Inbound Marketing Blog

Last week, some of the Tribute team attended INBOUND, an annual conference in Boston filled with actionable education, endless inspiration, human connections and amazing keynote speakers. After those four and a half days of straight learning (and a bit of fun), we left Boston with over 32 pages of notes on how we could improve our client marketing strategies as well as our client experiences.

As we’re sharing these visions with the rest of our team and our clients, we wanted to touch on a few of the major takeaways that can be useful for everyone.

Making the decision to outsource your business’s marketing efforts can be very difficult. Handing off the reins to an outside company can be scary, especially for small businesses that don’t have the resources to put a ton of money into their marketing efforts. We can’t all afford to run campaigns like Coca-Cola, Sony or Starbucks. However, there are many things to be learned from these big brands.

When I began blogging, I took the approach of purely factual and informative writing. Can I be honest? It was boring to write, and even more boring to read. Nobody cares to read blogs that are full of information and lack the human touch. Information is important, sure. However, it's how you present that information that determines its success. If you're looking to engage your audience more than you currently are, you've come to the right place.

You and Google have something in common: you both love fresh, quality content that is full of substance, easily digestible, and relevant. 

Yes.

I don’t know about you, but I like to check out several companies (online and in person) when searching for a particular product or service. If time permits, I could be searching for several hours. Researching is always my go-to when I'm on the hunt for something specific. You wouldn't believe the time my husband and I recently put into finding a new mattress. In our search, there were a few factors that really swayed us in our decision. Quality of the product and how it solved our needs were obviously the top two. But the third factor had to do with the companies themselves. Our online experience with each company played a huge part in  determining which stores we actually wanted to take time to go to in order to try the mattresses. Let me tell you, there were a lot of brands we dismissed right away. Maybe their product WAS as great as they tried to market it to be, but the experience we had on their websites and the reviews they had floating around swayed our minds away from doing business with them.  Why was that?

It seems like every other day I’m getting an email about why link building is dead or a new strategy on how to do link building. I’ll admit, I don’t read about 90% of those emails (mostly because they’re from questionable sources). But every now and then, an email will have a catchy, humorous, or interesting subject line that beckons me to open. Most of the time, the email or link in the email is to hire that company to do link building. Slightly ironic considering we do that ourselves at Tribute Media, but also making their email irrelevant to me since I don’t need those services. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s take a step back.

Regardless of which mass media routes you're using to market your business, it is vital that you take the time to have a comprehensive plan in place. Without a thoughtful plan, you risk wasting valuable time and money on unfruitful marketing efforts. 

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In the Elements of an Inbound Marketing Campaign, we covered:

• A checklist for the technical aspects of an inbound marketing campaign, including landing pages, thank you pages, follow-up emails and workflows.
• Ways to drive traffic to your offers via additional types of content such as blog and social media posts, as well as emails.
• And the kind of skill sets you’ll need to make it all happen, including a designer, web developer, writer and a Google SEO specialist.

With all of those basics laid out, we wanted to delve deeper into the email marketing portion. Although many businesses (maybe even yours) may dismiss email as simple one-on-one digital communication that doesn't require strategy, it is actually a powerful tool that too many businesses miss out on because they don't understand how it can be used for so much more.

Truth be told, I’ve never fancied myself a writer. I would classify myself as a reader--someone who enjoys reading fiction and non-fiction book, blogs, and stories. I’m not bad at writing, and I don’t dislike the thought of having to write a blog or any kind of content to be put on the internet, I just never thought of myself as a writer in the way I had perceived that title.