If you don’t know how to build a website how do you add Website Design Services to your business?

There are options. You could take the time to learn a CMS like WordPress and buy a good book. WordPress isn’t that difficult to work with but there is more involved in building a website then following steps in a book. And the time you spend learning is time you’re not prospecting and serving your current clients.

You could take the easy route and go with one of the services that allow you to build websites using and online builder. But even with these easy to use builders there is a learning curve, and its often difficult or impossible to implement some customizations.

Might we suggest a better alternative. Call Surge Labs. Co-Founder Scott Quarterman built his first website in 1996. I built my first site in 1998. Since then we’ve both built many websites for different industries and types of clients. There is a high probability that we’ve built a website for a company or someone in your client’s industry.

Over the last couple of years we’ve worked with a number of marketing people, serving as their outsourced website developer. If you look through our list of clients, a number of the client’s are websites for companies in Canada that were referred to us. Others represent relationships with marketing folks from the West Coast to the North East to the South here in Atlanta.

Website Design Services We Provide

Pre-Website Planning

From the moment you engage Surge Labs we’ll work with your client through you or directly depending upon your preference. We know the right questions to ask and have a process in place to ensure that their website is delivered on time, on budget and on target. Here are few things you can expect your client to receive during the planning phase.

Competitive Analysis – We review your client’s top three competitor’s websites and landing pages to find positive and negative things that we can learn from them. We then apply this knowledge to the development of the new site. This is an optional, but valuable service.

Keyword Research – We manually research relevant keywords for the pages of the website and select primary and secondary keywords to target within these pages. Since ranking in search engines for specific keywords is highly critical, this is a step that cannot be skipped or done haphazardly.

Sitemap – We create a sitemap to show how the content of the home page and one inside page will be displayed. This could be displayed in a graphic or wireframe format depending upon needs.

Website Development

With a solid plan in place we move to development of the site. Development often takes place on a separate build server. If your client needs a new host we typically recommend Siteground, but have worked with many different hosts. We also can recommend a variety of third party services depending upon the needs of your client.

Here are some of the main steps involved in the website build phase.

Website Design – We start by creating and presenting a custom design direction for the home page and one inside page for the site. This includes two rounds of revisions for each design based on client feedback.

Mobile Responsive Website Development – Using the approved design we then start to build the site out to match the design. We build with WordPress for most sites, though for some ecommerce websites it makes more sense to use Magento. In either case the website coding will be fully mobile responsive (display properly on desktops, tablets and smartphones), multi-browser compatible, and fast loading for SEO purposes.

On-Page SEO – The last step of the build process is to utilize the keyword report to do proper on-page SEO so that search engines index the pages properly. We add Google Analytics, connect Webmaster tools, and add any additional tracking codes.

Ongoing Monthly Services: Reporting, Landing Pages and Maintenance

Once the site is completed and launched, we offer continued services to provide monthly reporting, SEO landing page creation and website maintenance. Some of the ongoing website services include:

Monthly Website Performance Reporting – We provide a report of the website key performance indicators, such as visitors, leads, conversion rates, bounce rates, site speed and other data.

Monthly Keyword Rank Reporting – We provide a report of your top keyword rankings. This data will help us know which keywords to focus on to get additional traffic to the site.

Monthly Performance Analysis & Strategy – We review and analyze the Website Performance Report and Keyword Rank Report each month. We will make recommendations and provide guidance on how to increase traffic and improve keyword rankings.

Monthly SEO Landing Pages – We create landing pages as needed that target specific keywords to help gain additional traffic to the site.

WordPress & Site Maintenance – We monitor and maintain the website so that WordPress, the theme and all plugins are up-to-date, to avoid any site outages or security breaches.

Wrap Up

A website is the most important element of an online marketing strategy and its important that your client’s have a site that is attractive and professional looking, is coded to be optimized for search engines, includes an intuitive navigation and layout, presents concise messaging and copy, and has clear calls-to-action. All of the elements that go into creating a conversion driven website.

If you would like to learn more about how we can help you add Website Design Services to your business and capture additional revenue, call us at 678-951-9506 or complete our contact form.

Content Marketing Series Part 5

Content marketing is about delivering the right content to the right person at the right time. As we’ve been laying out in our “Build A Better B2B Marketing Strategy” series we’ve covered creating buyer personas and keyword research. This work will help us plan and create content to attract visitors to our website, but we have one more key piece of information we need. We need to understand the buyers journey and what stage our prospects are in it.

