EOI vs DEC in Outdoor Advertising

by Lauren Kalhorn on May 24, 2013

The decision of how to calculate your foot traffic or drive-bys is something to ponder over.

As more and more options to skip over commercials on the TV or radio are becoming available people are losing out on getting their product or service into people’s minds. When you make the decision to put your product or services out in the advertising world you need to know how to calculate your market. With DEC going out the door and EOI coming in which one is better to calculate your traffic in the outdoor advertising competitive market.

EOI is the new way to calculate your traffic, Eyes on Impressions is more effective then DEC (Daily Effective Circulation). DEC will count the number of cars that drive by compared to the number of hours the billboard is illuminated. Whereas EOI will take into effect the size of the billboard, the age of the people in the cars, income, education and even their nationality. Your EOI count is going to be lower but also more accurate when you compare it with your DEC score. DEC really counts the number of people passing the ad and does not deduct for people who are not seeing or relating to the billboard.

We used to decide where to place our billboards for our company by deciding what location had the best traffic and drive-bys. Now when determining your placement for your billboard you need to decide who your product or service will be more attracted to and how your billboard portrays this. Once this is decided you do a calculation on how many people in the area, you are hoping to put the billboard up, are attracted to the billboard and decide if this location is worth the money.

When deciding if the billboard will benefit your business more than a TV commercial you need to decide if the location is a good one. Billboards will only be worth the money if you have it properly placed in a location that is good for your product or service. The billboard will sell itself if it has been placed in a good location and is attractive to the proper audience. If you just want a general number of people that are passing by the billboard then DEC is your way to calculate but if you are needing a more accurate number of who is walking or driving by and actually being reached by the billboard then EOI is your go to way to calculate.

Advertising companies are changing the way they are calculating the cost of their billboards. The companies are changing from just the amount of cars and traffic to the types of people who are in the area. The advertising and marketing companies are now charging based on the demand and the EOI calculations. EOI is the way of the future in calculating the people being reached in outdoor advertising.

B2B Inbound Marketing

by Brett Gordon on May 21, 2013

The new approach to marketing, called inbound marketing, has been sending shock waves throughout the marketing industry lately. This relatively new concept allows companies and businesses to no longer be dependent on third parties, such as magazines, billboards, newspapers, television commercials, radio commercials, and others to get their message out. Now companies can use inbound marketing to tell their own stories. This is a major breakthrough because the cost to run an inbound marketing campaign is much, much cheaper than running an outbound marketing campaign using the third party channels we mentioned above. No other medium gives companies the ability to reach such wide audiences while only spending a fraction of the money that they would be spending on outbound. B2B inbound marketing will generate new leads for your company, help you nurture them, and ultimately increase your lead conversion rate.

The beauty of the internet is that your prospects look for you as opposed to you looking for your prospects. B2B inbound marketing specializes in generating content that will draw these prospects to your website, nurturing those leads with quality content and educational information, then converting those leads into sales. The cycle is very simple, and it’s great for businesses because the prospects who are navigating your site’s content are the ones who are doing most of the work. You just have the duty of making sure that your content is there and is easily available for them to see, read, digest and analyze. With inbound marketing, you are ultimately making your site more visible online, thus prospects will find you easier. If your prospects are having a hard time finding or navigating your site, you will lose traffic, and in turn, lose business. Inbound marketing prevents this from happening.

If you are just now starting to learn about B2B inbound marketing and all of its benefits, then you have chosen the right article to read! We have put together a list of things you will want to think about when developing your B2B inbound marketing strategy. Keep in mind that these are proven practices and they WILL generate new customers for you.

Tie Your Inbound Strategy to Your Already Existing Marketing Strategy

The most effective inbound strategies incorporate the company’s overall marketing strategy into it. Remember, you want to establish a singular voice with your audience, so be sure to match your inbound and outbound strategies so your customers don’t get confused. It is also a great idea to put information mentioning your inbound content on your outbound content. This can include things such as your social media links (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) or the link to your company’s website.

Get Yourself Support

You will want to get the full support of your company’s executives from both the sales and marketing departments. Aligning your sales and marketing departments using inbound is a surefire way to not just generate more leads from your site, but also to nurture and eventually convert them. If your sales reps are on the same page as your inbound marketing team, they will have a much better idea what is going on when leads ask them about the content and information that your inbound team created. They can also mention frequently asked questions they receive so that your inbound team can create more content that answers these questions. Essentially, the content used in your inbound strategy is the same as what your sales reps will use in their sales calls. If this isn’t aligned, you will have problems and leads will fall through the gaps in your strategy.

