Do These 5 Things To Master Inbound Marketing

In recent years, inbound marketing has meant everything to the marketing and entrepreneurial community. Thanks in part to the decline of user trust in brands and advertising (which in turn has led to the decline of traditional advertising), the alternative—naturally attracting customers by putting your brand in places they’d seek out naturally—is far more cost-efficient and rewarding.

“Inbound marketing,” though, is a collective term referring to a number of different strategies, all working together in complex ways. These include content marketing, SEO, social media marketing, and influencer marketing, just to name a few. There’s no surefire recipe for success (not that there ever was for outbound marketing or traditional ads), so many new marketers and entrepreneurs feel intimidated to step into this world.

There are probably hundreds of articles worth of information on the subject, but if you’re looking for the top factors for success in inbound marketing to get started, or if you’re trying to refine your own approach, these five fundamentals are necessary for a successful campaign:

1. Start with a well-researched strategy.

 There are two components to this deceptively simple tenet, and both are vital: “research” and “strategy.” First, you’ll need a formally documented strategy. It’s not enough to “know in your head” what you’re trying to do, or start off with a basic concept and just wing it the rest of the way. You need to know exactly what your goals are, exactly what resources you’re going to allocate, and exactly who on your team will be responsible for executing what. Without this strategy, your campaign will meander aimlessly, and more importantly, you’ll have no basis of comparison to see what kind of progress you’ve been able to make. Second, don’t just base your strategy on instinct or one-off brainstorming; base your strategies, ideas, and goals on hard research, whether that’s competitive, strategic, or demographic based.

2. Understand the difference between expenses and investments.

Traditional ads and outbound marketing have historically been treated as expenses; you pay a fixed amount of money for a given service or opportunity, and you get a finite amount of value in return over a fixed period of time. Inbound marketing strategies, on the other hand, are more like investments. You’ll pour money and energy into them, building measurable equity in the form of online assets, visibility, and reputation, and the more you invest, the more you’ll reap over the course of time. It’s a long-term strategy that usually won’t start paying off right away, so you might be fooled into thinking it’s ineffective if you only think of it as an expense and don’t give it enough time. You’re investing in your brand with inbound marketing, so plan accordingly.

3. Know how complementary strategies interact. 

There are dozens of strategies that could be considered part of “inbound marketing”, and you’ll need to at least familiarize yourself with them if you want to be successful. While it’s possible to see decent results by focusing on these strategies one at a time, it’s far more effective if you learn how to lace these strategies together, understanding how they complement and enhance each other. For example, using content to fuel your social media strategy could earn you more visibility, which can lead to more inbound link, which will, in turn, boost your search engine rankings. In this relationship, one move—the sharing of content on social media—affects your performance across three distinct strategies (content, SEO, and social). Know these relationships inside and out to maximize the potential value of every action you take.

4. Measure everything. 

This should be a tenet for any marketing strategy, but it’s especially important in the inbound realm. Regularly take measurements of your inbound traffic, your user behavior, your conversion rates, and everything in between. Compare these numbers on a month-to-month basis to see how your strategies are performing, especially over the long term. More importantly, these numbers are going to be what you use to determine whether your new experimental strategies are paying off; for example, let’s say you introduce a new type of content to your campaign. How can you know whether it’s an effective addition if you don’t have any numbers to compare your performance to?

5. Adapt constantly. 

Speaking of experiments and adjustments, you’ll need to adjust constantly if you want your campaign to be effective. Even if you start with a fully fleshed-out, well-researched conceptual strategy, it’s almost impossible to reach your full potential right off the bat. Even if you do, your available resources, technologies, and audiences will change over time, and if you want to stay relevant, you’ll have to change with them. Be prepared to make adjustments to your strategy, sometimes overhauling major components of it. It’s risky, yes, but you can always reverse your approach if you find your original methods worked out better. If you stand still for too long, you’ll either become obsolete, or a competitor will surpass you.

It’s impossible to reduce inbound marketing to a singular concept, since it can work across so many different strategies and so differently for different brands, but these five fundamentals will help you be a better inbound marketer no matter what your direction or strategic approach entail. Being an inbound marketer takes practice, experience, and refinement, like any other area, so don’t neglect your own personal abilities as you develop your methods.

FREE Cork Event:

Sales & Marketing Workshop

Where: Rochestown Park Hotel, Cork

When: June 29th 2016

Time: 9.30am - 11.30am

10 Communication Skills That Are Crucial to Sales Success

Good communication is crucial to sales success.

Sounds obvious, right? You can’t make a sale unless you’ve demonstrated value to a prospect. You can’t do that unless you’ve understood their problems and devised a strategy to solve them. In turn, you can’t do that until you get your prospect to tell you what’s wrong. And so on, and so forth …

The root of it all is the ability to gather and provide information in a way that makes your prospect want to do business with you. Your value proposition, your pricing, even your product’s features -- none of that matters unless you’re able to get your prospects to talk to you and also listen to what you have to say.

So before you immerse yourself in buyer personas, case studies, and Marketing collateral, work on these 10 skills to ensure that when you’re talking to a prospect, you’re sending the right message.

10 Communication Skills the Best Salespeople Share

1) They pay full attention

We’re all busier than ever before, and selling can be an especially pressure-filled career. So it’s understandable that during a client meeting, your mind could wander over to the demo you have to prepare for this afternoon, the prospecting you forgot to do, or the contract you’re waiting on to come in.

Just because it’s understandable doesn’t make it acceptable. Showing up to a call isn’t just about physically being on the other end of the line. You have to dedicate 100% of your attention to each call, otherwise you’ll miss details and make your prospect repeat things they’ve already told you. It’ll be obvious when you’re not paying attention, and that’s no way to treat buyers.

2) They practice active listening

Not only do you have to listen, you have to listen actively, otherwise your conversation won’t really go anywhere.

“Too often, salespeople are waiting for their turn to talk or thinking about what to say next, instead of truly listening to the prospect,” HubSpot vice president sales of Peter Caputa says.

Caputa teaches HubSpot reps the following four-step process:

• Truly listen to the prospect.
• Feed back the content and feeling of the prospect’s words.
• Confirm you heard the prospect correctly.
• Ask a relevant follow up question to further clarify your understanding of their situation.

3) They can read body language and control their own

The same sentence said by someone who’s smiling, looking directly into your eyes, and sitting up straight is received very differently when the speaker is looking away and slouching -- even if they meant the same thing both times.

That’s because while we can say pretty much anything we want, our body language often reveals our true intentions or meaning. Great communicators know how to read others’ body language so they can anticipate the direction a conversation’s heading, and also make sure their own body language isn’t sending out signals they don’t mean to broadcast.

4) They’ve mastered the nuances of voice tone

Like body language, voice tone -- your voice pitch, volume, speed, and even your word choice -- affects how the words you’re actually saying are interpreted. And if you’re in inside sales, the only thing you have to make an impression is your voice.

Listen to how your prospect speaks, then mirror their speaking patterns when it makes sense. While you probably shouldn’t imitate every slang word or lingo they use, slow down if they speak slowly -- or speed things up if they talk rapidly. Match your level of formality and familiarity to your prospect as well. The key is to meet buyers on their turf -- and that means speaking in a way they’re comfortable with.

5) They are empathetic

You don’t necessarily have to agree with everything your prospect is saying, but you should always at least try to see things from their point of view. And that means more than just saying, “Hmm, I see where you’re coming from.”

The best sales reps are able to connect with their prospects because they actually understand the things their buyers do at work every day and the challenges they face. Not only does being empathetic make you more likable, it also increases your chances of closing a deal. When you can draw on your knowledge of your prospects’ actual day-to-day, you’re better equipped to understand what they care about, which makes it more likely you’ll be able to help them.

6) They understand what’s not being said

Prospects sometimes don’t tell the whole truth. And that’s okay, as long as you know how to spot when it’s happening. Is your prospect just evaluating your company because his boss told him to present three options? Is your prospect sold, but her manager, the economic buyer, isn’t? These are crucial things to know, and you can’t suss them out until you learn to read between the lines.

7) They speak in specifics

Great communicators aren’t persuasive because they speak in dramatic, sweeping rhetoric. They’re able to convince people because they can point to specific examples or anecdotes that support the point they’re trying to make -- and in the case of salespeople, because they can demonstrate exactly how a product or feature will help their buyer.

Be as specific as you can. And if you can throw in a catchy soundbite or two, by all means do it. Just don’t rely on quippy phrases to get a deal to the finish line.

8) They are subject matter experts

Of course, you can’t be specific if you don’t have any idea what you’re talking about. If you sell to a specific industry, you should know that industries’ concerns, behaviors, and buying patterns down pat. If you sell to multiple industries, know your value prop as it relates to each cold and use customer references as backup.

Prospects will never trust you if it doesn’t seem like you really understand your (or their) business, so become an expert in your relevant field.

