Inbound Marketing Blog

You've pored over buyer personas and invested in understanding your audience. You've concocted a compelling offer, a valuable piece of content, a meaningful event. You've got what they want. You've got what they need. You're a marketing genius. 

The goal of any inbound marketing campaign is to convert your audience, your contacts, your leads, your prospects, into paying customers and raving fans of your business. And when you create an offer or an event, you are engaging that audience and showing them you've got what it takes to earn their business. You are building a relationship and earning trust and proving that your company can best serve their needs or that your product will solve their problems.

The best part is that people will just know you've done all that work and will just find your offer. 

Oh, wait. That's not right.

This is where your campaign collateral comes in. These assets are the big flashing arrows pointing people to your offer. They are placed where your audience already spends time online and create a path to your offer.

Below, we've listed a few of the major assets associated with pretty much every inbound marketing campaign and provided best practices to increase conversions. Keep these in mind when creating collateral for your next campaign. 

In 2015, when we started planning our first  Web Marketing Checkup Clinic, I wrote the original version of this blog post. Now that we've hosted a few of these checkup clinics, as well as conducted countless one-on-one checkups for clients and non-clients alike, I thought I would revisit how it all began and why this exercise is so important to us.

Hopefully, you've had the opportunity to have a web marketing checkup or have joined us for another workshop or event, here at the Tribute Media office. If you have, you know two things:

1) They are always fun and educational

2) Corey cooks some mean BBQ

But other than food and fun, why do we do it? Why do we lend our time and expertise to businesses... FOR FREE?

In short: Because we love building businesses.

)

When I first started hearing about this idea of sales and marketing being a strained relationship, I didn't really understand. At that point, I think I had just been very lucky that all my experiences with marketing and sales alignment were positive. It was just a big ol' love fest over here at Tribute Media.

But I've seen the data. I've watched some of our clients struggle. And ultimately, the proof is in the numbers.

For those looking to improve the relationship, alignment, and general understanding between these two departments, here are a few super simple ideas to get you started.

Best Places to Work in Idaho 2016

Last year, Jillian and I attended the Best Places to Work in Idaho ceremony for the first time. We felt proud to be surrounded by so many incredible local employers, and we were buzzing with anticipation (and maybe a little wine).

Autumn Kersey of Treasure Valley Children's Theater began calling up winners from our category. Believe me, we were so honored to be there, we would have been thrilled to be called up first to accept the 10th place award. With each winner that wasn't us, our eyes grew wider. 10th, 9th, 8th, 7th--and these were amazing companies we respect and admire! We couldn't believe it when Autumn announced her "friends in downtown Meridian, Tribute Media" for 5th place.

While developing one of the latest tools we'll be offering on our website—a nifty campaign planning tool and webinar—I thought I'd whip up a truncated, tactical guide to planning an inbound marketing campaign. Of course, seeing as we'll need a webinar AND a workbook to take you through what it takes to plan and manage a campaign, this post is only meant to guide you through at a very high level. 

Here is a quick look at the many elements of an inbound marketing campaign—a TL;DR version, if you will…

For the first several years from the advent of social media, businesses could take advantage of a HUGE audience to peddle their wares and promote their offerings FOR FREE. Could it be too good to be true?!?!

In short: yes.

"What can you do for me?"

Site visitors will be looking at many types of content on your website to try to uncover this information, but one effective way to help answer that question for them is to include a section for testimonials that showcase customer delight. When a site visitor reads success stories and learns how your business's products or services solved problems for your existing customers, it can help the new prospect move through the buyer's journey by showing them how they can benefit from working with you.

UPDATE: Thursday, April 14, we attended the Best Places to Work in Idaho award ceremony. It was a lovely event that brought together many of Idaho's top employers. As if it weren't enough to be surrounded by so many amazing people committed to being employers of choice, we also had the honor of accepting the award for 5th place in our category!

Each year Best Places to Work in Idaho awards several businesses in different categories the honor of being the best place to work. We are elated to announce that one of 2016’s winners in the category of Micro Employers (10 – 19 employees) was Tribute Media! We will now hold for applause and melodramatic adulation.