What is the Buyers Journey

The buyers journey consists of the stages your prospects go through from first realizing they have a problem to making a solution purchasing decision. The actual tactics buyers use vary but where they are in terms of making a purchasing decision can be classified into three stages:

• Awareness: understand the problem
• Consideration: search for a solution
• Decision: choose who to purchase from

Stages of the Buyers Journey

Awareness

During this initial stage the buyer is just realizing that they have a problem (or opportunity) confronting them. Typically their first action is to go to a search engine like Google to conduct keyword research to gain a better understanding of what they are dealing with. The goal is to understand the problem enough so that they can then move into the second stage to begin considering solutions.

Certain types of content work well in this stage including educational blog posts and videos, guides and ebooks, white papers, and infographics. Keywords to optimize for with this content should include modifiers like “how to, troubleshoot, prevent, improve, resolve, fix, problems, etc.” During the awareness stage the buyer may or may not be aware of your company so this is a great opportunity to introduce your company by helping to educate the buyer.

Consideration

Once the buyer understand the issue they then move onto the next stage, Consideration. During this stage the buyer begins to evaluate options and solutions to their problem. While the buyer is more seriously considering their choices, this is still a great opportunity to educate them about the decision they will make.

Content that works in the consideration stage includes comparison white papers, expert guides, webinars, podcasts and videos. Keyword modifiers to optimize for include solutions, service, tools, software, reviews, etc.

Decision

Once the buyer has moved through the consideration stage they are at the point of making a decision. This final stage is as much about the buyer being comfortable with making the decision as anything else. In this stage the buyer will be looking for content to finalize, reinforce and validate their purchase decision such as case studies, product spec sheets, demos or free trials, and purchase terms. They are also looking for documentation of other users experience such as endorsements, recommendations and testimonials. Your goal in creating content for this stage is to move them closer to making a purchase.

Keywords that will work for decision stage content include modifiers such as “compare, versus, reviews, pros, cons, etc.” You can also utilize promotions and ppc ads with limited time offers to try to capture quick sales.

Be Smart Creating Content

Combining an understanding your buyer personas, the buyers stages and the keywords used to search makes it possible to deliver the right content to the right person at the right time. The ideal situation would be one where you have the time and resources available to create content for each stage, that targets every keyword identified, for each of your personas. If you are launching your first inbound marketing campaign, though that’s not really realistic. A better way to approach launching your campaign is to identify where you’re best opportunities lie and start there.

The best place to start is by choosing one persona to focus on. This will then help you choose the best stage of the buyers cycle to target for that persona.

Suppose the persona you choose to start with represents VP’s of Technology. This persona likely is going to spend very little time in the Awareness stage. They already understand most of the basics that Awareness stage information addresses. Instead you are better off starting in the Consideration stage. This will then help you identify the correct keywords and types of content to create.

Then move on to the next persona and do the same. Once you are targeting one stage for each persona, you can then go back to address the remaining buyer stages for each persona if it makes sense. You may find that you have no need to create Awareness stage content for your VP of Technology persona. Instead you might create new personas that target junior members of the technology team, who have an influence in the purchasing process, that are more likely to spend time in the Awareness stage.

The buyers journey will vary among the different personas you have created.  Factors that will affect the right content to create includes the average sales cycle, the number of people involved in making a decision, the dollar amount of the average solution, the content best suited to them and of course the buyers stage they are in.  As you move into creating content you will need to understand where to focus your initial and long-term efforts based on the resources you have available.

Understanding the buyers journey, along with creating personas and conducting keyword research, will help you create content that reaches the right audience at the right time.

Coming Next: Types of Content to Focus On

Be sure to subscribe to our blog updates to be notified each time a new article in this series is published.

Check Out the Articles in This Series That Have Been Published

Article 1: Build A Better B2B Marketing Strategy

Article 2: Creating Your Comprehensive B2B Marketing Strategy

Article 3: Create Business to Business Buyer Personas

Article 4: The Ultimate Guide to Keyword Research

Article 5: The Stages of the Buyers Journey

Have questions or need help with your online marketing? Call us at 678-951-9506 or contact us.