Begin With Just One or Two Channels

Once you have gotten full support for your inbound strategy, you will want to focus on one or two channels that everyone on your team is comfortable and familiar with. You especially want to pay attention to which channels your customers are using the most. Articles and blogs are a great place to start if you are wanting to share information that’s more technical. If your product is more visual, then you will probably want to start with videos and social media sites such as Facebook or Pinterest. Just keep in mind that whatever channel you start with, it will essentially be an extension of a sales meeting with a prospect.

Develop a Schedule

Just creating individual pieces of content on a sporadic basis will not work. You need to be able to create quality, unique content on a continuous basis and promote these pieces of content through the right channels at the right times. A good idea is to create a timeline of the content you will be producing and when you will release or post it. Scheduling your content to be released around product launches and industry events such as conferences and conventions is a great way to capitalize on your potential customer’s interest. The key is to maintain your visibility with your audience. If you are not constantly producing content that your audience can see, or you just stop producing, your customers and leads will think you disappeared or just forget about you completely. This is the last thing you want happening.

Develop a Credible Persona

Develop a singular, company persona that offers added value and insight into your company. Give unique industry perspectives and explain the benefits of your products or services using this persona. Deviating from your established persona will only upset and confuse customers. If they can’t trust your company’s online persona and presence, why would they ever want to do business with you?

Create an Awesome Promotion Plan

Once you have created your content, you will want to make sure your visitors can find your website easily, and then be able to find the content on your website easily as well. You can promote this by optimizing your site for SEO so that your site is easily found in search engines, using promotional tools such as pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, or broadcasting your content using email and social media channels like Facebook or Twitter. Remember, the key is to make it EASY for your site visitors to find anything and everything that would make them interested or at least curious about what you and your company have to offer.

Actively creating content, optimizing that content, and then promoting it is the most effective way to run a B2B inbound marketing strategy. On top of that, inbound marketing is unbelievably cheaper than outbound marketing, and it can create the same results, or even better! The future of the marketing industry is in inbound, so if you and your company don’t show some initiative NOW, you will most assuredly be left in the dust of the companies who are already implementing inbound into their overall strategies.

Blog Written By Brett Gordon

Certified Inbound Marketing Strategist | Content Marketing Specialist | Social Media Strategist | SEO

How to Upload Images to Prestashop

by Lauren Kalhorn on May 15, 2013

When you make the decision to upload images to Prestashop, it can be a fight. For someone who isn’t that into programming, they will be intimidated when they Google an answer to this problem. There is not really an answer out there as to why so many people are having this problem, and Prestashop offers little help on the matter. After hours of searching and trial and error we have found a solution. What Prestashop does not tell you is that the images need to be uploaded at a maximum of 50 images at a time. Try this process with a small test grouping before trying to upload a larger group, just in case you encounter errors. This will speed up the time Prestashop takes to process and upload the products. Here, we have a very simple step by step process for anyone who is new to the concept of Prestashop or just wants to learn about a fast way to do this.

Making a Spreadsheet from Excel:

To put the images in a spreadsheet to upload when using a server of images, you must create a concatenate formula to piece the URL together. In this case we had a column of product numbers (which matched the image names on our server), a column for the file extension (in our case, they were all .jpg files), and a column of the server URL up until the image name (for example: “http://www.site.com/images/” Don’t forget that last /). We click on the cell where we want to place the new URL and click on formulas. Then click on text functions and drop down to concatenate. Fill in the rows by clicking on the cell you wish to be placed there, or type in the cell number (See below for an example). When you fill out all the boxes you need, click okay, and you should have a put together URL. If you have several items, just click on the cell and in the bottom right hand corner you will find a square. Drag this down and it will automatically fill the rest out. It should look like this:

Uploading the Images:

Once you save the Excel spreadsheet, you need to open it in OpenOffice. This is an open source (read: free) program you can download online that is very straight forward and user friendly. We use OpenOffice because it saves exactly in the format (with the encoding) that we need. Once you open it up in OpenOffice you need to save it in a .csv with a semicolon as the field separator. As you open Prestashop, you click on tools and directly under tools is a CSV Import button. Upload your .csv file. Under import you drop down from categories to products, change the field separator to a semicolon as you did on OpenOffice. If there are still sample products from Prestashop, you can also opt to delete all existing products. Make sure that you select the square that says use product reference as key. When selecting your drop down menus on each column you need to select “ignore this column” for the blank columns and also the columns that included the file extension and incomplete server URL that you used to create your full image URL. The column with the image URL needs to be selected as image URL. Depending on how you have your spreadsheet laid out, you may need to skip lines. In our case, we skipped two lines for descriptions of the columns while uploading over 12,000 products. Prestashop will not flag an empty box if a product is missing an item. It will only flag an error if you have a completely empty column or try to add over 50 images at one time.

