Effective Inbound Marketing Tips

If you haven't heard, the days that it impressed people to have a big, flashy website full of gadgets, animations, and bandwidth-heavy flash apps are pretty much over.

There are a couple reasons for this. While broadband is common enough in households, in the past couple years there has been a huge explosion in mobile browsing. Also, there has been a general trend towards simplicity in consumer product and website design.

Each of these presents its own issues, but the short version is, the business content of your website needs to follow the good old KISS principle: Keep It Simple.

Simplifying the Business Content of Your Website

1. Design With Mobile In Mind

While mobile browsing does still only account for a fairly small percent of web activity today, it is growing rapidly. Already, 85% of new mobile phone sales worldwide are web-capable, and that number is rapidly approaching 100%. Mobile sales are on the rise as well. Last December, 87% of tablet owners did at least some of their holiday shopping online through their tablet.

So, while you may not be losing too much if you're overlooking mobile right at the moment, the winds are rapidly shifting. It would be effective planning to begin working on optimizing your site now, before you fall further behind.

When optimizing the business content of your website for mobile browsers:

• Compress images and other elements as much as is reasonably possible, since many mobile users are on slow connections or limited data plans.

• Keep your site layout simple (more on that below) without an excess of top- and side-bars. Generally only one permeant sidebar should ever be needed.

• Verify your site renders properly on several of the most popular mobile browsers, especially Safari for iOS, Chrome for Android, and Opera Mobile. If it cannot and retrofitting it will be too difficult, consider spinning off a separate mobile site.

• Don't use of any third-party plugins like Flash, Unity, or Chrome extensions. Mobile compatibility for these is spotty at best, and often completely missing. Flash does not work with iOS, for example.

It's also worth considering that slow load times can contribute significantly to bounce rates. A leaner, meaner site means better visitor retention across all connection types. Even if you don't care about mobile users, having optimized business content is still a good idea.

2. On Simpler Website Design

It's typical to think of new technology first being embraced by the young, especially Generation Y / Millennials. However, in fact, one of the fastest-growing markets for technology is people in their middle age: older Gen-Xers and Baby Boomers.

These groups, who did not grow up using online services, want simplicity in their electronics and website design. They're likely to be confused or simply put off by overly-confusing websites, and go somewhere that's easier to use.

On top of that, being straightforward and unpretentious is a valued trait among younger demographics, so complex websites just don't appeal to many groups right now.

The more you can streamline your interface, the better:

• As we said above, keep the overall design as clean as possible, with a minimum of important button bars.

• Use a simple and straightforward color design, with preferably no more than three major colors involved.

• Graphic buttons like your Calls-To-Action should be fairly small. They should be eye-catching, but not at risk of being mistaken for anything but an advertisement.

If you want more tips for making a Boomer-friendly website, here's an excellent list of design elements to consider.

Simple Business Content is Better Business Content

Hopefully, the takeaway today is obvious: The more simple, functional, and easy-to-use your website is, the better. Keep your designs clean and uncluttered, and keep an eye out for mobile compatibility.

What other tricks have you used to make your website more accessible and inviting?   

Occasionally, we get a message from someone asking if maybe we're being a bit extreme by saying "blog or die" as often as we do. After all, aren't there other Internet marketing strategies that work just as well as blogging?

Well, it's a fair question. There are a lot of ideas out there for effective Internet marketing, so why do we say "blog or die?" Well, let's look at some numbers real quick, courtesy of Hubspot's 2012 State of Inbound Marketing report:

• Blogs are cited by respondents as being the cheapest way of recruiting new leads.

• 92% of companies who average more than one blog a day reported getting a customer through it.

• Company blogs were more likely to be cited as at least "useful" to Inbound marketing strategies than any other online marketing approach.

• Facebook and LinkedIn, however, are individually a bit better than blogs at generating new leads, but only in specific fields. Blogs reach everyone about equally.

• Additionally, investment in social media is currently growing faster than blogging, with 62% reporting that social media had become more important to them in the last year.

So, there is still an argument to be made for social media, and it's clearly gaining traction among businesses. I would argue - and this is my own interpretation, not something in the Hubspot report - that much of the growth is simply due to social media finally hitting the mainstream marketer's radar. That is, it's become more important mostly because it was entirely unimportant just a couple years ago.