Content Marketing Series Part 4

For any online marketer, figuring out where to start an online marketing campaign is often the hardest part of the process. Coming up with ideas for your next blog post, white paper, email campaign, and video can also be a challenge.

The keywords that prospects use to search for information, answers to questions and solutions provide the backbone for your optimization initiatives. While we were conducting interviews to create our buyer personas, one of the questions we asked the interviewees about was the keywords they used in their search. We combine this research with some other keyword research best practices to identify the keywords that will help us optimize our site and content.

This guide will take you step-by-step through the process of researching and tracking the best performing keywords for your online marketing campaigns.

Getting Started

So, where do you start on a keyword research project? The first place to start is your website.

If you’re company provides business-to-business (B2B) services and or solutions then you need to focus on your service/solutions pages. We would start with the pages that are receiving the least amount of traffic and are most important for your company.

If you’re company is an ecommerce company and sells directly to consumers then we would recommend starting with your products that aren’t currently getting the traction you want – this may be caused by the pages targeting the wrong keywords.

Open your pages and look to see what keywords they are currently targeting. In most cases, the keyword that your page is targeting is probably in the page title (text that shows in the browser tab for that page).

Take that keyword and follow the steps below to get started.

Step 1: Gather Your Keywords

A) Create a Keyword Spreadsheet

Start by creating a spreadsheet to organize and prioritize your keywords. Add a tab for each page you are trying to improve. Add the following columns to the spreadsheet…

• Group
• Keyword
• Avg. Monthly Searches
• Competition
• Notes

Keyword Tools

1. Google Keyword Planner (within Adwords) – Since Google owns the majority of search traffic on the Internet this will be your most important tool. This is the tool we will be using in this blog post.
2. Google Suggest – When you use Google to search you will notice that a small box comes up under the search field that lists other keywords. This is a great way to see which keywords Google suggests you target based on your current query.
3. Wordstream – This tool pulls data from multiple sources including ISPs, browser tool bars, and search engines (like Google). Then they use a proprietary algorithm to sort and filter the results for you.
4. Moz – Moz has an entire suite of SEO tools to help any online marketer including a keyword tool.

B) Gather The Keywords

Using your preferred keyword gathering tool (we will be using Google Keyword Planner in this post), start by inserting your current product/service page keyword (this is the keyword that is probably in your page title tag).

For this example, we will use the keyword “data entry”, which is the keyword the current service page is targeting. The company actually provides data entry outsourcing services.

C) Enter the keyword into the Keyword Planner…

Be sure you are targeting the right geographic area that you want. In this case we want to target keywords within the US only.

D) Review keyword results

By default, it will sort the tables by relevance. You can sort by “Avg. Monthly Searches” or “Competition” if you want. We recommend keeping the defaults for now.

E) Check your current keyword

Click the “Keyword Ideas” tab and you will see the data around the specific keyword you entered. This will give you some good data about this keyword.

In this case “data entry” is showing a very large amount of traffic “9,900” with low competition. At first glance you many think this is a good thing, hold on a second let’s take a look at the actual search results…

You will notice that Wikipedia listings and job listings are coming up. This is a clear indicator that this keyword is too broad.

Keywords that are too broad mean you will almost never get an opportunity to be on page 1 of Google search results. This actually makes a lot of sense. If you think about it someone typing this in is probably not looking for our services.

Let’s dive in deeper by taking a look at “data entry outsourcing” keywords.

F) Dive in deeper

To dive in deeper let’s start looking at terms that are more in line with the business service offering. Let’s try “data entry outsourcing”…

These results look much better. But first, let’s look to see if there is any traffic around “data entry outsourcing”…

Ah, there is some very targeted traffic to be had here.

Step 2: Create a “plan”

Let’s go ahead and create our first “plan” by clicking on the “Add to plan” arrow.

After clicking the arrow you will notice that the tools is starting to collect the keywords in a group to the right. This will gather all the necessary data around these keywords for us to analyze later.

A) Add keywords to the plan

Now that you have one keyword added to the plan we want to start expanding the keyword reach to see if there are other keywords we should be targeting.

Click the “Add group ideas” tab and then click the first group “Entry Outsourcing”.

Take a look at the keywords presented. If they look like they are relevant then click the arrow in the right column to add them to your plan. Add as many as you think will work. We will prioritize them later.

Once you’ve added those keywords to your plan, click the back arrow and we’ll take a look at the next ad group “Entry Services”. We found a few keywords there and have entered them into our plan.

