30dps Blog

Conversational marketing is a term that’s been around for some time. However, it’s coming back to the forefront for marketing pros these days. Conversational marketing is a segment of inbound marketing that involves participating in one-on-one conversations with customers and prospective customers whenever and wherever they want to interact. If they want to communicate via Slack at 7 a.m., make that possible. If they prefer to connect via text at 9 p.m., ensure that you can accommodate that request. 

Building relationships and growing sales requires two things: 1) The desire to improve your results, and 2) the tools for doing so. One great new suite of interaction enablers is the Service Hub from HubSpot. It's a comprehensive set of tools that empowers your team to deliver an exceptional customer experience. I'll blog more about it soon, as it's proving to be a game-changer for our clients and can surely help any organization that wants to have more fruitful conversations with its customers. For now, just know that Service Hub has features like live chat, automatic email routing, support ticket generation, and much more.

Dictionary.com defines personification as “the attribution of human nature or character to animals, inanimate objects, or abstract notions” or “the representation of a thing or abstraction in the form of a person.” You may have noticed that advertisers are using that approach to great effect these days. And their success can provide a cue for your inbound marketing.

These are exciting times in inbound marketing, with new strategies and tactics being developed faster than ever before. However, this means that “what works” for building a brand, increasing lead generation, and growing sales is changing rapidly too. At our Colorado Springs inbound marketing agency, we stress the importance of data-driven marketing and of staying on top of the tactics that are driving results, both for your company and for other marketers.

If your company is like most, your website is the cornerstone of your inbound marketing efforts. As the first “salesperson” that prospects encounter, it’s critical that your site is fine-tuned at all times. Nevertheless, it’s not uncommon to have a “set it (up) and forget it” mentality. As one of the top inbound marketing agencies, with teams in Colorado, Washington, and Missouri, we are also one of the most doggedly persistent in encouraging clients to take another look at their site because we know even small tweaks can have a big impact on engagement and conversion rates.

You’ll sometimes hear a discipline described as “simple, but not easy.” That label is perfect for inbound marketing. You create interesting and informative content, offer it to your prospects for free, and then nurture your relationship with them until they become customers. Simple. Unfortunately, as one of the top inbound marketing agencies in Colorado and Missouri, we know from experience that it’s not as easy as it sounds. Success in inbound marketing requires more than great material. There are a number of other key components you must have in place if you want your inbound program to thrive.

Lead nurturing is the process of repeatedly reaching out to a prospect as they make their way into and through the sales funnel. The goal is to provide helpful content that answers the questions the prospect has at each point along their buyer's journey. Lead nurturing creates confidence in your prospect that your solution is what they need. That’s a little different than the old-school approach to marketing, which was to send a list of product features and functions to a prospect, and if they were interested, great—and if not, so be it. While that sort of “one and done” approach didn’t require a lot of time and effort, it was not, as you can imagine, very effective.

As one of the top HubSpot agencies in Colorado, we know that if there’s one eternal truth about the best ways to get website visitors to convert, it’s that there’s no eternal truth about the best ways to get website visitors to convert! As a marketer, what you must do is revisit the constantly evolving best practices and review your website regularly in light of them to ensure you’re maximizing your chances of turning visitors into leads—and ultimately into customers. Interestingly, this “never rest” approach falls right in line with the growth-driven design (GDD) concept that we're such fans of.  

At first blush, inbound marketing seems to be as exceptionally simple as it is effective. You just create and promote great content on a regular basis and soon you’ll have a consistent flow of solid leads that turn into closed deals. However, as people new to the strategy soon learn, there are a number of potential problems you can encounter. Knowing what they are and how to avoid them can make the difference between budget well spent and wasted.

How’s that for a head-scratcher of a headline? Another way to state it would be that “... the Answer is Answers.” What I’m getting at is that at the end of the day, the primary reason visitors come to your website is to get their questions answered. “Can it do what I need it to do?” “Is it as cool as it looks in the ad?” “Does it come with a warranty?” “How much does it cost?”

When we truly committed to inbound marketing, the difference was profound. We'd been talking the talk for a long time, and we're certainly believers in content marketing, but we'd never really walked the walk. The data supporting a move to inbound is pretty compelling. For most small to medium-sized businesses, and many large businesses, inbound marketing should be a huge part of the marketing mix, or even the cornerstone around which marketing strategies are built. The worst thing you can do however, is to merely pay lip service to inbound marketing, because an inbound strategy that lacks commitment is a high-risk proposition. Here are the top five risks associated with a failure to commit to inbound marketing.

There is little doubt that outbound marketing is still an effective tool, especially for big national brands with huge marketing budgets. Even for certain types of small to medium-sized businesses, outbound marketing can be an important tool for getting the word out. But there is little question today, that for many types of businesses, inbound marketing pays significantly higher dividends than more traditional outbound marketing. Here are five clear ways that inbound takes the prize.

