Inbound Marketing Blog

Originally published on August 5, 2011 and continues to be relevant. Enjoy! As a service provider, we often have clients ask us to help them “increase awareness.” As one of the people responsible for wrapping this often undefined goal in some metrics, I’ve had to figure out what this really means. Often clients aren’t able to distill this goal down into something measurable. But, to gauge our effectiveness, it’s critical that we work together to do so. I’ll attempt to reveal some of the measures that CAN be used. However, as with all things like this, before adopting them for your awareness metrics, make sure these are really measuring what your specific goals are. When speaking of “awareness” what we usually mean is brand awareness. We want people to think of us when doing something related to our cause, our company, or our product. When defined in this way, it becomes a little clearer what things are important to measure.more

What predictions do you have for inbound marketing in 2016? With 2016 on the horizon, that's the question we asked the MINDSCAPE team. Read on to find out what some of the team is predicting.more

Twitter: The place to be for B2B inbound marketingmore

It is often said attention spans are shorter and shorter, people can’t focus and are always on the go, much like the hare from the old children’s story we all know, The Tortoise and the Hare. While many people do enjoy sharing quick things like funny animal videos or a list of top 10 vacation spots, content marketing platform Buzzsumo discovered after analyzing 100 million articles that people enjoying and sharing long form content (the tortoise of the content industry) is on the rise.more

Try These Inbound Marketing Tips How would you describe your organization’s online marketing mix? Is it like chicken noodle soup? While it may be satisfying it just doesn’t have that extra oomph and excitement of a dish like chicken curry.more

Originally published on July 17, 2011 and continues to be relevant. Enjoy! How do you develop quality online content? What does a good content strategy look like? How is your content strategy tied to your Web marketing and SEO efforts?more

With the holiday season fast approaching, I’m sure you’ve started planning for how you’re going to take advantage of the time when consumers are eager to pull out their wallets and pony up their hard earned cash to purchase your wares. If you haven’t thought about it yet, or if you’ve been struggling to come up with ideas on how to take advantage of the period of retail abundance with your website, don’t worry, it’s not too late!more

As you work through your strategic planning process, you're probably required to submit your marketing budget for the next year. The following are the top items you’ll want to consider as you determine what your team can handle, and where you’ll need to bring in outside expertise.more

Your success with digital marketing can be amplified dramatically if you're doing this right...more

Hubspot released their 7th annual report on the State of Inbound Marketing over the weekend. And while the report clearly indicates that marketers who prefer inbound are the smartest, best looking people in the world, there’s fantastic data that you will find very helpful and relational for any size B2B, B2C, or a non-profit organization.more

Big data. It’s a phrase you’ve heard a lot the last few years. It's a $125 billion industry. But what is it, really? Big data is simply the practice of collecting large data sets that can be analyzed to show patterns, trends, and associations, especially for consumer behavior. The latest stats indicate that 90% of the world’s data has been generated in just the past few years.more

One of the most frustrating experiences for a marketing professional, or a business owner, is to invest time and energy into your marketing and receive less than desirable results. As much as you’d like to deny it, without effective marketing, you will struggle to accomplish your sales goals.more

Whether you’ve just opened for business, or you’ve been selling online for years, you’ve probably thought about or tried to increase your sales using Facebook marketing. The bad news is that most businesses get this very wrong — often alienating their Facebook fans by pelting them with a barrage of sales pitches and promotions. The good news is that it IS actually possible to increase sales through Facebook (without turning your profile into a huge electronic billboard).more

Everybody wants more leads these days! Whether it’s growing your email subscription list, identifying buying prospects, or just forming relationships with individuals interested in your industry, collecting the contact information for individuals is one of the best ways to effectively sell your products and services.more

Online marketing success has an ever increasing importance to your business’ success. For a lot of businesses this is known, but it’s hard to be effective since the web is evolving at an exponential rate. As online marketers, we have found digital data to be one of the primary keys to grow such success. Due to these benefits of data, more data is being created and analyzed every day. Now we are in an era where the term “big data” is a common term in everyday business. With the vast amount of available data points, we have realized that watching all of them is inefficient and can cause more harm than good when just one of these data points experiences significant change. To combat this fear, we have developed computed aggregates of metrics that represent one, more complete metric. It’s easier to watch and tells a broader story. This may seem like a new approach or that we’re masking the details unnecessarily however, let’s remember that this is not a new method. The stock market has done it forever and at such a success level that the DIJA, NASDAQ, and S&P 500 have continuous coverage on every news outlet.more

Imagine Sit back, take a deep breath, and imagine with me for a moment. Imagine that you could read the minds of anyone with whom you came in contact. You could read their emotions and their motivations. You would know what they wanted to hear and exactly what to say. You would understand what they wanted to achieve. You could take all of your insights and combine that with the person’s surroundings; you would know what they were doing, where they were currently and where there were headed, if they were using a mobile device, and a myriad of other small details. If they asked you a question, you could take all of this information and respond in a way that would perfectly meet their needs at that moment. If for some reason you didn't meet their expectation, you could know that and change your response. Wouldn't this be great if communication worked this way?more

In Part 1 of this series, the understanding and reasoning behind unique context and intent was discussed. Through some feedback, it became apparent that the most intriguing parts of the article happened closer to the end where I started to hint at the applied use of this theory. I thought there would no better way to help others than to show an example of this taking place. So for this part of the series, we will breakdown Google's site structure for its own product – the Nexus.more

There are many times when presenting a solid Content Strategy to our clients that some confusion sets in when they don’t find the details on the exact direction for writing a post, or insight into how many followers they will gain on a particular channel. Yes, social media is a huge part of the efforts, but it is important to look at them separately.more

This post was originally published on creativewebbusiness.com. There's been a bit of a kerfuffle lately in the Facebook marketing community regarding the changes the platform has been making to its newsfeed algorithms. Late in September, business pages began to notice engagement rates with their posts dropping through the floor. The reason is that REACH - the number of people seeing the company's posts - has plummeted as a direct result of Facebook's latest newsfeed algorithm changes. This has been going on slowly for many months, but this month it reached a head. Facebook's official statement regarding the algorithm changes is as follows: "We're continuing to optimize News Feed to show the posts that people are most likely to engage with, ensuring they see the most interesting stories. This aligns with our vision that all content should be as engaging as the posts you see from friends and family." Huh. So that's how they're going to play it.more

How are you measuring against your goals for 2012? We’re all in this together. Time goes by faster and faster, everyone is “busy.” Like many professionals and businesses, we took time in late 2011 and earlier this year to identify our goals for 2012. As we begin the planning process for next year, it is a good time to look back on those objectives and see how we’re doing. Why? Well, looking back at what you set out to do can be energizing as we head into the home stretch of the year. Remember all the planning, conversations and excitement when you set those goals? Rekindle that excitement and go for it. You still have over three months left in the year.more