Likely competition also increased predominantly which is the reason for different marketing strategies coming into picture.

To overcome the competition, businesses look for targeted web traffic for their business online.

This article describes some simple tips to get targeted web traffic for small business marketing.

Top Resources for targeted web traffic
Generally, small business owners usually try to increase their web traffic to reach their targeted customers as a part of their marketing strategy.

Keeping in view of their small business and available resources, they look for optimized marketing strategies for their business.

They increase their web traffic by following various strategies which are affordable and easy for the small business firms.

Inbound marketing
Inbound marketing is nothing but getting found by the customer easily in the search engines, social media networking sites etc. when he or she searches for a product or a service of your firm.

Here you need an optimized website with good informative content with keywords.

Search Engines
Search engines generally brings targeted traffic for sure but you need to submit your site map in these search engines and should regularly post informative content in your website by tagging with good keywords.

Search engines usually grade the websites with their own rankings.

So search engine rankings help in finding your website in the starting pages of the search engines.

Social media networking sites
Major social media networks such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are places where you can find different people from different countries at one place.

You can increase your targeted web traffic by attracting these people to visit your website.

As a result you can find new customers for your products or services as well as increase your web traffic.

But this strategy will be successful for your firm when you make a friendly relationship with this people rather than doing direct business.

Marketing consulting services
Depending upon the need and available financial resources of your firm you can opt for marketing consulting services in order to increase your web traffic in your website.

There are various marketing consulting firms which offer services for small firms with various packages which help in marketing of your small firm on Internet and can also take help in finding your customers through these consultancy’s .

Hence, these inbound marketing, social media strategies, search engines etc can bring targeted web traffic and can help you in finding your customers easily but for this you need to maintain a corporate blog and an optimized website.

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March 10, 2011October 8, 2011

How to transform your offline marketing to online inbound marketing

More and more Marketers which are active in offline marketing start switch their marketing to the web.

To gain profits from the switch from offline to offline you need to set a committed strategy.

This strategy includes a rework of your offline activities to drive your audience online and a website optimization, re design or complete rework to capture your audiences’ attention.

Here are useful tips how you can make it work for your business.

Drive your audience from offline to online

As you use offline marketing material you should aggressively motivate your audience to visit your website. To achieve this you should include your website URL in all of your print material.

This includes your brochures, business cards, flyers, displays and all the stuff you give away for marketing to your audience.

As the technologies evolve, mobile devices are a great way to take your offline marketing online.

To make it easier for your audience to take your online information you should include a QR code in every piece of printed paper. This makes it easy for your potential customer to capture your most important information on the fly, like website URL and slogan, with a smart phone. Later they can come back to explore your website.

To empower this process you can do contests which lead your offline audience online. Contests are a great way to get website traffic.

More about QR codes: Businesses discover QR codes as marketing method

More about Business Cards: Business cards and why still to use them in social media

Business cards and why still to use them in social media

View more documents from inBlurbs

Your audience has hit your website the inbound marketing way and what now?

To gain the most out of your offline to online transition you should set effective lead capture landing pages, where they can register to make use of contests, special offers, coupons and other important information.

For this you should maintain an email list and set a lead nurturing process to convert those generated leads during the time to paying customers.
Use your lead nurturing as an information tool, do not tray to send out sales pitches. Your email newsletter is a communication tool and if you use it wisely you can profit greatly from it.

The move traffic from offline to online can increase your website traffic by up to 50%

Keep your water cooking and drive more target traffic to your website with GROUPON, read this article.

Groupon your revenue

View more documents from inBlurbs

How did you done the switch from offline to online with your marketing? I am looking forward to your comment. Please leave your comment below.

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March 9, 2011October 8, 2011

Start your new business cheap with inbound marketing

Most entrepreneurs lack of cash to start a huge online marketing campaign when they are beginning with their business.

Also they are not sure if their business concept will work and are scared of to invest a lot of money in advance with to be sure if they go to make money.

Did you know that you can test the waters with a blog?

A blog can start a business the cheap and affordable way. A blog is your first step to tap into inbound marketing.

A blog is cheap! You can setup your WordPress blog with Godaddy for under $10 per month.

People buy from people they trust.

Start blogging by showing your experience and your expertise. So you will gain trust with your target audience step by step.

Start your blog first and begin to write and publish remarkable and helpful content about your industry.

Did you know that social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are free?

Get going and create your profiles there. You can connect your blog with all of those social media sites. As you publish an article is will be distributed to all of them,

Enhance your tasks and create profiles in YouTube, Slideshare and Flickr. Upload your videos, documents and photos there.

Brain vs. Budget = Inbound Marketing

View more presentations from inBlurbs

Engage with your audience in social media. Listen, be helpful and answer questions. So you will attract more interested people to your blog.

When you attract more and more visitors to your blog the inbound marketing way, you can use one of the many WordPress plugins to create a shop on your blog.

Now when you write about a topic include a related link to your shop to make it easy for you audience to buy from you.

The strategy above only depends of your diligence. Just do it!

Do you have some more ideas on how to do business when you have a small budget? I’d love to hear from you. Just leave your comments below!

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March 4, 2011October 8, 2011

Businesses discover QR codes as marketing method

QR codes are around for several years now.

But with the increasing demand of creative marketing challenges, they come more and more into the focus of marketing professionals worldwide.