All said and done and you should have a product uploaded onto your website. If this works on your test group, increase the amount to include up to 50 products with images. If you go over 50 you will incur several error codes, including the error message that it did not finish the upload and you will need to re-save a smaller portion on the .csv file in OpenOffice.

Hope this helps!

5 Inbound Marketing Trends for 2013

by Brett Gordon on May 13, 2013

In today’s ever-changing digital and inbound marketing world, the ability to adapt is key to any business’ or company’s survival. Last year’s trends do not always mean they will be this year’s trends, and those who recognize this are better able to be flexible and innovative in their business and marketing strategies. You can choose to continue to do things the way you’ve always done them, but in a world where the stagnant get left behind, this is a recipe for failure. Do yourself a favor and take a gander at our list of the top 5 surefire inbound marketing trends for 2013 and learn how to leverage these trends in your direction.

Visuals Have Become VERY Important

Visuals have always been important in inbound marketing, but their importance increased exponentially in 2012. With powerful visual platforms such as Pinterest and Instagram, visuals have taken off and have become one of the best ways to interest and engage your audience and draw them to your website and social pages. Since the platforms are so easy to use, there really is no excuse to not be providing great visual content for your viewers.

You may think creating quality visual content is a daunting task, but it really isn’t. Remember to keep it simple. If you have a website, be sure to include a visually appealing logo and design. You’ll also want to provide photos and pictures of you and your team when it is relevant and necessary. If you are putting together a blog, always be sure to include great visuals and infographics along with them to increase the quality of your content. On Facebook, you will want to share and post videos and images on a continuous basis.

Search Is Going Social

With the continuing meteoric rise of social media and the recent algorithm changes made by Google, social signals and influence have become much more important to search. There is still some fuzziness when it comes to the relationship between social media and SEO, but inbound marketers have managed to put together these tips to improve your search engine rank using social media.

Integrate all of your social accounts.
Create inbound links in your social channels.
Constantly and continuously post quality, original content.
Create an active presence on Google+

Google+ is not necessarily as popular as Facebook or Twitter, but since it is owned and run by Google, you might want to keep Google+ in mind.

Gamification

Gamification is the concept of integrating game-like elements into marketing strategies. This has surprisingly proved to be a very successful way to generate interaction and engagement. One way a lot of marketers have used this is by using social media to reward fans based off of likes, comments, shares, and other social media activities. You can even take this a step further and implement similar ideas into apps or your website. Gamification is still a relatively new concept among marketers, so this should be interesting to watch play out over the coming months and years.

Mobile is Going Responsive

Responsive design has become extremely popular recently due to its ability to adjust to whatever device is trying to access it. It works across all platforms including desktop PCs, smartphones, tablets, and laptops. Responsive design can also make it a lot easier to update your website since you will no longer have a need for a mobile only domain. Industry experts see virtually everyone going responsive in the coming years.

Email is Still Alive and Kicking

It seems like every year now that people are saying that THIS year is going to be the year email finally dies. However, year after year, it refuses to kick the bucket and appears to be as strong as ever. Why? Because email has adapted and grown with new technologies and discoveries. To be blunt, email still hasn’t even reached its apex because marketers are still learning how to use it to its fullest capabilities.

Email is still email, but in order to use it effectively, companies must learn to approach it differently. The usual email blasts and impersonal messages aren’t going to work anymore. You, as a marketer, must learn how to create interesting and relevant content, target your efforts, and engage your recipients with personal messages. If you manage to pull all of these factors together, and do it well, you will be shocked at how effective your email campaigns have become.

Times are fast, and they are continuing to move even faster. This means that adaptation and flexibility are your two most important traits when it comes to navigating the digital and inbound marketing landscape. New trends are on the rise while other trends are dying out. It is your job to be able to recognize the difference between the two and apply that knowledge to your business. If you do, there is no stopping you and your business from becoming successful.

Blog Written By Brett Gordon

Certified Inbound Marketing Strategist | Content Marketing Specialist | Social Media Strategist | SEO

Web Design Process | Discover, Define, Design, Develop, and Deploy

by Brett Gordon on May 10, 2013

At Anchor Communications, we will often use the 5D methodology in our web design process. We want to ensure that our clients get exactly what they want and that there is no confusion during the design, development, and deployment process. One of the best and proven ways to do this is through the use of 5D methodology. This consists of four distinct steps; discover, define, design, develop, and deploy. It is effectively a business model that focuses on listening to the client, and then applying what they’ve told us to deliver results and meet, or even exceed their expectations. Our goal is to deeply discover our clients needs. During discovery, we determine what we need to do to meet those wants and needs, then work together with the client to apply original thinking, tools, services, and high-end technology to define, design, and develop a course of action to satisfy those wants and needs.

