Breaking Down the Different Types of Digital Marketing Agencies

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If your company is looking for a digital marketing agency, there are a plethora of options at your fingertips. A quick Google search of “digital marketing agency near me” will bring up a map full of red pins around your area and an endless amount of search result pages.

With so many marketing agencies, how do you know which one is best for your business? Before we look at each type of digital marketing agency, let’s define what digital marketing is, exactly.

Content Marketing, Inbound Marketing, Sales and Marketing Alignment

5 Spooky Marketing Tactics That Will Scare Prospects Away

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There are many terrifying things in the world — spiders, tornadoes, losing your mom in the grocery store, just to name a few. For marketers and salespeople, however, the scariest thing may be how easy it is to lose a potential customer. Just when you think you have them… poof! They disappear like a spirit at a Ghostbusters convention.

Why does this happen? It may not be the prospect’s fault. It may actually be that your marketing tactics. You might be scaring them away with your outdated techniques! Things like cold calls and unexpected emails can spook even the bravest of prospects.

Content Marketing, Inbound Marketing, Sales and Marketing Alignment

What to Look for in a Content Marketing Agency

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Content. You can’t live with it and you can’t live without it.

Wait… can you live without it? Not if you’re in marketing. But what is content, exactly? And what is content marketing? While we’re at it, what does a good content marketing agency look like?

According to the Content Marketing Institute, ” content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”

Translation: content is a big deal. It’s not something you can simply outsource or ” tack on” to your marketing strategy and hope to get results. It needs to be engaging, clean and of the highest quality. With exceptional content marketing, you can actually increase sales, save on marketing costs and attract better, more loyal customers.

With all that in mind, here are some things to consider if you’re deciding on whether to hire a content marketing agency or not. 

Content Marketing, Inbound Marketing

Visual Hierarchy in Graphic Design, Defined

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A hierarchy, simply put, ranks the members of a group according to relative importance. For instance, in the military, a private who tells his commanding officer to drop and give him 20 will most likely find that demand going unmet. And when you enter an unfamiliar situation, hierarchies can tell you where to go first. You shouldn’t approach the shoe department manager at your local Kohl’s to initiate corporate buyout discussions.

In graphic design, hierarchies also tell you what’s important and where to go first.

Creating a visual hierarchy means using visible treatments and cues to guide the eye to content in order of importance. It looks like we’ve already fulfilled the promise of this post’s title! Unfortunately for fans of really short blog posts, there’s more to discuss.

Design, Inbound Marketing, Websites

How to Qualify Leads with Long-Term Revenue In Mind

Quality Leads Long Term Revenue

Spending time on the right leads is crucial for any business growth. When talking with prospective clients, we often forget to ask ourselves whether this is the type of client that could bring long-term value to our business.

Start-up founders and business professionals often get blinded by the possibility of turning a lead into an active client, forgetting to take into consideration the opportunity cost of on-boarding a bad lead. Understanding how to qualify leads becomes an important part of every sales process.

As a business owner and a sales professional, the time you spend qualifying a lead is synonymous with the success you will have. Leads should be prioritized based on their importance and relevance to the business itself.

Applying this simple-yet-effective thought can save you and your salesforce a lot of time in negotiation with potential clients who will bring more troubles than revenues.

Inbound Marketing, Sales and Marketing Alignment, Sales Enablement, Sales Strategy

Explosive Growth: Building a Content Marketing Plan That Works

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The rules of marketing have changed dramatically since the birth of the Internet. Today’s consumers have more control over how they consume content and are choosier about what grabs their attention. That makes creating great content — and having the right plan to deliver it — crucial to marketing success.  

As traditional advertising has declined, content marketing has exploded, largely because it takes an approach that is relevant for today’s consumers. By providing useful information to potential customers, it engages them on the platforms where they spend their time, whether that’s on social media, blogs or through video and podcasts.

While content marketing is a proven effective way of reaching customers, it requires a good strategy to make sure it’s being delivered properly. Think of it this way: Even if you have the best football team in the league, you’re not going to find success if you don’t have a great game plan. A good team knows what they’re going to do before they walk onto the field.

Content Marketing, Inbound Marketing, Writing and Editing

Content Promotion Success Story: Rainbow Muffler & Brake

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Content marketing is all about the content, right? Well, sort of. If content creation is one half of content marketing, the other half is content promotion. After all, the best content in the world isn’t truly effective unless people are reading it.

According to the Content Marketing Institute, “content marketing generates over three times as many leads as outbound marketing and costs 62% less.” But an Adweek study also showed that “92 percent of consumers trust recommendations from others, even people they don’t know, over branded content.”

How do you embrace the potential ROI of content marketing without branding? It’s all about content promotion. To illustrate this point, we’ll first define content promotion (aka influencer outreach) and show how it worked for one of our clients: Rainbow Muffler & Brake.

Blogging, Content Marketing, Inbound Marketing

HubSpot Workflows: Best Types and Best Practices

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“Hey, girl, did you know I’ve created dozens of workflows in HubSpot?”

While this probably isn’t the best pick-up line out there, it might be nice to hear if you’re looking for someone to help your company with lead nurturing. (As long as you remove the “girl” part.)

Why? Because workflows can seem like a daunting task at first. After all, aren’t they an advanced marketing tactic? You can’t build workflows if you’re a marketing newbie, right?

Wrong.

Sure, HubSpot makes it easy for lead-generation specialists like myself to build complex workflows with multiple if/then branches based on smart list criteria — but it also makes simple workflows accessible to new users.

Let’s take a look at some of the types of workflows you can build in HubSpot, as well as some best practices for using them.

HubSpot, Inbound Marketing

The Future of Inbound: What We Learned at #INBOUND18

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Each year, thousands of people who are passionate about marketing, selling and delighting customers come together for one of the largest inbound marketing events of the year — INBOUND. 

Like many exceptional things, INBOUND gets better with age, and #INBOUND18 did not disappoint. With Keynote speakers such as Deepak Chopra and Shonda Rimes, as well as several spotlights on successful business owners and thought leaders, the ideas were flowing as quickly as the drinks at Club INBOUND. 

Didn’t get a chance to go to INBOUND this year or feeling a bit overwhelmed by the information overload? Here are some of the top lessons we learned at #INBOUND18.

HubSpot, Inbound Marketing

How to Create Buyer Personas (With Real-Life Examples)

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You know your business and services inside and out. You can speak passionately about the intricate details of your latest product or the advanced logistics behind your business model. You’ve scoped out the competition and understand the benefits that make your company stand out. But how well do you know your audience?

As a business owner or marketer, you probably have a solid understanding of your customers’ basic demographic data — you know what they do for a living, their age and where they live. But when it comes to creating targeted inbound marketing that works, you have to go deeper than what can be found with a simple LinkedIn search.

This is where buyer personas come in.

Content Marketing, Inbound Marketing