BroadVision Marketing Blog

Everyone says you need their product or service. We get it. But in today's digital world there really is one thing your business needs: Digital Marketing.

Whether you undertake it yourself or hire a digital marketing service, marketing your business online is a necessity for most every business.

So, What Is Digital Marketing Exactly?

Every business needs to be seen and heard.

One of the most fundamental and basic requirements for any commercial endeavor, be that a simple lemonade stand or a multi-national services enterprise, is attention. Potential customers or clients must take notice of you.

“If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?”

One could reasonably ask, "If you have a business and no one knows, does it exist?"  

In the days prior to April 30, 1993, there was no Internet, no World Wide Web, no marketing "online" as we often refer to it today. There was only advertising, public relations, and publicity. And word of mouth, of course.

Without any of these platforms promoting the existence of your business, it would not exist for all practical purposes.

Today is no different.

Almost everyone goes to the Internet - usually with their cell phones - to search, to shop, and to find businesses. If your business is never seen online then it may as well not exist. Which is why digital marketing is so essential to your business.

Content is the primary key to successful digital marketing. But if it's not helpful content, it isn't helping your search engine rankings.

Written content, whether webpage copy or business blog articles, are critical content elements that can provide what Google has termed "helpful content." And Google is now ranking search results accordingly.

The purpose for teams is to combine a group of members to work together to accomplish certain goals that cannot be achieved effectively by an individual. Do you wonder why I keep repeating this? It’s because sometimes teams can get off-track like an elementary school student who starts reading an encyclopedia entry for a class and ends up following a cow path far from the subject because he loses focus.

A Sample Marketing Plan for an Inbound Marketing Strategy

A sample marketing plan for Inbound Marketing will give you one of the most powerful and most cost-effective approaches to marketing. Compared to traditional marketing methods, inbound consistently outperforms and typically costs far less.

A few stats from Hubspot illustrate this fact:

• 57% of businesses have acquired a customer through their company blog. 
• 42% of businesses have acquired a customer through Twitter. 
• 57% of companies have acquired a customer through LinkedIn.
• 48% of companies have acquired a customer through Facebook.
• Inbound marketing costs 62% less per lead than traditional outbound marketing.

Having said that, it is important to keep in mind that inbound marketing, while having a number of consistent components and tactics, is not a "cookie-cutter" approach to marketing either. Each strategy and subsequent plan is unique to each user.

Your Company Is Different - Just Like Everyone Else

Your business is like no other. Really. Your goals, your challenges, your offerings - they are all unique to you and your business. Even if you think you are simply a commodity. And because your business is unique, your marketing plan shouldn't be generic either.

We can offer a sample marketing plan, but the goal is to adapt it, modify it, make it your own. What might work well for your competitor across town may not be exactly the plan that will be most effective for you. Your marketing strategy should be crafted with your vision, your objectives, and your customers in mind.

Now that we've established that not all businesses are the same, nor are all effective marketing plans, let's look at a generic approach to inbound marketing.

A Sample Inbound Marketing Plan Checklist

A typical inbound marketing plan will consist of the following steps:

Marketing is as old as humankind. And it's still evolving. The challenge for small business owners is knowing what works. Especially for digital marketing.

Tactics by themselves do not constitute a marketing strategy, but the tactics used in a good strategy must be effective in and of themselves. 

Colors compose a secret language that only the human subconscious – and savvy inbound marketers – can understand. There's a reason the walls of your local fast food restaurant are orange, red and yellow. These are colors that subconsciously excite you and stimulate your appetite. There is a science behind the calming shade of green of your favorite coffee shop’s cups and why there's so much red in casinos. The language of color is a huge advantage in the world of marketing.

To say that orange makes you hungry is an oversimplification. The orange countertops aren't going to bring in customers who are full and make them eat. But marketing surveys have shown that color is an element that directly affects consumer behavior. Color plays on associations in the mind that can elicit certain responses, which is why it’s one of the most powerful design elements on websites, ads, direct mail, and other marketing materials.

Colors do elicit responses, but these responses vary slightly from person to person. However, according to marketing research, there are some common associations made with certain colors. We have presented an infographic (naturally) with our logo on it to go along with an article by guest blogger Jason Lagden of Sydney, Australia.--Jaco

There are few things more powerful when it comes to driving traffic to your company's website than business blog posts.

By harnessing the power of search engine optimization, frequent and consistent blog articles can pull in a higher percentage of leads and website visits than all other SEO tactics combined. If, that is, you have a proper strategy and produce valuable and relevant blog content.

For many small business owners, the terminology that swirls around the digital marketing realm is confusing, especially terms such as inbound marketing.

So many similar terms are recklessly thrown around by marketers and others that it seems it's easier to just ignore them all. But understanding the essentials of inbound marketing can be valuable for owners.