As the president of a marketing agency, the most frequent objection I hear about blogging is “No one is going to go to my website to read my blog." And they're right. But that’s not how it works or why you blog.
Did you know Tribute Media hasn't had a real "salesperson" for more than a year now? While I wouldn't recommend that for most businesses, it works for us (as of this writing) because we've invested years of effort and expertise into building an inbound marketing machine that brings in enough leads who are already qualified, well-educated, and nurtured. From there, it's much easier for me to see them through to "closing the deal." As president of the agency, I wear many other hats and have much more responsibility beyond selling, so keeping track of active leads in HubSpot's CRM and using automation tools is essential to sustaining this model.
You may have decided that you want to outsource your search engine optimization (SEO) services in order to get your site to show up on search engines like Google. But, how do you find the right person or agency? What questions should you ask, and what answers should you be wary of as you start to have these conversations?
If you are a local business—usually meaning a brick and mortar shop or service provider with a physical location—you can benefit from claiming and updating your Google My Business Page. Google My Business profiles are almost like a second website—a second opportunity to show up in Google’s search results, yet too many businesses leave this opportunity on the table.
One of the most common questions we hear as a web marketing agency is, "What is a CMS?" This is usually after one of us annoyingly drops this jargony acronym in a conversation with a new client or prospect. To which we sheepishly reply, "Oh, sorry! It stands for Content Management System." Which is often followed by: "What is a content management system?"
More than five years ago, Tribute Media announced an experiment called "Office Free Fridays." We shared far and wide on social media and sent an email to all our clients, letting them know what to expect. We wanted to help our employees with work-life balance, but frankly, we were a little concerned our clients would be upset with us.
If you build a website and never put it on the internet, is it really a website?
This is not a deep philosophical question. It has a simple answer.
NO.
A development site is like an unsent email in your draft folder or all those baby pictures of your teenager on your phone that you keep meaning to back up to your computer or maybe even print and hang on the wall.
So then why are there so many websites living in the purgatory of a development environment instead of on the world wide web?
This is not a rhetorical question. It also has a simple, though not as brief, answer.
"Without Hubspot's automation, we would have relied on manual efforts to vet more than 1,000 individuals manually. By automating the vetting process, the majority of the candidates that were not ready to move forward were able to exit the process on their own saving hundreds of hours for the all-volunteer staff."
- Corey Smith, SHP CMO