The 5D methodology is as follows:

Discovery

During the initial phase of a project we conduct meetings, workshops, and webinars with the customer to accurately determine their needs and current situation. We discuss technology and marketing as well as roles and goals. Once we feel comfortable that we completely understand the tasks at hand, we move to define the scope of the project and agreement deliverable.

Define

During this stage we want to establish exactly what it is that you and your company are trying to accomplish. This involves discussing your wants, needs, marketing goals, budget, financial situation, and us becoming familiar with as many aspects of your company as possible. Simply put, the more we know, the more we can help you. Using the information you have provided us, we will develop a Scope of Work (SOW) which will detail and outline a solution that will satisfy your wants and needs. The specific parts we focus on during this step are:

Planning/Discovery
Project Planning
Requirements Definition
Conceptual System Design

Design

Once we have submitted the SOW to you and your company for review, we will wait for approval. Once the SOW has been approved, our design and development team will initiate the design process. This will focus on the specifications you have provided, the budget you’ve given us, and your business goals. The design process includes:

Prototyping
Functional Design
Technical Design
System Architecture
Training Plan
Test Plan

Develop

Once you have approved the final design, we will begin the development and building process. Remember, you do not always go through these steps at once. Oftentimes, problems and obstacles will be encountered, and we will have to go back and rework things so that everything works out the way you want. It is not uncommon to go through the define, design, develop, and deployment stages many times before the final product is where everyone desires.

Also keep in mind that the development stage is normally the most time consuming stage. This is the stage where we will be tinkering with various facets of the initial design to ensure that it is not only visually pleasing, but also workable and that it is delivering a great experience to the end user. To put it simply, the design stage of the methodology is a very dynamic process and requires the most patience, but the resulting payoff is immense. Items that are focused on during the development stage are:

Application Coding
Testing/Quality Assurance
User Documentation
Program Documentation
Change Management

Deploy

Once everything has been designed and developed to the point where you, as the client, are satisfied with it, we will launch the product or service. It will essentially be “live” for anyone to use or visit at this point. We will then closely monitor any and all activities and make sure that no unexpected issues pop up. We will populate database tables with the latest versions of production data, and all internal and external client operations processes will be integrated and confirmed. There will also be client training available at the beginning of the deployment stage.

Deploying the software is the most essential part of the methodology. Now that real people are using it and customers are logging in and engaging with your products and/or services, both parties will be able to get a much more accurate depiction of how your particular product or service is performing. Here we will make the necessary minor changes, then plan any additional improvements that will be needed down the road. The final steps of the deployment stage include:

Hardware/Software Installation
Data Conversion
User Training
Support Training
Post Implementation Review

Blog Written By Brett Gordon

Certified Inbound Marketing Strategist | Content Marketing Specialist | Social Media Strategist | SEO

How To Maintain Google Ranking When Switching To A New Website

by Brett Gordon on May 3, 2013

So you’ve decided to finally redesign your website. You’ve noticed that your competitors have started updating their sites and you, not wanting to be left behind, have decided to update your site also. The only problem is you have worked for a considerable time to get your current site ranked on Google, and you are worried that you could lose all that SEO work during the redesign process. This is, indeed, a very important problem that you will want to keep in mind and address while redesigning. If you do not, you will lose all of your previous SEO work and your new site will plummet in Google’s rankings. Be sure to follows these steps on how to maintain Google ranking during your site redesign process and avoid watching your new site’s rankings plummet.

Organize Your Keywords and Phrases

Check to see what your current site is currently ranking for using a rank checker. You will want to compile all the phrases and keywords you are ranking for along with their associated pages. Put them all into a spreadsheet, including information like keyphrases, your rank, the matching pages, and the date you got all the information.

Know What’s Working

Use Google Analytics to check which pages are getting you the most search traffic on your site. You will want your new site to include all of these pages. Do NOT get rid of any pages that are performing well. This will hurt you as far as SEO goes. You will want your new site to have a matching page for all of your previous high ranking pages. Generally speaking, you will want to include every page that Google has indexed, regardless of how high they rank. If they rank, you want to include it on your newly redesigned site.

The content you create on your new site’s pages need to be just as relevant as your old site’s pages. This means keyphrase frequency and keyphrase prominence should be just as good, if not better, than your old site’s. To put it in simpler terms, you want the same phrases to appear at least the same amount of times and in the same places. This includes headers, titles, body text, meta descriptions, etc.

Maintain Your Site’s Basic Structure If Possible

Try to keep the same domain name for your site if you can. If you end up having to change your domain name, then you will lose all “domain authority” with Google. This is the last thing you want happening. You also do not want to change the URLs on your most important pages. This might not be possible since redesign often includes updating the CMS and advancing the URL structure of the site, but you still want to avoid it if you can. If you end up having to change your URLs, try to change them to something that is rich with your keyphrases.

