BroadVision Marketing Blog

“To be or not to be, that is the question.” But is it even the right question? I took statistics in college and I learned some useful information about questions that I use in my inbound marketing business. This information is good for any business person. The steps that I am sharing with you today are how to conduct marketing research. I am not going to give you a lot of information on any of the steps because I think we all need to see the big picture before getting down to specifics.

Website conversion killers? Really? Okay, so you have done a great job creating your website, you’ve optimized it, creating all sorts of learning devices like infographics, video, free reports and super blog articles. You are getting traffic and you have moved up in Google Search Engine Land, but something isn’t right. In fact something is really wrong. The visitors come onto your site and hop off faster than fleas coming in contact with flea prevention medicine. What?

LinkedIn—you know what you use it for personally, but do you know the best ways to use LinkedIn for your business? Or are you letting one of the best business social media platforms pass you by? You need to purposely set time daily for LinkedIn and you are going to be amazed at what you can do. Yes, even though it is only in fourth place behind Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, LinkedIn is for serious business people. They want the social element, but they want it more focused with people who are passionate about their professions.

Workflows have many functions. One is to keep all members of your team aware of what is supposed to be going on while getting feedback that can be seen by all members at the same time. A Workflow can also be an automated system that you can trigger to occur based on a a prospect's behaviors or contact information. A third kind of Workflow yet is the one where a presentation is pre-created (see our infographic). We can see then that there are several directions Workflows can go--internally within the organization, externally to and from a prospective client or as a tool to help in a pre-creation. As a member of Hubspot, we spend a lot of time talking about the latter, but for those of you who haven't joined Hubspot, yet, we are going to introduce you to Workflows as an internal organ first. (The infographic below is one that we created using infographic creation tools from a previous article we wrote.)--Jaco

Did you know that 85% of people in the United States search for local businesses on the Internet. Yes, that includes both brick and mortar and online businesses. Any type of business can take advantage of local Internet marketing and benefit from it. People around the world now use the Internet to look for businesses selling products and services they are in need of, instead of using phone books, yellow pages and other resources. Today, gaining the attention of consumers and letting them know about the existence of a business can become impossible for a business that doesn’t have an active online presence.

Awhile back I talked about why video. I think we all agree that video is a necessary part of an inbound marketing campaign. So let’s hear what two experts say are ways to actually create videos. We’ll start with looking at the few things we need to do to have an inbound marketing video that is a technical success. Alex Robertson delineates some of them succinctly in Marketing videos: top tips to make them tip top.

Mobile Marketing--Are You Mobile-ized for smartphones, tablets, netbooks? Is your website mobile-ized? Considering the facts that more people are using these devices than their desktop or laptop computers, it just makes sense to be able to be seen and used over the "phone" as part of your inbound marketing mix. How many customers or clients are you losing a day because they get frustrated trying to find you or trying to purchase something from you on their phones when your website just does not compute? It's time to wake up and smell the coffee your clients are drinking as they check their email. Below is a video brought to you compliments of BroadVision Marketing listing the reasons you should have your website mobile-ized. 

Infographics offer an opportunity to present complex information in a visual format that's fun and easy to understand. Because nearly any content can be made into an engaging inbound marketing infographic, they are becoming increasingly popular in online marketing. Brett Kaepernick says in an article written March 2013 “4 Effective Ways to Use Infographics as Inbound Marketing Content” that “Infographics are one of the most popular ways to engage prospects, primarily because they make information simple to understand and, at the same time, provide added dimension. Infographics use copy and visuals – typically icons – to tell a complex story.”

Agreed: Search Engine Optimization has gotten much more difficult since Google brought the zoo to the party. Agreed: Most people do not search beyond the first page of Google results. Agreed: A business wants to be on that first page.  Agreed: There are 3 pillars that a business person in charge of the internet connection needs to control at all times to get on that first page; these being content, inbound backlinks and social media. Agreed: Getting backlinks has become much harder than it used to be and considerably more labor intensive. Problem: How many ways can a business person use to get inbound backlinks?

How are your New Year’s Resolutions holding up? Oh, you wrote goals? When was the last time you looked at them? Maybe you need to get them out and dust them off? I thought so. I did the same thing with mine.  We all fully intend to review them on a regular basis and have put that into our calendar. When the day to review them popped up, did you have something pressing you had to do instead? Oh yeah. So when the next deadline came along it was easy just to delete it from your email message service. Well, the jig is up for all of us. We need to re-up as my friend in the army did recently.