You can also check out any of the other ad groups and add relevant keywords to your plan from there.

B) Download the keywords from your plan

Next click the download icon in the bottom right side of the plan column.

You will be presented with a download screen. Be sure to select “Include average monthly…” and in this case we want an Excel file. You can download a Google Sheets file as well.

Then go ahead an save the file to your hard drive.

C) Open the file in Excel

When the file is opened it will look like the above image. We want to make some changes to the file before we copy the files into the Excel file we created earlier.

I) Remove some of the columns from the Excel file

First select and remove the C, D, E, H, I, J, K columns. These columns contain data that are specific to Adwords and you probably don’t need them. However, you may want to keep the H column which contain average click costs which may help you determine the importance of the keyword.

D) Select, copy and paste rows into spreadsheet

Copy from the spreadsheet…

…and paste into the new spreadsheet.

Step 3: Organize, Prioritize, Select & Optimize

Now that we have our keywords we need to figure out which keywords we want to focus on. This is usually the hardest part of keyword selection – selecting the main keyword you want to target. Should you go after the keyword with the most traffic, or the one with the lowest competition, or a combination of both?

We recommend looking at both Avg. Monthly Searches and Competition.

So let’s sort the rows according to Avg. Monthly Searches and Competition. Sort on Avg. Monthly Searches and then on Competition.

I have highlighted the levels and orders. Be sure to check “My data has headers” to be sure you’re sorting the correct columns.

A) Which should be your primary keyword?

Well, let’s figure it out.

First, let’s do a Google search for “data entry services”…

…and then, “outsource data entry”…

I’m seeing that several of the company’s competitor’s are showing up in the search results of both. We are also not seeing any Wikipedia listings in the “data entry services” results which means we can probably target that keyword.

B) Select your primary and secondary keywords

The primary keyword (the green row above) will be the keyword that you want to use in your page title tag, meta description tag and within the page content and images.

The secondary keyword (the orange row) you can use within the meta description tag and the page content. You may also want to consider creating a landing page on your site that targets the secondary keywords.

C) Optimize your page with keywords

Update the page title, meta description and content to include your new keyword(s). Don’t forget to include the keyword in image ALT tags as well.

D) Create blog posts and landing pages that target keywords

Consider creating industry blog posts and landing pages using the new keywords. This will help drive additional traffic to your site so your site will generate more leads.

Step 4: Track & Report

Now that you have your keywords and they are in your pages and optimized, what do you do with them?

We use a tool like Moz to pull our keyword ranking data from each month (you can even track them weekly if needed).

For all of our monthly content marketing and SEO clients we use a similar formatted Excel spreadsheet to track the monthly progress of our keywords. Red cells indicate that the keyword is not the top 5 pages of Google search results. Yellow cells mean pages 2-4. Green cells mean page 1.

Each month we review the progress of keywords and then plan tactics for the following month to help increase rankings. For example, since “data entry services” is in the red, then we need to write a blog post about “data entry services” or create a landing page, or a video. Then the following month we check to see how our new content has performed.

Step 5: Rinse and Repeat

Once your keyword research project is done, it’s not really done. Each month you should be reviewing your keywords to be sure they are still relevant and to target new keywords and remove keywords that are not relevant.

CONCLUSION:

Before starting down the path of any online marketing campaign it is best to start with a solid foundation – keyword research. Keyword research will help you focus all of your online marketing efforts, and will help keep you creating good quality content.

Check Out the Articles in This Series That Have Been Published

Article 1: Build A Better B2B Marketing Strategy

Article 2: Creating Your Comprehensive B2B Marketing Strategy

Article 3: Create Business to Business Buyer Personas

Article 4: The Ultimate Guide to Keyword Research

Article 5: The Stages of the Buyers Journey

Content Marketing Series Part 3

Each of your B2B clients and prospects is a unique company looking to address a specific need. But targeting individuals is not that efficient so instead you need to gear your marketing towards large segments that share common backgrounds, wants and needs.

B2B buyer personas allow you to develop a deeper understanding of your different buyer segments to customize your content to their specific needs, questions, and concerns. It helps you deliver the right content to the right person.

Where to Start Building Your Personas

Building personas isn’t a simple endeavor and requires time and effort to do the research needed to develop the source information to properly build one. Personas may be fictionalized representations of buyer segments, but they still need to be based on real data mixed with your understanding of the market and buyer motivations. The better the data the better the final result.