You’ll also want to link between pages like the footer, the sitemap, and with links in the content on your pages. This will help search engines to find your pages and rank them. Always try to take advantage of opportunities to create keyphrase-centric links.

Know Your Redirects

Don’t redesign your site without first knowing which pages are linked to other sites. If you change the URLs of these pages, then you will break all of those links on those websites. You will not be able to update the links on the other websites, but you can make sure that you do not break them. To figure out which of your pages are linked to other sites, use a link popularity checker. Keep in mind that a majority of the links will most likely be linked to your home page.

The next thing you want to do is create a list of all the pages that have been indexed by Google. ANY pages, not just the high ranking ones. Once you’ve done this, you will want to create redirects for all of the pages on that list. To do this, create a permanent 301 redirect for every comparable page on your new site so that Google and visitors will be redirected to your new site. You want to do this so the value of your old pages are passed on to your new ones.

Prepare for Indexation

You want your new site to be easily crawlable by Google, so you will want to do a few things to ensure that this goes smoothly and in a way that best benefits your site. The first thing you want to do is update your robots.txt file. Your new one might be a little different that your old one. This is especially true if your new site has a different login area, a shopping cart, or a new CMS. This is done so search engines know not to index these pages.

After that is done, you want to create a new sitemap.xml file. This is what will assist Google in discovering all of your new site’s pages sooner rather than later.

Along with this, creating custom 404 pages for missing pages will help link visitors to other useful pages. Your 404 pages should have a message along the lines of “Sorry, the page you are looking for is not here.” Keep it short and sweet, but polite.

Launch Your New Website

Now you can finally do what you’ve been waiting for all along; launch your brand new website! Once your new site is live, be sure to check for 404 errors. You can do this using Google Webmaster Tools. Also, make sure that your XML sitemap is working correctly.

The fact that you decided to redesign your website in the first place shows that you recognize the need to adapt to changing conditions and keep up with your competition. However, it is easy to forget about SEO when redesigning your website. Often times you will see companies that are afraid to update their websites because they fear losing all of their SEO work, or they are simply too lazy to make a new site. Other companies will aggressively attack a new website design, focusing almost exclusively on creativity and imagination, but then completely forget about SEO and end up watching their website’s search traffic crash up to 50%. Don’t be one of these companies. Just follow these simple SEO steps on how to maintain Google ranking during redesign, maintain a creative approach during the design process, and you will have a site that is not only visually appealing, but will also be Google friendly.

Blog Written By Brett Gordon

Certified Inbound Marketing Strategist | Content Marketing Specialist | Social Media Strategist | SEO

Inbound Marketing Statistics 2013

by Brett Gordon on April 30, 2013

Inbound marketing is still a relatively new concept to the marketing industry. In fact, Hubspot just released only their 5th Annual “State of Inbound Marketing” Report. It’s 175 pages of inbound marketing statistics and technical jargon, so we hardly expect you to read the entire thing. However, a LOT of important information is discussed in it and we feel you, as an inbound marketer, should know that information. That’s why we have put together this short and sweet blog paraphrasing what is said in the report. If that’s not good enough, you can always go download the full report.

Inbound Marketing is Growing Rapidly

In a nutshell, a majority of companies do some form of inbound marketing now, more of their budgets are going into inbound than into outbound marketing, and inbound budgets have increased at an approximate rate of 50% over the last 3 years. Inbound marketing has never been growing at as fast of a rate as it is now, and it is only going to grow even more in 2013. Don’t think inbound is important? You might want to think twice about that, because the industry is taking off.

Inbound is Still Cheaper Than Outbound–By a Mile

Inbound delivers 54% more leads than outbound while doing it at a lower cost per lead. Inbound marketers will also literally double website conversion rates and testing has made this even more efficient. You can see this in the major ROI improvements over the years. This is good to know in the digital age where the customer is control of buying and the buying process starts with search results. If someone lands on your site, the odds of them becoming a lead are much higher. Also, remember that testing is not hard or expensive to do, so do it! It will help you become a much more effective marketer by focusing on what’s working, getting rid of what’s not working, and smoothing out everything in between.

Inbound Marketers Are Still Learning

When Hubspot surveyed inbound marketers, a significant amount could not actually define inbound marketing. A majority of them also did not know how to effectively analyze and leverage ROI in their favor. If you’re wondering, the report defines inbound marketing as “a holistic, data-driven strategy that involves attracting and converting visitors into customers through personalized, relevant information and content-not interruptive messages-and following them through the sales experience with ongoing engagement.” It’s a lot to swallow, but most marketers can’t even get the basic gist of what inbound marketing is. Don’t be one of those people.

