We believe that every great inbound marketing or sales enablement plan includes a well thought out content strategy, which is why this is one of the first, and most critical, steps we take with a new client. It’s so we can ensure we aren’t creating content just for the sake of creating content, but that we have the end sales results in mind. Below is a sneak peek into the steps that our consulting team and content strategist take when developing a robust content strategy.

When it comes to blogging, you may be wondering, "What makes the perfect blog post?" In my opinion, this is both an art and a science. It needs to be visually appealing with text breaks, a good amount of white space, and visual elements. But it also needs to be written in a way that provides value, engages the readers, and encourages them to take a specific action.

In other words, writing a good blog post is no easy feat. Understanding the basic building blocks of the perfect blog post is a great start.

Sometimes when you generate leads via inbound marketing, you can get a lot of information about your prospects and leads when they fill out a lead capture form. It really depends, though, on what you're willing to ask.

You can ask things like name, phone number, email, company name, industry, revenue, and more. There's a lot of different variables you can ask for.

The tricky part is, when you ask for too much information, you might limit the number of people that are willing to provide all of that to you. Consequently, this might limit the number of leads you could generate.

79% of the United States population has a social media profile. I really don’t even need to go further. I could end the post right here with this statistic. If 79% of the population is somewhere, do you want your business to be there? If you answered "yes," then your business, no matter the industry, should use social media. Simply being present and intentionally representing your brand, on a platform which 79% of the population lives, is beneficial. A strategic social media strategy can also play a major role in the success of your inbound marketing strategy.

How your business can successfully use social media is an entirely different conversation. Some industries have really seen obvious success on social media. To name a few: restaurants, retail, real estate, entertainment and fashion. Many of these industries have a visual product, yet all of them still require informative content to be effective. Yes, some industries are more effective than others with social media marketing, but with intentionality, effort, and commitment, any company, in any industry, can benefit from social media marketing.

A few times a year, we have a company-wide step challenge to see who can get the most steps in to foster some friendly competition and some good health. In fact, I just got back from a quick walk on my lunch break to see if I could squeeze in a few steps for today.

Before I left, I had a call with a prospect who was expressing some frustration they're having in trying to get their sales team to contribute to their blog. They know their sales team has some great ideas and great thought leadership and subject matter expertise, but they just can't get them to share.

You’ve invested time, energy, and money on creating a great inbound marketing plan. You’re regularly publishing strategic content that is attracting new visitors to your website daily. You’re promoting your campaigns effectively with a mix of organic and paid efforts. But you just aren’t seeing the leads come in. Sound familiar? That’s because driving traffic to your website is only half the battle. What happens once they get there is what makes the difference between a visitor that comes and goes, and a visitor that raises their hand by filling out a form or taking an action.

There are many reasons why this might be the case, but I’m going to share three of the top reasons we see time and time again causing a low visitor to lead conversion rate.

Social media is an essential piece of your inbound marketing strategy. Once you’ve created valuable content, social media is a great way to deliver it to your target audience. In addition to being an effective content distribution channel, it can also help you increase your brand awareness and visibility, connect with your audience, capture leads for your business and even drive referral traffic to your website.

Before you begin seeing results from your social media efforts, however, you must start with a solid social media marketing strategy. Below we’ve shared a few tips for businesses that need to start building your strategy and leveraging social media as an effective inbound marketing tool. These tips are the foundation of a successful business social media strategy to help get you started and get you going in the right direction.

Salespeople and marketers often focus on the sales process to track a commitment. Different labels are put on selling steps, but generally they are seen as: identify, connect, discover, advise, and close. (Read more about our recommended sales process.)

What can be forgotten—and shouldn't be—is that a prospect is also going through a buying process, their buyer's journey, in sync with your efforts to sell.

Over the last several years, many organizations have purchased marketing automation software technology, hoping this would be the answer to a lot of their marketing problems. They knew they needed to do something different to build a more sustainable sales pipeline and help qualify more sales leads. And they knew that technology could potentially be the answer. Unfortunately, a lot of organizations woke up six months later and were really frustrated.

While working with a client recently, we noticed that they were seeing high numbers of traffic to their blog posts but not as many CTA clicks and conversions as we’d like. We felt that we were following all of the typical CTA best practices including a variety of CTAs for different stages of the journey and on various topics, smart CTAs, CTAs that stood out on the website, and so forth.

However, conversions still seemed slightly stalled, and we knew we could do more. So, we looked a bit closer at the analytics and found that the time on page was a little low – likely too low to actually be finishing the blog posts in their entirety and seeing our closing CTAs. This is pretty common in our content-rich world; people scan and then move on.