Some good sources to tap into include interviewing existing customers, salespeople in your company, support and customer service interactions and even prospects who did not choose to buy from you. You want to make sure that the list of questions you ask them are focused on the “what, where, how, and why” of their buyers journey. You will want to do 3-5 interviews with each persona segment to get started

The number of personas you will need to create will depend upon the size and complexity of your business and the products and services you offer. If you’re just getting started with building personas, then you probably want to limit yourself to 2-4 distinct personas. Over time you can add or edit existing personas as needed.

3 Steps to Create Your B2B Buyer Persona

Building personas is a complex process with multiple phases including data collection, interpretation, and analysis. Hubspot has an online buyer persona builder that will give you an idea of what’s involved in the process.

For our discussion we’re going to simplify the persona building down to three areas that will help us create and deliver relevant content: Who they are, What they want to achieve and Where they research.

Who They Are
Since your persona is a fictionalized representation of a person you need to build a background that will help you target content to. The first step is to humanizing your persona is to come up with a name that will resonate with your team. In traditional segmenting we use a title such as CFO, Marketing Manager, Owner, etc. But for our purposes we want something that’s going to be a bit more sticky such as “Financial Fred”, “Marketing Mary” or “Owner Owen”. As the details flesh out you’ll like find yourself referring to your persona’s simply as Fred, Mary or Owen.

With a name in place you need to build the background of there persona. What is their role in the company, what is a typical day like, what sort of tools do they use, what sort of associations do they belong to, what are they job responsibilities, how do they make purchase decisions, etc. Any question that provides insight to understanding the persona is worth asking.

You also want to develop information about the company. Are they a large, medium or small size business? How many employees do they have? What is their annual revenue. What industries do they work with? There are a lot more question you can ask if relevant. Even though you may know some of this information, asking open-ended questions may reveal additional information that you can use.

If you look at enough information on personas, inevitably you will see recommendations to also build a personal background. While that makes sense for B2C companies, for our B2B needs I really don’t care where they live, what school they went to or how many kids and dogs they have. Those are questions that are more specific to the individual and better left to the sales team to develop during the relationship development phase.

What They Want To Achieve
Each of your personas are dealing with day to day challenges to carry out their job. You’ve already determined that they have a need for your product or service, so now its time to learn more about their goals and objectives, challenges and opportunities, and any common objections or requirements.

You also need to learn more about how their company goes about making purchase decisions. Who are the influencers within the organization? Are decisions made by an individual or a team? What would make them hesitant to purchase, or more likely to make a decision? How long is their buying cycle? Is it seasonal or ongoing? Once again the list of questions you could ask is endless. The key is to ask the questions that will help you get a better feel for the segment and tailor your content marketing to.

Where They Research
Because we’re using a content marketing strategy, the questions we’re getting answered are designed to help us craft content that will resonate with the persona. It’s important to understand what types of information they consume and where do they go to find that information. Do they prefer blog posts, white papers, webinars or videos? Each person you interview will have their own preferred choice, but as a group what are the best types of content to produce? Additionally you’ll likely find that there are a wide number of resources that they tap into. What are the more common resources that we can use to distribute our content such as on our blog, via an email newsletter, on social media or in industry forums.

Once your research is complete you have the information needed to create and deliver content that will be relevant and useful to your persona. Your products or services no longer need to be the focus of your content. Instead you can create content that your prospects are actively seeking to address challenges, opportunities, goals and objectives. In other words you have the information at hand to deliver the right content to the right person at the right time.

Be sure to subscribe to our blog updates to be notified each time a new article in this series is published.

Check Out the Articles in This Series That Have Been Published

Article 1: Build A Better B2B Marketing Strategy

Article 2: Creating Your Comprehensive B2B Marketing Strategy

Article 3: Create Business to Business Buyer Personas

Article 4: The Ultimate Guide to Keyword Research

Article 5: The Stages of the Buyers Journey

Have questions or need help with your online marketing? Call us at 678-951-9506 or contact us.

Content Marketing Series Part 2

The key to success is to have a B2B Marketing Strategy and plan to achieve it In other words you have to think about what you want to do and then take steps to do it. There are two components – Think and Act. For today’s post we’re going to keep it simple and combine the two into a single entity as we review a Comprehensive Strategy.