It also mentions that marketers are having a problem analyzing their ROI. In fact, 34% of all businesses couldn’t, or do not, compute overall inbound ROI. If you are planning on getting serious about inbound, then you need to get serious about establishing marketing metrics. If you want to earn your executive team’s respect and secure the budget you want or need, then you need to learn how to effectively measure your ROI, and then apply what you’ve learned from that into your inbound marketing strategy.

Inbound is Seen as a Lot of Work

The report literally mentions, and I kid you not, that a lot of people shy away from inbound marketing simply because they view it as a lot of work. Really? Well if you are too lazy to even try at inbound marketing, then so be it. You’ll just be another one of the companies who will fall by the wayside purely because they refused to implement an inbound marketing strategy. The choice is yours.

Inbound Marketing is a STRATEGY

Inbound is not a channel, nor is it a technology; it is a STRATEGY. Inbound requires you to alter your approach to marketing and highlight your end-to-end marketing practices. So you want to stay true to your customer personas and consistently and constantly track your progress. There are mounds upon mounds of reports and studies that strongly suggest that you create high quality content, and publish it often. This has not been disputed either. If you want to develop an effective inbound marketing strategy, then you will have to be able to sit down every once in awhile and pound out a blog or article. If you simply refuse to do this, then you’ll want to hire an in-house copywriter or blogger.

You Must Focus on the Customer

According to the report, 50% of businesses consider their companies to be customer-centric, while 25% stated that their top priority this year is reaching the correct audience. This is great to hear, but one has to wonder what those other 75% of companies are focusing on instead of their customers. Want to answer this question? Visit their websites. Guess who they’re talking about. Yep, themselves, not the customer.

Inbound Could Use More Support

Before we jump into this, keep in mind that manpower doesn’t necessarily mean marketing power. However, 51% of inbound teams claim fewer than 6 people and, at the enterprise level, 31% of teams were made up of 5 or fewer employees. It’s hard to analyze exactly how this is affecting these teams’ ability to create and manage an inbound marketing strategy. If we think about it, the question we should really be asking is how many of those 5 or so employees TRULY understand inbound marketing and how to apply it. If you have 5 employees, but only 3 are true inbound marketers, then you only really have 3 employees on your inbound marketing team.

Content IS Important

The report says that “only 18% of marketers are purely focused on developing quality content in 2013″. This is a problem. There has been argument in the industry for quite some time whether or not content marketing is important. Let’s set the record straight; it is. As a marketer, your bottom line is to increase the number of leads your are getting and converting. Without quality content on a regular basis, you are not going to get any leads. People may visit your site, and you may get leads through other channels, but without content you are not providing your customers, clients, and leads with information that is of value to them. Without content marketing, you are working for yourself, not the customer.

This a very, very brief summary of everything that was said in the report. Of course, if you want to read the report, or at least get a glimpse of it, you can always download it for FREE. There you can go in-depth on a variety of topics concerning inbound marketing and the state it is in today. The bottom line is that inbound marketing has a very, very bright future ahead of it. There are still problems and obstacles to overcome, but those wrinkles are being smoothed out as we speak. Couple that with the fact that inbound marketing is growing faster than ever before, and you have yourself several very good reasons to integrate an inbound marketing strategy into your overall marketing strategy today!

Some Quick Hits on Inbound Marketing Statistics

58% of all businesses plan to execute inbound marketing strategies in 2013.
48% of marketers plan to increase inbound marketing spending in 2013.
Twice as many marketers say inbound delivers cheaper cost-per-lead than outbound methods do.
54% more leads are generated by inbound than by outbound.
43% of all marketers generated at least 1 customer from a blog this past year. (Blogs require about 9% of marketer’s time and 7% of their budget.)
17% of marketers have stated that traditional advertising and direct mail have become less important in the last 6 months.
100% more website conversions come from inbound compared to outbound.
125% increase in inbound marketing hiring is predicted for 2013.

Blog Written By Brett Gordon

Certified Inbound Marketing Strategist | Content Marketing Specialist | Social Media Strategist | SEO

What is Marketing Automation?

by Brett Gordon on April 26, 2013

With the explosion of SMS marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, and the buyer’s newfound ability to research and self-educate on products and services, marketing automation has become increasingly important. Marketing automation allows marketers to target prospects and customers with the right messages at the right time, without the hassle of doing it manually. Using marketing automation, marketers can schedule ahead messages, posts, images, and any type of multimedia. However, in order to do this, marketers need a marketing automation platform in which they can customize content and automate marketing interaction and communication. This is what allows marketers to guide buyers through the research and purchase process.

These days, buyers are learning to use company and social media websites to research and analyze products and services themselves. Because of this, buyers have usually made their purchase decisions by the time they go to the store or pick up the phone to make a purchase. This is based off of information gathered by them from your company, your company’s competitors, and several third-party websites that offer reviews, analysis, and feedback.

