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. 

Let’s be honest - if you aren’t blogging, then you need to be; and if you are blogging but don’t see the benefit, then it’s time to re-evaluate your blogging strategy.

There are a number of ways to determine the ROI of your blog, and those ultimately depend on your goals. However, we’ve determined one way that may help you in determining if you are getting the ROI you need and what’s included in that calculation.

See, here’s the thing: if you are only blogging for blogging sake, then you are going to see a minimal return on investment. Read on to learn about what it takes to get a maximum ROI for blogging.

It's unfortunate that we continue to see common misconceptions about the merits of blogging. Blogging may have gotten a bad reputation over the years, with (it seems) everyone who has an opinion having a blog, sharing their educated (and sometimes uneducated) opinions to the “blogosphere.”

Although that particular kind of blogging can be unprofessional and (many times) unimportant clutter, company blogs are actually a great way to upload fresh, relevant content to your website.

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Confession: I am obsessed with research. I will spend hours poring over information to ensure that I have all the facts and angles figured out.

I also happen to be very skeptical when doing research, wondering: Who’s credible? Is what I’m reading just a ploy to convince me of something or are there others who agree?

That said, I am a huge believer in reading reviews, Googling additional information, and… checking the comments section.

If your company has been blogging for years, you have likely had many campaigns that have inspired blogs posts. But now that those campaigns have ended, you may be wondering: “What purpose do these posts serve now that my campaigns are over?”

Besides the obvious SEO benefit of blog posts, there is another benefit to keeping them in your repertoire: You can recycle them.

Here are a few ways to repurpose your old content to drive user engagement and traffic to new campaigns.

Safe content sucks. It certainly isn’t a revolutionary statement. It’s actually a pretty obvious statement. However, the concept becomes extremely daunting when you think about applying it to your veterinary practice’s marketing plan. You’re probably thinking: “Damn it, Jim, I’m a Doctor, not a risk taker.” (if you got that reference, I like you already).

Imagine this scenario: You publish a blog on your prestigious and professional site about….

Dog crap.

In college, I had a class that really helped me develop a greater understanding of content. We studied how content affects individuals differently and evaluated how and why people engage more with varying types of content. One area of focus was interactive content.

"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.

Creating relevant and compelling content isn't as simple as randomly choosing a topic. There are very specific steps to take to successfully create content that reaches your target audience. I happened to learn these through experience. I like to call it: