Content isn't king. Content + Experience is King.
Inbound
Marketing
Inbound marketing is not a tactic, channel, or technology. It’s a way to approach your marketing to capitalize on the way your customers make buying decisions today. People value personalized and relevant content, not intrusive messages. With inbound marketing, you can attract visitors, convert leads, close customers, and delight them into promoting your business to others without interrupting their lives.
Inbound marketing is all about pulling prospects and customers in rather than pushing your message in front of them when they don’t want to see it. Through great content in your blog, downloadable content, social media, SEO, email, etc, you can attract your prospects to you when they need you and are looking for you, rather than interrupting them when they don’t want to see you.
Strategy
Strategy is the backbone of everything we do at HIVE. We work with you to develop the right plan to reach your target personas through effective content that they care about delivered at the right time to effectively move prospects throughout your sales funnel.
Execution
With a full in-house team of inbound marketing experts, our team is equipped to effectively execute on your custom inbound marketing strategy. From copywriting to design to development, and everything in between, we're ready to execute.
Analysis
We're not just data-driven, we're data obsessed! Each month your dedicated Account Manager will review all data with you to learn what is being most effective, what isn't, and where there is opportunity for growth. Your campaign will change from month to month and quarter to quarter based on data.
Times are changing. We have all grown up with the idea of a funnel. You add prospects in the top and customers come out the bottom. Well, there has been a massive power shift in the way sales happen today. We, as sales people and businesses, no longer have the power. We are no longer in control. More and more prospects are doing their own research and finding the answers they need on their own. They don't need sales people like they did even 5-10 years ago. That's why the concept of the funnel has to change. Introducing the flywheel.
The flywheel puts the customer at the center of everything we do and the faster we get it to spin, the better our marketing, sales, and service engines are running. See, there should never be an end to a customer journey. With the funnel, once you closed the business, they were out of the funnel. They, in some cases, were forgotten. With the flywheel, they never leave. They're always being put first and always being touched. Regardless of your business, industry, or who you sell to, it's time to adopt the flywheel and put the customer at the center of everything you do.
Inbound marketing itself is a methodology. It is an idea that with great content, great understanding of your ideal target personas, and great awareness of how and when to reach your target personas, you can win.
But what actually goes into an inbound marketing campaign?
As we talked about earlier, inbound marketing is designed to pull the right people to your organization and solutions when they're ready for it. That means that we are focused on being helpful, easy to find, and available when that time comes. It, in turn, does NOT mean that we are going to be intrusive, interrupt our users when they're doing something else, or smacking them in the face with our sales content at all times.
So, in order to be a truly inbound marketing focused organization, you will likely use some or all of these methods to reach your audience:
Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a practice of optimizing your website to be found through search engine results pages (SERPs). The idea behind SEO is that you create a great website experience for your users as well as search engine crawlers through keyword and topic optimization in metadata, on-page content, headings, and urls while also getting recognized by other websites for having valuable content through backlinks. SEO is vital for every business and really is now just table stakes to compete.
Digital Advertising
Digital advertising is the practice of paying for clicks to your website. While this may not be 100% an inbound marketing method, it does play in the same arena. The idea behind digital advertising is to ensure that your content, offers, and resources show up when someone is searching for you, has shown an interest in what you do, or fits your ideal customer profile.
Content
The backbone of any inbound marketing campaign is content. That content is how you will educate your website visitors, customers, and prospects on your industry, your company, your solutions, and even their problems. Content can come in the form of website copy, videos, blog posts, downloadable pieces of content like ebooks, white papers, infographics, and checklists, and even podcasts. Content should be educational and useful for your target personas.
Website Optimization
It doesn't matter how great your business is or how helpful your solution is if you have a terrible website experience. If your website takes too long to load, shares a different message than the user was expecting, focuses only on selling and not on educating, or doesn't give a clear path that the user should take, you're going to lose that prospect. Optimizing your website is one of the most important things you can do for your organization.
We are a proud Diamond HubSpot Solutions Partner Agency. HubSpot is the world’s leading inbound marketing software. We use their award winning platform for every aspect of your inbound marketing campaign including design, landing pages, social media, blogging, analytics, email marketing, and optimization. With HubSpot, we’re able to manage and optimize your entire campaign in one centralized location which gives us the ability to move more quickly to increase results.