Due to this transformation of the buying process, marketers have had to find new ways to reach out to consumers. Traditionally, marketers would send mass messages, usually in the form of outbound emails, to their consumers. However, today marketers need to be able to guide consumers through the buying process so that they can easily find the exact information they are looking for. Marketing automation software allows marketers to do this.

Through observation of prospective buyers’ processes and their digital behavior, marketing automation software can understand and take advantage of where they are in the buying process, and offer content that is of interest to them at that particular stage. Using lead scoring, which is a part of the automation platform, marketers can categorize buyers into different sectors based on their online behaviors and will know if a buyer is ready or not for a conversation with a sales representative. If they aren’t, then the platform will nurture the lead providing high quality content until they display behavior that signifies that they are ready, or close to being ready, to make a purchase.

Along with this, content needs to be very personalized to what type of buyer it is. Executive buyers are going to react differently to messages and content than their employees, and general consumers are going to react differently to different types of content and messages depending on their wants, needs, and desires. As a marketer, you need to trust the information in your database, because that is what is going to help you create the content you need. This means that you’ll need to cleanse it and standardize it on a regular basis. A majority of today’s marketing solutions give at least some type of data management as a part of the automation platform.

Marketing automation is the only type of software that is going to allow you to approach buyers and cater to their individual wants and needs based on targeting, timing, and content. Using lead scoring, lead nurturing, data management, and the underlying automation platform, marketers can effectively understand buyers and use this information to efficiently market to them. Marketing is all about delivering the right message at the right time to the right person. Marketing automation not only does this, but it makes the entire process much, much easier.

Blog Written By Brett Gordon

Certified Inbound Marketing Strategist | Content Marketing Specialist | Social Media Strategist | SEO

Parallax Web Design

by Brett Gordon on April 24, 2013

Parallax web design has been called the future of web design for quite some time now. Today, it has become one of the biggest trends in the web design industry, period. Its uncanny ability to take normal websites and transform them into works of art, while engaging users, has sent shockwaves throughout the web design industry, and people are starting to take notice. If you haven’t heard of it, or don’t know what it looks like, you can check out some outstanding examples from around the web. Here at AnchorSTL, we have been using parallax concepts for the past 5 years in our web design, however, just recently we launched our brand new, redesigned parallax site, so be sure to check that out if you haven’t already.

Parallax is a term that refers to the perceptible movement of objects and images when you view them from different perspectives, angles, and points of view. In actuality, this method was invented way back in 1982 when the makers of the arcade game “Moon Patrol” used it to make the background images move slower than the foreground images, creating a sense of depth for the gamer. Thirty years later, we have learned how to apply parallax concepts to websites. Of course, “Moon Patrol” was a 2D game while today’s websites are obviously a little more advanced than that.

With the introduction of HTML5, CSS, and other modern browsers, web developers have been able to incorporate multi-plane animation, new elements, and the creation of motion behind the y-axis into parallax web design. Now developers can create websites using parallax design to awe and impress visitors who visit their sites. Take a look at Nike’s Jumpman shoe site, the “Life of Pi” site, Nintendo Wii’s Mario Wii microsite, or Smokey Bones’ site and try not to be blown away by the animation and visuals. Pugeot went so far as to even incorporate audio into their parallax site. All of these sites take advantage of parallax’s features to not only shock and awe the viewer, but also draw them into the content and engage them. Try going back to normal sites after spending awhile looking at parallax sites. They’re bland, boring, and generally do not captivate or pull you into the content at all. Simply put, they do not have the pull and magnetism of parallax sites, and any company that doesn’t have one right now should be seriously considering getting one. The attraction they generate is unparalleled (pun may be intended) as far as websites go.

Another thing to note about parallax design is that it works perfectly for lazy users. Let’s face it, a majority of people who browse the internet do it lazily. They do not want to click on a lot of links and they wish everything came to them, as opposed to them having to look for it. With parallax web design, you will be putting all of your information on one single home page. All the user has to do is scroll and all your information will literally come to them on one page without them having to do any work. Couple this with the fact that parallax sites are much more interesting to look at, and you will create for yourself a tourist trap right on your website. You can’t lose!

Just like with anything else in the web development and marketing industries, agencies and companies are going to have to learn to adapt to this new type of medium. Parallax web design used to be called the future, but in reality, it is the NOW of web development. If you and your company wait too long to incorporate parallax concepts into your website, you will quickly find yourself losing business to competitors who ARE using parallax web design. Don’t be one of those people. Jump on the parallax web design wave today and reap the benefits!

