(Hubspot)---Smarketing

Five Steps to Integrate Smarketing into your Organization

Before I give you the five steps to integrate Smarketing into your organization, you may want to know what it is right? Smarketing is the process of integrating the sales and marketing processes of a business. The sales and marketing relationship is often a negative one, so Smarketing should help to make these processes easier. Now that you have a little information on what Smarketing is, I'm going to give you the these five steps to integrate it into your organization:

1. Speak the same language
• Make sure to create a metrics-based goal for marketing which can be tied to sale's goals
• Define the hand-off process between marketing and sales which will make the process smoother
• Define your buyer personas to both groups in order to make sure they target the same people
2. Set up closed-loop reporting
• Make sure that you can identify the signs that you don't have closed-loop reporting
• Identify the benefits of closed-loop reporting for marketing and sales to both groups
• Example reports based on closed-loop data
3. Implement a service level agreement
• Definition of an SLA: agreement between sales and marketing
4. Maintain open communication
• Types of meetings and topics for each 
• Types of emails and content for each
• How to maintain open communication outside meetings and emails
5. