Inbound Marketing Blog

If you are active in Google Analytics, you have probably noticed the latest update made to the "homepage." The new update automatically brings useful and relevant data to the front page of a Google Analytics account, making it easier for users to locate important information in a timely fashion. I talked to one of Mindscape's strategists, Han Lee, to see what he had to say about the update.more

Are your marketing emails not performing quite as well as you might like in terms of click through rates and conversions? Improving email performance doesn’t have to mean completely overhauling your email templates or coming up with an entirely new email strategy. Sometimes making a few small changes can make a huge difference, particularly if they are ones that make your emails easier to read and more visually appealing.more

I was going about my day today, texting friends, checking emails, perusing social media, I realized that no matter where I looked, I encountered GIFs (or Global Interchange Format). They were being used in Facebook ads, emails from my favorite stores, I even saw a few popping up in website content.more

I want you to think back to elementary school. What do you remember most? A favorite game you played at recess? A favorite lunch that your mom used to pack for you? How about a favorite school subject? One of the things that I remember most about elementary school is my favorite subject, Reading & Writing.more

The days where your college website could skate by on pure information and a design comparable to that of a hotel lobby brochure are long gone. You need a little more to make your website unique and appealing to the wide variety of people who visit it (alumni, current students, parents and especially prospective students). There are a plethora of website designs and content trends that you can experiment with to set your school’s website apart.more

By now, we're all probably aware of the extreme results video content can produce. Including video content in an email leads to a 200-300% increase in click-through rate, including a video on a landing page can lead to an 80% increase in conversion rate, after watching a video 64% of users are more likely to buy a product online (Hubspot). I mean, with one trip to the search engines, you can turn up a plethora of positive video content statistics - seriously, I just did it and found all of these:more

Throw away your laundry list. How a good story can make your content more compelling. The other day I was perusing Netflix, trying to decide what to watch. In its infinite wisdom, Netflix suggested one of my favorite shows, Mad Men. For those of you who aren't familiar, Mad Men is a period drama set in the 1960's at a New York advertising agency. The plot is full of drama, intrigue, and — marketing wisdom? Let me explain. On Mad Men, the advertising agencies focus on creating elaborate campaigns to sell products to consumers, we're talking storyboards, characters, themes and in-depth narratives, almost like they were creating mini-movies. Things usually culminate with the suave leading man, Don Draper, giving a grand client presentation telling an amazing story. It happens that the same imaginative thought process and crafting of storytelling narratives used by Mad Men can be — and should — be applied to creating content for your B2B website.more

Advice for measuring website performance for people who think they're too busy to measure website performance. The blessing of a website is that everything is measurable. The curse of a website … is that everything is measurable. Do people click red buttons more than blue buttons? Which verb works best for a Call-to-Action? What percentage of people visiting my site are coming from the Ukraine? Knowing what, when, and how to measure can be overwhelming. However, it doesn’t have to be. Our Chief Operating Officer is an incredibly intelligent guy, and when he’s considering site metrics, he focuses on just five numbers. Five isn’t so bad. You have five senses; five pockets in your Levi's, and five days in your work week — okay, five days in your *average* work week. Anyway, if you want a snapshot of performance, here are the five numbers that are most important to your website.more

So you've written the perfect email. It has everything. The design is glorious, the content is nothing less than brilliant, and the CTA you threw at the bottom is so clickable it hurts. But you have a problem...lately your email open rates have been abysmally low. You don't want to send out your masterpiece only to have it waste away in the dusty inboxes of your list members.more

Here at Mindscape, we have a philosophy that scares a lot of people: if you think something might work, try it. I know, horrifying, right? Well, to a lot of people it actually is. There is this idea floating around that any possible change you make in your digital marketing strategy could be devastating; any subtle copy alteration, navigation change, or shift in social tone could be the destruction of your company. Honestly, I have no idea where this fear came from and why it has any bearing on anyone's decisions. If we never tried anything new, how would we learn and grow? Every single marketing norm that we embrace today, was once just an idea in the back of some go-getters head. It's as simple as that. If you want to make your business the best it can be, you have to be willing to test things out and try new things. Below are a few things to keep in mind when trying to break away from the norm.more

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Less is more. Quality over quantity. These old adages can hold true when it comes to gifts, interior decorating and ... digital marketing. Yes, you read that right. There are many instances in the world of digital and Inbound marketing, where quality is much more important than quality. For instance:more

Website content, blog posts, social media, emails; there are so many avenues that colleges and universities can use to create digital content and communicate with their prospective audiences. This variety can be a blessing and a curse, depending on how you slice it. But either way, it can be a challenge. We asked some of the colleges and universities that we work with what some of their biggest challenges are when it comes to creating digital content and here is what they had to say:more

I am a huge fan of superheroes - Superman, Batman, X-Men; I love them all. So any chance I get to make a superhero analogy I take it, and I think this is one of those chances, so bear with me.more

My girlfriend likes to test me from time to time. She likes to subtly slip little questions into our everyday conversation to see if I know things. Her favorite color, favorite animal, what kind of ice cream she likes best (trick question, she's lactose intolerant). Over the years, I have gotten pretty good at paying attention to the little stuff and answering these questions without a second thought... but for some reason, I never know what to get her for her birthday.more

Jane owns a small coffee shop in a busy metropolitan area. As a responsible business owner, she is aware of how many people come into her shop, what they order, and if for some reason they leave without ordering anything (something she notices has been happening more often lately).more

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In the Wild West (or at least how it's portrayed in the movies) the "good guys" wore white cowboy hats and the "bad guys" wore black cowboys hats. But "white hats" and "black hats" aren't just for the Wild West anymore, now they show up in the technology sphere. Recently, the term "black hat" has been used to describe computer hackers, virus creators, and others who perform unethical actions with computers. Some of these unethical actions can include aggressive SEO tactics, like:more