A recent DM News survey found that 46% of executives noted that not having an effective strategy is the biggest impediment to achieving their marketing goals. Creating a strategic plan is the first step to overcoming the obstacles in the way of achieving the goals we have set.

Steps In Our B2B Marketing Strategy

Identify The Goals

In our previous post, Build A Better B2B Marketing Strategy, we declared that our three goals were to

• Drive more website traffic
• Capture more leads from our website
• Close more sales from our website

Determine The Target

With our goals in place we need to identify who our potential prospects are. Who are we trying to drive to our site? We can get a 1,000 new visitors to our website but if they aren’t the right people does it really matter?

The foundation of our inbound marketing strategy relies on targeting the right prospects with the right content at the right time. By creating buyer personas we can better understand where our prospects are in the buyers journey and the types of content that will resonate with them.

A buyer persona is a fictionalize representation of your ideal customers. If you’re starting from scratch then its best to start small by creating 2 to 5 personas. These should be focused on who your best and most profitable prospects are.

Some ways to identify your personas includes looking at your current customers, tapping into feedback from your sales team, and finally interviewing customers and prospects. Then you need to ask a lot of questions to further flesh out the personas. You need to understand their typical background, demographics, what their goals and challenges are and how they go about researching and making purchase decisions. Then its a matter of tailoring your content to reach the persona.

Find Engagement Points

To market to a group of people (your personas) you need to identify where they congregate online – forums they use, sites they visit, and social channels they use.

There are a number of ways to find out where your different personas hang out online. You can ask your current customers and even current prospects what sites, forums and social channels they use. You can look at their website to see what social media accounts they have listed on their site, if they have any associations or industry groups listed. You can also research to see where their website is receiving links from. If anyone posts in a forum or on a blog post there is often a backlinks to the website created. Just go to Google and search site: theyredomainname.com and see if where their links are coming from.

Once you have an initial list together you just need to continue updating it as you find new online opportunities to engage.

Connect Their Problem / Opportunity To Your Product / Solution

You’ve done your research so you know that the problems, issues and opportunities your prospects have can be solve or enhanced by the products and services you offer. You just have to connect the two.

In the past we would blast a radio ad, interrupt a TV program with a commercial, telemarket them, etc. Those are outbound marketing tactics though, and we’re going full-steam ahead with inbound marketing tactics. Content provides an excellent vehicle to capture attention from both search engines (to rank for keyword searches) and people (to draw them to us from search engines). As part of our research we know the keywords that our prospects are likely to use. We also know to some degree what type of content they like to consume such as blogs, videos, infographics, podcasts, webinars etc. Finally we know that we’re going to have prospects in all stages of the buyers cycle that we need to reach.

We just need to utilize this knowledge to create content that reaches the right prospect at the right time with the right message. When we’ve accomplished this we’ve made the connection between the prospect and our products / services.
Create A Publishing Plan To Promote Content

At this point we know who we are targeting, where to reach them, and what content to use. We just need to make it happen. The most effective tool to ensure that your inbound B2B marketing strategy stays on target is a calendar. It doesn’t matter if it’s paper or electric based, it simply needs to be developed, managed and executed. You can plan out in advance as far as you like but we would at least recommend you do so at least 60 days out.

One of the biggest reasons content marketing plans fail is that people try to create their content on-demand without a plan. You need to understand how the different topics you create content about will work together to advance your marketing. You need to have time to do some research. And you need time for the content to percolate in your mind. There are many times when I thought I had written a great blog post, only to rewrite half of it the next day. After a couple of hours of working on a piece of content your mind will think anything is great just to be done.

A calendar allows you to plan out what content you will create, who it is targeted to, what format it will be, where it published, and what the call-to-action is.

Track And Measure

We already know what our goals are…more traffic, leads and sales. As we learned in marketing 101, though our goals need to be SMART …specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound.

For example, our goal for this quarter might be to drive 20,000 people to our site, capture 800 leads, and generate 50 sales resulting in revenue of $500,000. We might also have goals tied to our marketing efforts such as to publish 30 blog posts, 5 infographics, 3 videos, 1 white paper, and hold 2 webinars. In the end our overall strategy is made up of collection of strategies and tactics designed to achieve the ultimate goals.

With your B2B marketing strategy in place it’s time to move into the implementation phase. A lot of the work we will cover in this series is occurring at the same time, so as we move through the series we’ll cover topics based on what makes the most sense to us.

Be sure to subscribe to our blog updates to be notified each time a new article in this series is published.

Check Out the Articles in This Series That Have Been Published

Article 1: Build A Better B2B Marketing Strategy

Article 2: Creating Your Comprehensive B2B Marketing Strategy

Article 3: Create Business to Business Buyer Personas

Article 4: The Ultimate Guide to Keyword Research

Article 5: The Stages of the Buyers Journey

Content Marketing Series Part 1

If you’ve ever sat down to create an online B2B Marketing strategy, you’ve likely realized that at times it can be tough to wrap your arms and mind around what it is you should be doing and why you should be doing it. Over the next couple of weeks we’re going to dive into some of the “how to’s” that will help you establish, meet and exceed your online B2B marketing goals.

But, before we can do that we have to first determine what your goals are. For our discussion and moving forward we’re going to define three goals that you want your online marketing to achieve.

The Three Top Online B2B Marketing Goals

Drive More Visitors to Your Website
Capture More Leads from Your Website
Close More Sales from Your Website
Each of these goals builds on the prior goal as we move from capturing attention to capturing dollars.
Online B2B Marketing Tactics

As we take a more in-depth look at each of these goals we’ll cover some of the following topics:

To drive more leads to our website we’re going to look at the three primary inbound methods which include blog writing, social media publishing and email marketing. We’ll look at keyword research, which should be the foundation for your online marketing, and how that carries over to your website through on-page optimization. Content is extremely important in driving traffic so we’ll discuss how to re-purpose content, and how to use social media to expand the reach of your content.
Once you have more traffic coming to your site you need to capture more of these visitors as leads. To improve your lead capture efforts we’re going to look at what a conversion process looks like. We’ll cover how to capture leads from blogs, social posts and email. And finally how do we get more leads from our existing and new traffic using conversion optimization.
The final goal is to close more sales. Once you’ve captured the leads its time to start developing them and moving your leads through the conversion funnel. We’ll star with a discussion of the different life cycle stages in the buying process. Then we’ll take a look at a lead nurture work flow, cover how to score leads, and then walk through how you up-sell or cross-sell.
The online B2B marketing strategy that we’re going to be pulling together with these posts is based on the concept of inbound marketing. Inbound marketing, in case you’re not 100% sure what that means, is defined by wikipedia as “marketing activities that bring visitors in, rather than marketers having to go out to get prospects’ attention. Inbound marketing earns the attention of customers, makes the company easy to be found, and draws customers to the website by producing interesting content.”

Inbound Marketing Verses Outbound Marketing

A good example of a outbound marketing tactic is a TV commercial. You are kicked back enjoying your favorite television show and a commercial comes on and interrupts you to catch your attention. Inbound marketing on the other hand draws in interested visitors using content. For example you write a post that helps your prospects identify and resolve a key issue. When they search online for information about the topic they see a link to your blog post and choose to click over and read it.

Which do you think is likely to be more effective …interruption or attraction.

Each of the topics above will be covered in its own blog post. As we release new articles we’ll link to them from this blog post. You can also subscribe to our blog so that as soon as we release a new article you will be notified.

Before getting into the details with the next post, let’s take a look at some statistics about Inbound Marketing that show how effective it is as a marketing vehicle.

Inbound marketing costs 62% less than traditional outbound marketing. (Hubspot)
Inbound marketing drives 54% more leads than outbound marketing. (Hubspot)
B2B companies that blog generate 67% more leads than companies that don’t blog. (Hubspot)
80% of decision-makers prefer to get company information in a series of article s instead of in an advertisement. (Content Marketing Institute)
These are only a few of the numerous stats available that show the value of implementing a content marketing strategy for a B2B company. Thanks for reading and we hope you enjoy the upcoming series.

Be sure to subscribe to our blog updates to be notified each time a new article in this series is published.

Check Out the Articles in This Series That Have Been Published

Article 1: Build A Better B2B Marketing Strategy

Article 2: Creating Your Comprehensive B2B Marketing Strategy

Article 3: Create Business to Business Buyer Personas

Article 4: The Ultimate Guide to Keyword Research

Article 5: The Stages of the Buyers Journey

Have questions or need help with your online marketing? Call us at 678-951-9506 or contact us.