Effective Inbound Marketing Tips

Everybody is looking to smoke the competition.  Business owners want a competitive edge, right. The idea is to out-market the next guy and bring in more business.  Well, many attempts to smoke the competition merely causes toxic waste and these marketing smokescreens don't ring true with search engines.  This article will look at a few tactics that create pollution and offer some alternative marketing ideas that are healthy and organic and internet friendly. If you wish to create healthy marketing that works - then read on.

Who Gives a Hoot?

So, here are a few marketing elements that can be considered wasteful or toxic. The first is making gut calls on a website's offers or calls-to-action.  Making decisions from the gut when it comes to internet marketing can be misguided at best and toxic at worst. Gut calls are made by stingy owners and involve a site's offers, its content, and often its design aspects. On the other extreme are decisions made with over-analysis.  Focus groups or polling your family members often produce so many ideas on how to "fix" your website, that its hard to decide on which ones to attack first.

Trying to please all the opinions can be a big waste of time from these non-experts. Avoid polluting your marketing message from your 24/7 business employee (your website) with gut calls, or tons of "fix-it" opinions from the uninformed.

What Does Work?

Let's keep it super simple. Create healthy marketing using real data.  By relying on closed-looped marketing analytics to make specific changes to your business website - you are making data-driven decisions. This is the opposite of gut calls or opinion paralysis.

In practice this means looking at where you're website traffic is coming from. Is it social media, is it from organic search, or paid search campaigns, or perhaps its from referral sources (links from other sites and referral partners).  Look at this data carefully to determine not only traffic sources, but more importantly customers that convert via your business site. This information is available from marketing software, such as HubSpot or Optify, and from free sources such as Google Analytics. 

Here's an example of which marketing sources produced traffic, leads and customers for a piano retailer:

Not using data to determine where your target customers or web traffic is coming from is lazy. Stop being lazy.  Get a closed-loop marketing solution to help you figure out who is coming from where.  Get smart quick with the right marketing software to deliver real data.

Healthy marketing is organic content

87% of B2B content consumers say that online content has a major (27%) or moderate (60%) impact on their vendor selection (according to a new report from the CMO Council and NetLine)

Building valuable website content in the form of blogs and website content will organically attract new site visitors and target customers. Businesses who blog consistently typically get results like this, even seasonal B2B businesses like this paving company:

These monthly site visits grew sharply over time, more than quadrupling within 6 months.  These results are typical for businesses that blog 3 or more times per week.  It sounds like a lot (3+ blogs/week) of blogging, but we're basing this on actual data from real customers - each of whom blogs at least 3 times per week.

Creating compelling content that offers solutions or answers also helps create trust. Trust builds relationship and rapport.

In sales, we learned a long time ago that selling is based on relationships. Relationships are based on trust, credibility and interest.  Providing non-salesy content is key.

Consider creating healthy marketing such as organic content and data-driven online marketing decisions.  Avoid toxic thinking and smokescreens when competing for attention online. Trust the numbers which never lie. Trusting your gut may fail you.