Now, if you asked us to flatly choose one medium as being the most important, we'd still continue to say "blog or die" based on current trends. If nothing else, it's far harder to make a sale directly through social media rather than capturing a sale from someone already perusing your site.

However, here at 98toGo we really don't feel like this should be an either-or question. Since both blogs and social media are relatively cheap to invest in and manage, we feel the best approach is to work with them side-by-side.

Update Your Blogging Strategies By Embracing New Technologies

With Internet marketing, it's a lot easier and more practical to intertwine marketing strategies in different mediums as compared to traditional offline advertising. The Internet is one big, inter-linked mass and should be treated as such.

The best approach we find for utilizing your blog alongside other Internet sides is to look at your blog as being the hub of your online marketing activity. It's right there on your site, so it's easier to capture people's attention and guide them to Calls to Action or to your shopping cart. Most people who buy from you are going to be making their purchases ultimately thanks to your website.

When working with social media, we recommend you view your presence there as being like satellite offices, or perhaps as embassies. Each form of social media you approach is basically foreign turf. They have their own user demographics and their own ways of speaking and doing business. The users are on "home turf," and you have to speak to them in their preferred ways to convince them to meet you on your terms, at your website.

So, the best approach to social media is to play to the strengths and interests of the "local" user base, convincing them to come visit your hub where actual business will be done.

Then, once they're at your site, they see your blogs, your whitepapers, and your calls to action. If they were on the fence about doing business with you before, the content on it will help convert them in ways you couldn't accomplish through social media alone.

And that, in the end, is why we think "blog or die" is still the name of the game.

What do you think? Are blogs still the best all-around investment?    

Creating blog content is easy. The internet is full of content farms and  job boards in which companies can quickly hire out their web copy in bulk for pennies on the dollar. The companies who use these services receive their content extremely quickly – sometimes within just a few hours – and generally pay less than $5 per blog writing. Usually these content mills use search engine optimization tactics that claim to help your company’s name show up faster in search engine results. It’s fast, it’s easy and, best of all, it’s extremely cheap. There’s just one problem – the copy produced by content mills is total junk.

A well managed business blog, full of high quality, well-written content can drive lead generation, increase sales and quickly convert readers into paying customers. However, a poorly managed blog filled with cheap content can drive potential customers right into the arms of your competitors. That’s why, when creating blog content, it’s important to keep your business goals in mind.

Invest Wisely
You wouldn’t purchase an office space with leaks and termites just because the rent is a little cheaper, and you wouldn’t hire a high school dropout to handle your accounting because they expected a lower wage. So, why risk the integrity of your company by purchasing cheap and poorly written blog content just because you’ll save a few bucks? An intelligent business owner knows they’re not going to launch to the top of their industry by doing the least amount of work or paying the lowest for the services they need.  Successful companies get to where they are by making smart choices – and sometimes this means paying a little more.

Quality vs. Quantity
Unless your company is a news organization, your sole purpose is to provide a product or service – not pump out fresh content on a blog four times a day. When you enter the world of outsourcing content to professional copywriters, you must immediately decide what’s more important – the number of posts published or the quality of each post? If you’re looking to use blog posts to interest potential clients and convert them into loyal customers, you should probably focus more on quality. As any web analytics expert will surely confirm – it’s much better to have one well-written, well-researched blog post per week than ten keyword-stuffed, nonsensical pages of cheap copy.

Write to Your Audience
Your customers are smart people. They don’t have time to wade through paragraphs of drivel and cheesy sales pitches. Hard sells, spelling errors and overused keywords are a big turn off – and the sort of tactics that will make your company look sleazy and unreliable. On the other hand, a professional copywriter will take the time to research your company, your brand personality and your customer demographics, and will present you with the sort of interesting content that appeals to your current and potential customers.

The truth of the matter is that there is really no easy way to get around paying for good content writing.  However, this doesn’t mean you should succumb to outrageously high rates either. Instead, seek out trusted web content firms who can offer competitive rates and remember that if a web content offer seems too good to be true, it’s probably being written by a bunch of untrained chimpanzees. Like many other investments you make for the sake of your business, when it comes to creating blog content, you get what you pay for.