9) They know what they don’t know

But being an expert doesn’t mean you know everything. Unless you’ve shadowed your buyer, you don’t know exactly what they do or every nuance of their business. So don’t act like you do. You should know enough to sketch out the outlines of their situation on your own, but you’ll always have to rely on your prospects to fill in the little details.

Be aware of the gaps in your knowledge, then ask your prospect to help fill them in. They’ll appreciate your honesty about what you don’t know, and you’ll avoid losing deals because of false assumptions.

10) They’re genuinely curious

The key to sales is asking good questions. And if you’re not actually curious about your prospect’s situation, it’ll be all too easy to slip into your elevator pitch before you’ve established whether any part of it is relevant to your buyer. Great communicators are naturally curious about their conversational counterparts, and that’s especially crucial in sales -- ask questions first, then answer them later.

FREE Limerick & Cork Events:

Sales & Marketing Workshop

Where: Savoy Hotel, Limerick

When: June 21st 2016
Time: 6.30pm - 8.30pm

Where: Rochestown Park Hotel, Cork

When: June 29th 2016

Time: 9.30am - 11.30am

These 3 Psychological Barriers Are Hurting Your Creativity

Psychological barriers routinely put chains around workplace creativity, stalling both projects and careers. To unlock your innovation, recognise these three most common hurdles and apply the easy fixes.

Conformity

If you're a conformist at work, you say and do what you think others expect you to do and say, aligning your beliefs, attitudes and behaviours with current norms. Honesty is difficult and, subsequently, so is building the trust you need to share your original ideas.

Fixes:

• Ask your boss for some independent projects.
• Ask questions, especially "Why...?"
• Use phrases such as "I think...", "In my opinion..." and "I would..." to remind yourself to speak with independence.
• Spend time with those from other cultures to see what others do and believe.

Fear of Judgement/Looking Like a Fool

Lower-level workers often fear being judged during the creative process because they don't want to lose the chance for perks or promotions; upper-level workers don't want to destroy the reputation they've built. If you fear being judged, you probably feel nervous when you have to show your work or are asked for your opinion. You also might think things like "If I do X, they'll..." or "I don't want them to..."

Fixes:
Tell yourself "They're on my side."
Make a list of your well-received ideas or products to remind yourself others have judged you positively and that rejection isn't guaranteed.
If you have a negative reaction to others' work, challenge yourself to identify the root of that reaction. Then come up with something positive about the concept. The less you judge others negatively, the less you'll expect others to judge you negatively, too.

Ready Acceptance of the Obvious

Obvious solutions usually are easy to come up with, but they tend to be creative wastelands. Acceptance of the obvious likely is a problem for you if don't come up with multiple options or jump to get to work without questioning what you were told to do.

Fixes:
Set aside your initial idea for 24 hours to give yourself time to think of other options and avoid selection based on hot emotional reaction.
Practise combining opposites.
Take classes, research and read so you're more aware of alternatives.

The Creativity is There--Claim it!

Most employees--including you--have creativity inside. They just need to free it. Doing this involves changing habits, which can take time and get you out of your comfort zone. The good news is, anybody can use the strategies outlined here. Recruit your coworkers and even your boss to support you, and encourage them to challenge conformity, fear of judgement and ready acceptance of the obvious, too!

FREE Limerick & Cork Events:

Sales & Marketing Workshop

Where: Savoy Hotel, Limerick

When: June 21st 2016
Time: 6.30pm - 8.30pm

Where: Rochestown Park Hotel, Cork

When: June 29th 2016

Time: 9.30am - 11.30am

9 Questions to Ask Before Creating Another Social Media Account

9 Questions to Ask Before Creating Another Social Media Account

1) Is my persona on this network?

Different social networks have different user bases -- even the major ones. For example, 72% of adult internet users are on Facebook, while only 25% are on LinkedIn, according to Pew Research Center. Each of those networks attract users for different reasons, and cater to different user behaviour.
Just because a network is hot right now, doesn't mean you should be using it. The key is to figure out where your personas are engaging on social media and figure out a strategy for connecting with them there. (Don't have personas yet? Check out our persona templates to get started.)
Note: Keep in mind that the personas you're targeting might differ between departments. For example, your recruiting department may be looking to engage with different folks than your marketing department.

2) Will this account fill a need that is different from one of my other accounts?

If you have a social channel for your company already, you likely already have an audience that's interested in receiving your content and updates. Congrats, that’s hard work.
When you start a new account, you are building that audience all over. Don't do the work for nothing. Unless there is specific content that your audience cannot receive in the original area, or there is a need to serve a new user base, there might not be reason enough to create another account.
In other words, don’t create a need for a new segment if it isn't already there. Creating a new account should be to drive a business need, not to create one from scratch.