What’s a QR code?

A QR code is a specific matrix barcode (or two-dimensional code), readable by dedicated QR barcode readers and camera phones. The code consists of black modules arranged in a square pattern on a white background. The information encoded can be text, URL or other data.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

They have understand that with the massive growth of the mobile device and applications market, the potential customers, which are in hurry should have the opportunity to get information on the fly to review it later when it’s more convenient for them.

We all know those situation, we walk around the street and come across an interesting product or offer.

In the most cases we do not have a pencil and a piece of paper to write down the contact info to reach out to the seller later.

But we have our iPhone, Blackberry or any other smart phone, maybe with a QR app installed!

If the seller has a QR Code placed to his offer we simply scan this QR code with our smart phone and have all important details we need to reach out to the seller later.

Scanbuy, the global leader in mobile barcode solutions, released its latest ScanLife Mobile Barcode Trend Report.

Here are some of the Mobile Barcode Trend Report key stats highlighted:

Traffic was up 16x in 2010 overall
Traffic doubled since the last Trend Report in September
UPC scanning outpaced 2D codes as a result of the holiday shopping season
The largest scan days were the day after Thanksgiving (“Black Friday”) and Christmas Day (as people received gifts, many being new Smartphone’s)
The top most used features for people scanning UPC codeshare Coupons, Prices, and Nutritional Info. This reflects previous learning that Food and Personal Care are the most scanned categories.
There was a 13% increase in female to male traffic, and a 25% increase in the 25-54 age groups. This is likely indicative of how the technology is evolving, and going more mainstream.

QR codes become more and more popular. They are easy, cheap and quick to produce and can be used for any marketing activity as traditional and interactive campaigns.

Some examples where QR codes are used:

Real estate agents
Billboard Ads
Guerilla marketing campaigns
In-store displays
Event ticketing and tracking
Business cards
Print ads
Contests
Direct mail campaigns
Websites
Email marketing
Trade shows
Conferences
Tourism

QR codes give marketers the ability to measure response rates, which allows them to easily to calculate their marketing profit.

Here are some popular users of QR codes:

U.S. Army
Memphis Rock ‘n’ Soul Museum
Lviv Tourism Movement (Ukraine)
Sports Illustrated
Tim McGraw and Dave Matthews

To get your own QR code done is very easy and the most services are online and free.

Here are the TOP 10 QR code generators:

Get your own QR code NOW and start capture leads the smart way!

Do you use QR code for business and how are your experiences? I am curious to read your comment. Please leave your comment below.Further important resources:

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March 4, 2011October 8, 2011

How to loose in social media? Just talk about yourself!

If you like many other out there talk about yourself in social media than you miss a great opportunity to be recognized as an interesting source of information.

Imagine you are on a cocktail party! And one guy stands with a group of people and start involve in the conversation. Then you understand that this person is only talking about himself. What would you think?

Yeah, you are right!

You would think this guy has no social behavior and this guy is doing shameless self promotion. Instead of sharing something his community cares about!

If you don’t have anything of value to add to the conversation, than you should keep your thoughts for yourself!

If you want to be accepted by a community and earn their trust, become something like an Trust Agent, like Chris Brogan has described in his homonymous book, you have to listen first and then, and only then if you have come up with some fresh angle, you can do a smart review to the conversation.

You can make or break the communities trust! Shameless self promotion is no marketing!

Social media is there to connect on a more personal basis. Be personal and share advice, promote other people, and ultimately learn from others. To gain authority shares your personal perspectives to your communities.

Just be yourself instead of only talking about yourself!

First you have to earn the communities trust, than you can carefully start promoting because people will be curious about you.

The more personality, restraint and expertise you show, the less you talk about yourself, the more authority and trust you will gain with your communities!

How do you promote and do you think self promotion woks? I am curious to read your opinion. Your comment is appreciated!

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February 1, 2011October 8, 2011

Do you still interrupt and disturb your audience too?

Today I’ve had a chat with a sales person of a company.

This sales person told me that he has not made a sale in the last three months and is scared about keeping his job.

As I knows this sales person I have asked where the problem is, because this sales person is a great seller I was wondering where the problem is?

So I started asking!

My question: Do you get leads, and if yes how many and how often per week and month?

I got the response that this sales person does not get any leads. I can imagine it could be very hard to get customers without any leads.

The sales person told me that he has to generate his leads by them self. Means cold calling and the whole set of interruption marketing.
I asked further:

Has the company any marketing? The answer was NO!

Ok let’s summarize:

No marketing, no responsible person, no strategy!
No leads, sales team needs to cold call and to do the whole set of interruption marketing, which could seriously harm the reputation of the company.
The closing rate is also very low.
This business loses a bunch of revenue each day to smart competitors.

By the way this is an IT company, they are selling technology services.

With this kind of non-strategy it could be very hard for this company to grow and to stand against smart competitors in the long term.

But there is a solution to also help this company the smart way.

Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing is the marketing strategy that focuses on getting found by customers.

Inbound marketing is related to permission based relationship marketing.

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 helps you to:
A. Save up to 60% 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.

Marketing Takeaway Tip: Use Inbound marketing before a competitor does. Otherwise the uphill battle could be much more costly and time consuming. If you need help, hire Inbound marketing professionals to get you started.

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