Think about all the time your sales team isn’t at work, but you wished they were. 

When they’re on vacation.
When they’re at lunch.
When they’re commuting.
When they’re on a flight.
When they’re with their family on the weekend.

Now think about the time your sales team is at work, but they’re not involved in sales-related activity.

When they’re in a staff meeting.
When they’re filling out an expense report.
When they’re flying to a conference.
When they’re working on a proposal.
When they’re responding to an associate’s email.

The list seems never-ending. The truth is, salespeople aren’t always very productive. In fact, according to HubSpot Research, salespeople spend just one-third of their day in sales-related activities.

Now, imagine if you had a sales resource that never went on vacation, or took a break, or got sidetracked by unproductive activity. Inbound marketing is that resource.

Governments repair and build roads. Utility companies run new transmission lines and fiber optics. And at home, we attach rain gutters to our houses and add-on new rooms. These are all examples of enhancing infrastructure. Even at work, we get new computers, new phones, and new desk chairs. Those too are infrastructure upgrades. 

Sales and marketing organizations have infrastructures as well.  Websites, sales collateral, CRM, marketing automation, and email are all examples of marketing infrastructure basics. How often does your firm evaluate the status of your marketing infrastructure? Do you have everything you need? What are you missing? Is everything working as it should? Like any infrastructure (roads, bridges, roofs, plumbing, etc.), a marketing infrastructure can become less effective if it’s neglected. And a neglected marketing infrastructure will eventually lead to ineffective marketing plans and missed revenue targets.

Your blog is a digital hub for the valuable, educational, and entertaining content you create for your target persona. Its goal is to increase awareness, drive traffic to your site, generate leads, and establish authority – leading to profitable customer action.  

But running a successful blog is a challenge for some businesses, and it requires constant analysis to ensure your current content strategy is effective. This can be done by reviewing the content you’ve created, assessing what worked or didn’t work, and creating a plan of action to improve going forward. Or in other words, conducting a blog audit.  

This process can help you uncover what content resonates most with your ideal prospects, and in turn, guide your content strategy and increase your awareness, engagement, and even conversions. It gives you a high-level view of how well your blog is (or isn’t) performing, and identifies gaps and opportunities in your blog strategy.  

The good news: it’s not as complicated as it sounds. And if you’re wondering where to start, what to evaluate or how to apply your findings, we’ve created a simple system to help you evaluate your own blog and begin seeing real results from your content. 

Occasionally we get the question, "Well, why do we need an inbound marketing agency if we have an in-house marketing department?" Good question. 

Inbound marketing agencies should not be competing with marketing departments; they should be partnering with them. This is how we do business differently at LeadG2. In fact, marketing and sales directors love us! We are an extension and an arm of their in-house marketing team that allows us to focus on areas we are experts in, and allows the marketing team to complete other vital marketing tasks. 

When you invest in a new effort like inbound marketing at your company, or you enter into a partnership with a marketing agency, everyone expects to get results. No one does marketing for marketing’s sake. We want to establish our brand, build an audience, convert leads, grow a pipeline, accelerate deals through the funnel, and ultimately grow revenue. Unfortunately, that doesn’t always happen. Instead of experiencing the euphoria that comes with achieving goals, you suffer the frustration of unfulfilled potential.   

Looking for a business, product, or service? Need a good how-to video? Just "Google it." Google has made accessing the information we need readily available and easily accessible. Consumers can find businesses, services, and products with a click of a button and faster than ever before, making it vital that your business has an online presence.

There was a time when writing a few good blog posts a month was enough to engage readers and keep them coming back. Today, however, there is much more at stake. User experience, or UX, plays a critical role in delivering quality blog content.

While it has its roots in design, UX - in this aspect - refers to how readers interact with or experience your content.

Are they able to understand the message you’re conveying? 
Can they find the information they’re looking for?
Is the content formatted in a way that captures - and holds - their attention?

When factoring in UX, quality content goes beyond the words on the page. It involves a number of considerations that can influence whether a reader bounces (leaves your website after viewing a single blog post) or stays to learn more about your business and what it offers - ultimately leading to a conversion. It’s not enough to have good content, you must also create an enjoyable experience for those reading it.

A few years ago you started to blog. It went well. Your brain was fresh, and ideas for new articles flowed. But then life happened. You got busy at work, and you got busier at home. Before you knew what happened, your once-a-week blog update slowed to once-a-month. And then it slowed further to one new update every few months. And then you woke up one day and realized that you haven’t posted an update to your blog in over nine months. 

Lack of time is an easy excuse. However, I guarantee you that if your blog was producing the results you thought, it would, then you would find the time. Let’s be honest. It’s not really the lack of time. It’s the lack of results.

As we kick off the new year, it's safe to say that content still reigns as king in the B2B world, and it seems that it's going to stay that way. With B2B marketers who use blogs saying that they get 67% more leads than those who don't, and companies who blog see 97% more links to their site than those who don't, it's clear that blogging should be a part of your B2B marketing strategy. 

So, do you really need to spend time to promote your blog? Isn’t the point of a blog to promote your website? Yes and yes. Your blog is, indeed, a big opportunity to drive traffic to your website and promote your business as well as your products and services, but it needs strategic guidance to be successful in driving traffic and converting leads. Many industry experts preach the 80/20 rule when it comes to content and promotion, saying that 20% of your time should be spent creating content, and 80% of your time should be spent promoting it. Think of your blog like a garden that's meant to feed your family. The whole purpose of the garden is to create food—but you need to feed it, water it, and tend to it to get the desired results. The same is true of your blog. 

When people ask us, "Where should I share my blog?" we suggest these eight free ways to distribute blog content. There are additional distribution channels that include paid promotion and advertising, but this list focuses on eight ways you can share you B2B blog content immediately that we've found successful for our clients and ourselves.

Inbound Marketing is the process of attracting the attention of prospects, via content creation, before they are even ready to buy, and it's one of the best and most cost-effective ways to convert strangers into customers and promoters of your business. Today, we are bringing you a recap of the most popular posts we've published in 2018 on inbound marketing. 

Blogging is a key player in any successful inbound marketing strategy, and it's a goal of ours to provide our clients and visitors top-notch, quality content to teach them and guide them to success. We've searched for the most popular blogs of 2018, and we've curated these lists that will publish each day this week to bring you some of the most educational and informative content from the year. Check out these top blogs on inbound marketing from 2018 and let them guide your strategy in 2019!