3) Do I have the time required to build an account?

If you are going to have a handle represent your brand it is important for that handle to be meeting the expectations of the customers. Most commonly that means building a sizeable following and consistently posting to the account. Otherwise, the handle can look inconsistent with your other handles -- or worse, dormant.
That being said, it takes time to build and publish to a new account (multiple hours a week for several weeks). This is a laborious process that requires a big time commitment in order to be successful. Before committing to your new account, take a look at the calendar and see what your team can realistically handle.

4) Do I have the time required to monitor the account?

This is the one that surprises most people. When you open up a direct channel of communication, your audience will use it. Being able to monitor an account is imperative for a good brand experience. This expectation of service can be great if you’re looking to start a support account, but trickier if your account has primarily a marketing function.
Keep in mind that expectations will be different depending on the network you're considering. On Twitter, 70% of surveyed users expect a response from brands, and 53% want that response in under an hour. Brands that don’t respond actually hurt their brand reputation. Facebook is also encouraging faster responses by giving brands who respond to 90% of messages within 5 minutes a “very responsive” icon on their pages.
While you may have a slightly longer grace period for brand comments (like on Facebook or Instagram), when people are reaching out to you directly on an account, they are doing it because they want a rapid response.
Check out this handy guide to learn how to monitor your social media effectively.

5) What is the plan for content planning/creating?

This may be the most time-consuming part of your social strategy, but some (myself included) would say it’s the most important. Content is what will keep your social channel front of mind, and it’s also what will bring in the views, interactions, and leads. Suffice to say, when creating a channel you should have a plan for sustained content creation.
When thinking about your new social channel, consider where you will be getting the material and how you’ll be able to sustain this to create multiple posts a week. Remember, this content should also serve a unique function from your existing accounts.

6) How many posts/week am I able to commit to this account?

Posting consistency is key. Once you have a content plan, be sure that you’re able to keep up a consistent posting schedule as well. After all, your accounts aren’t doing much for you if you’re not posting from them. Dormant accounts also can give off the impression that you don’t care, or can’t commit to brand followers.
Exactly how often you post is dependent on network and industry, but you should plan to have at least 1-2 Facebook posts a week, and 4-5 on Twitter (if not more). For some of the quieter networks with less links to click (think: Snapchat, Instagram, etc.), you can manage posting a couple of times a month, rather than weekly.
Need help figuring out a posting schedule? Check out our templates.

7) Do I have budget to help build/scale this account?

Money talks on social media. This is an unfortunate truth we are seeing more and more often. While you don't really need budget to build out an account, a little spend can go a long way for boosting posts or putting yourself in front of new followers -- especially on algorithm-dependent networks such as Facebook.
If you choose to put your money behind advertising in social, watch it carefully. Define goals beforehand, and put it into a network that is really worthwhile for you. Each network has a slightly different way of handling paid advertising. For more on how to navigate paid social advertising, check out this free guide or click on any of the respective links below:

• Facebook
• Instagram
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Pinterest
• Snapchat 

(Note: Snapchat ads can be quite expensive. You may want to consider an on-demandgeofilter instead).

8) What is the goal of this account? How will I know if it's successful?

When you’re launching any initiative it’s important to know what value it will bring you, how you know you should double down on your efforts, or when you may want to cut and run.
Whether your success is measured in leads, applicants, or share of voice, knowing your goals can help you prioritize your time and report your wins back to your team more effectively.

9) Why is time spent on this social account more valuable than time spent doing other marketing activities?

If you’re feeling good about the questions above, you've hopefully determined that creating a new social account will take you a healthy (but totally worthwhile) amount of time. Now you have to ask yourself: Am I best spending my time creating content for this specific channel, or should I consider other marketing tactics (running experiments, optimizing emails, hosting events, etc.)?
At the end of the day, it comes down to you and your team. Specifically, to whether or not you can create and sustain a new account to a degree that feels worthwhile to your company. If these questions have you planning a run for the hills, perhaps a new account is not the right fit. At least not right now. On the other hand, if they have you feeling excited about the content you’ll post with this account, or the goals you’ll be trying to hit, sounds like you have some creating to do.

FREE Limerick & Cork Events:

Sales & Marketing Workshop

Where: Savoy Hotel, LimerickWhen: June 21st 2016
Time: 6.30pm - 8.30pm

Where: Rochestown Park Hotel, CorkWhen: June 29th 2016Time: 9.30am - 11.30am