Blog Written By Brett Gordon

Certified Inbound Marketing Strategist | Content Marketing Specialist | Social Media Strategist | SEO

10 Inbound Marketing Strategies That Will Increase Traffic

by Kayla Blankenship on April 15, 2013

So, what exactly is “inbound marketing” and what is the difference from “outbound marketing?” This is a question I used to ask myself all the time when I first became a marketing major in college. For many, marketing comes easy, along with all of the terms “marketers” use. Now I’ll admit it I’m not the brightest crayon in the box, I have my moments, but one thing that does come easy to me is the concept of inbound marketing strategies.

Let me ask you, by a show of hands or “likes” on this post, do you know what the difference between “inbound” and “outbound” marketing is? If not, keep reading. If you do, then feel welcome to jump ahead to the top 10 changes to drive up your results.

Inbound marketing is simply advertising, A different kind of advertising. Inbound consists of getting people to come to you. Through your blogs, videos, podcasts, eNewsletters, eBooks, SEO, and social media marketing to name a few. There are other forms of content marketing as well that many people use to create “inbound” approaches. Outbound marketing is when you’re simply buying attention through mail, radio, TV commercials, flyers, spam, and email marketing along with many other approaches. With “inbound” marketing, you can help yourself “get found” by others already out there in your industry yearning to learn and shop what your industry has to offer.

Here are the top 10 changes you should make to drive up your inbound marketing results.

1. Share your blogs across all social media platforms. Share your blogs with friends, followers, connections you’ve made on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and other sites. You will continue to drive up more traffic to your website and this way you can create new leads and close more sales. Social media marketing opens a huge door for businesses and the opportunity to connect with potential prospects. Most of your prospects are already on a social media platform and are actively looking for educational material.

2. Is your website sending the right message? If not, fix it. They say you have 10 seconds to capture the attention of your visitor before they hit the back button. Your prospects want to feel like you “get them.” understand their challenges and have solutions to fix them. This tends to be a very common and difficult challenge for marketers. People make most of their purchasing decisions on an emotional level, don’t overlook the important things.

3. Share blog content with key groups. LinkedIn for example is a place to connect with people who match many target audiences profiles. There are a ton of people who use LinkedIn groups for every kind of industry, role, and firm. Identify groups that include your “perfect prospect” join these groups and begin sharing your content.

4. Create and add graphic call to action buttons. Gone are the days of plain and simple links, today you need flash, colorful, graphics that are visually appealing that will attract your visitors. You want them to click and communicate with you, make it valuable. This will also help you increase the number of leads from your website.

5. Create visitors into leads. To do this you need a conversion strategy, here is where landing pages come into play. Create dedicated landing pages that use your best practices to convert your visitors into leads. Don’t use a page navigation, this tends to distract visitors and make them leave your page. Use images of your material and offer a brief description of the product. Make sure your visitor feels comfortable.

6. Who doesn’t love special offers? Add offers to your website and make sure they are appealing to your customers and prospects at all stages of the buying process. Inbound marketing has proven that educational material, such as videos, eBooks, podcast and invites to webinars help increase your likelihood on generating leads. Consider people who request such material as “leads” but they are not ready to speak with a sales person yet.

7. Create Campaigns. Build a lead nurturing email to continue conversation with possible new leads. Do so even after they have downloaded your material. Continue sending them regular emails with more educational content after they have downloaded original material. You must nurture all the way through your sales process.

8. Blog at least three to four times a week. Blogging help by adding fresh content to your pages on a regular basis. Google then rewards sites with fresh content by increasing their likelihood of moving up on the search results pages. You may be on page three today and by next week you may be on page one or two. Blogging gives you and your business the advantage with an authentic voice and allows you to display though leadership. Share your perspectives, this way your prospects will engage with you more quickly and convert from a visitor to a lead.

9. Double T! Track and test everything you offer. Just like in science you have to test your hypothesis and track your results, same thing goes for inbound marketing. Your tools needed for your research include tools for analytics, testing and content creation. Your final package must provide marketers with tracking results, be able to measure effectiveness, create easy to use testing environments, and also produce a more powerful, quantitative, reiterate results in the program.

10. Reuse Content. What are at least three other websites potential prospects use? Can you identify them? If so, drive these prospects back to your site. Reusing content is a key factor an inbound marketing. It can be difficult to create original content consistently, but you can offer your blog content, eBooks, slideshows on other sites that are looking for content of their own. When they post your content with a link back to your site this is a back-link and you get more visitors, leads, and possibly more potential customers. You don’t want to create duplicate content you just simply want to share it with others and make sure to update content regularly.

It’s been stated that most marketers today spend ninety percent of their efforts on outbound marketing and ten percent on inbound marketing, in today’s world these numbers need to be switched. By adding these ten elements to your inbound marketing effort, you will begin to start seeing your business being found, getting leads and eventually closing sales.

Blog Written By Kayla Blankenship

Content Creator/Blogger/Social Media Strategist