As much as we talk about the details and inner workings of inbound marketing, we sometimes fail to clarify WHY we are such big proponents. We have discussed the different elements of inbound and content marketing, and hopefully shed some light on the pitfalls and challenges. But here are four reasons why we LOVE inbound marketing and content marketing:

When used well, inbound marketing is a strategy that can deliver outstanding results—especially for those companies that have the wisdom and the patience to watch it mature and blossom. However, there are a number of pitfalls that can leave you spinning your wheels and not taking full advantage of all that content marketing has to offer. Understanding what these pitfalls are and how to avoid them is critically important.

I would love to tell you that I've always believed in, and maintained the discipline of, consistently documenting my goals. The truth, however, is that I've been largely undisciplined in this area up until a few years ago. One of my personal heroes has long been the legendary Zig Ziglar. His repeated admonition to write down your goals across all areas of your life and review them consistently ultimately won me over. I now have all of my goals documented, and I review them every Monday morning at 8:30. I'm still a long way from being where I'd like to be, and sometimes fail to make my goals precise enough to be doable and measurable, but I'm certainly making progress. On the personal front, I've had the goal of increasing the organization of my work spaces at home, and am pleased to announce that I finally cleaned out the garage that has hindered my accomplishment of that goal. On the business side, I've long hoped to see 30dps become a top marketing agency in Colorado and expand competitively into other areas of the country. Having just recently started staffing in Springfield, Missouri, and Olympia, Washington, I'm convinced that it was establishing goals and reviewing them regularly that helped drive this accomplishment.

Inbound marketing is an ongoing, long-term strategy that requires the same kind of discipline in goal setting. Without tangible goals, your inbound marketing will, as with other things, benefit greatly from goal setting. Setting goals, and frequently reviewing and monitoring your progress towards those goals, is essential to successfully accomplishing them. You have probably heard of SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable,Relevant and Time-bound) goal setting, but perhaps you struggle with how to engage your inbound marketing using the same principal. Here are six steps you should take.

As you define and implement your inbound marketing strategy, you will, no doubt, have certain expectations about everything from the quality of your branded content to the timeliness of its publication. However, those expectations should not be set in stone. The happiest and most successful content marketers are those who display a high degree of flexibility even as they stay focused on producing outstanding results.

You’ve started producing a consistent stream of fresh, engaging content for your inbound marketing program and are leveraging it through a marketing automation system like HubSpot. At long last that material is beginning to draw increasing numbers of visitors to your website.

You give your team a much deserved pat on the back as you wait for the new leads to start coming in. But they don’t. At least not in the numbers your growing web traffic would seem to suggest that you should expect. “What’s going on?” you ask.

Did you know the average person is exposed to almost 10,000 branded messages per day? From the moment they wake up and brush their teeth to when they end the day snuggling up on the couch to their favorite TV show, consumers are being bombarded with brands starving for their attention. And in this digital age, it's getting even easier for "them" to reach their audience anywhere, any time. Whether it be pop-up digital banners, an autoplaying video, or sponsored social media posts, more and more consumers are getting more and more agitated with the ever growing presence of online ads. And we hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it's only getting worse.   

Throughout our 28+ year history, we have had some great nonprofit clients. The nature of these organizations is all over the place, including the following:

• Christian ministries
• Churches
• Curriculum publishers
• Book publishers
• Relief organizations
• Political action committees
• Political parties
• Senior housing
• Mental health services

While all of these organizations have been a delight to work with, in recent years, those that have proven to be the most successful from a marketing perspective are the ones that have recognized the challenges that are surfacing as we shift from the age of information to the age of experience. Inbound marketing, marketing automation, content marketing, and growth-driven design techniques are a perfect way to address those challenges.

A properly planned and executed inbound-marketing strategy maximizes the return on every dollar spent on marketing and fundraising, while potentially improving the impact of the core services that support the organization's mission—making it ideal for most nonprofit organizations.

Inbound marketing is certainly not for everyone. It is really only for those that are passionate about doing things differently than they've been done in the past—those that are committed to creating meaningful and lasting relationships with customers, not just saying whatever is necessary to close the sale. While almost all of us would agree that the former is superior to the latter, much of traditional marketing and advertising is solidly rooted in the latter.

We talk a lot about both inbound marketing and content marketing here at 30dps. While neither notion is really new, both terms have grown sharply in popularity and acceptance in just the last few years.

Driven in large part by two firms (i.e. inbound marketing by HubSpot and content marketing by Content Marketing Institute), the interest in these two terms has exploded in recent years, as reflected in this Google Trends chart.

Even here on our blog we often speak of them as if they were the same thing (largely for the sake of simplicity), but the truth is, they are signficiantly different. So for those who do not know this distinction, we'll try to clarify.