Alright, it's time. Video is important to marketing and sales. I know, I know... but have I done much with it? Not until this year. After attending INBOUND 2018, Hubspot's annual conference, I decided that it's time. Time to jump feet first into the world of video to enhance our company's marketing and sales efforts and achieve bigger and better results. 

Video is often cited as a tool that helps drive marketing and sales performance, and the numbers shared in a Hubspot blog back up those claims:

• 97% of marketers say video has helped increase user understanding of their product or service.
• 76% say it helped them increase sales.
• 47% say it helped them reduce support queries.
• 76% say it helped them increase traffic.
• 80% of marketers say video has increased dwell time on their website.
• 95% of people have watched an explainer video to learn more about a product or service.
• 81% of people have been convinced to buy a product or service by watching a brand's video.

We often wear a lot of hats, juggle a lot of duties, and report to a lot of people. It can be challenging to gracefully and successfully achieve everything you want to (and need to) while also adopting a new marketing or sales tactic. I network with a lot of marketing, sales, and public relations professionals, and these are the most popular reasons people share that they avoid getting started with video, and ways to overcome these excuses to achieve results with video in marketing and sales strategies.

Competition for your prospects’ business is fierce. It’s likely that your competition’s sales team is just as hungry as yours. However, it’s not always the best salesperson that wins the business. According to HubSpot, only 19% of decision-makers want to connect with a salesperson when they are the Awareness stage of their buying journey. The Awareness stage is when the prospect is beginning to explore and first learning about their options and potential solutions. Since they’re not talking to your salespeople, it’s critical that your marketing provides your team with the winning edge. 

Quality content is the backbone of your inbound marketing strategy.

The main goal of inbound marketing is to use tactics that help potential customers find your business - no matter where they are in the customer journey. And regardless of the tactics in your inbound marketing toolkit - like email marketing, SEO or social media marketing - relevant, valuable content powers each one at every stage of the journey.

Multiple studies confirm the invaluable role content plays in inbound marketing. 84% of people expect brands to create content that provides solutions, tells stories and creates experiences, as reported by Newscred. Furthermore, the average person consumes 11.4 pieces of content before making a purchasing decision. Content also helps to build brand trust with potential customers, as 95% of B2B buyers consider content as trustworthy when evaluating a company and its offerings.

For this reason, you need to create a mix of content that’s designed to attract, engage and sell to your target audience at every stage of the customer journey. But first, it’s important to understand exactly what we mean by customer journey.

You can’t think of your marketing database as just a list of names and contact information. It’s so much more than that. This data represents what’s possible for your business. It’s your future customers and referral sources. It’s next month’s closed deals and next year’s revenue. A company’s marketing database can be the lifeblood of its revenue growth strategy. Consequently, it should be regarded as a key intellectual asset of the business. As with any corporate asset, there should be a plan to protect it, enhance, grow it and leverage it.

Have you been churning out quality content for years for your business and industry? Does traffic to your blog still come from old posts? Are ebooks published three years ago still converting? You're not alone.

"I have no idea how to get Millennials to _______________"
-Every client that I've spoken to in the last 16 years.

Ever since 2002, business owners have struggled to attract the Millennial generation, those born between 1981 and 1996. Millennials are quite different than the Boomers and Gen X who I worked with during my tenure at my advertising agency in the 2000's. And it has taken the marketing world, especially the small- and medium-sized businesses a long time to figure them out (if they have at all).

But to be honest, that's not important right now.  

Uber has disrupted and transformed the transportation business because they focused on being easy to do business with. They’ve eliminated as much friction in the sales process as possible. No more standing in line to hail a cab. No more stumbling for a credit card or scrounging for cash. No more stuffing hard-to-read receipts in your wallet. And because Uber is easy to engage and easy to work with, they have experienced dramatic growth.

Learning from your peers is one of the best ways to see if you should get started with inbound marketing, or whether you're on the right path to building a solid lead generation strategy

That's why we started the "5 Questions With..." series. In today's edition, we get to hear from Mark Zimmer, Owner of Zimmer Radio, Inc., out of Joplin, Missouri. 

As we've shared in previous posts, our team recently attended Hubspot's annual conference in Boston, INBOUND. Each year, INBOUND marks a monumental time for Hubspot's product updates and announcements, and this year didn't disappoint. This year's over-arching theme at the conference was, 'Grow Better,' and these product updates will assist Hubspot users with just that: growing better and growing bigger. 

As we've shared here and here, the entire LeadG2 team is currently in Boston at INBOUND, an annual marketing and business conference hosted by HubSpot. Tuesday was opening night kicking us off with a keynote speech from Deepak Chopra, yesterday was day two of sessions and keynotes, and today, we're wrapping up the last day at #INBOUND18. We've put together a few key takeaways that our staff found interesting, inspiring, or helpful from Thursday and Friday's sessions in this post.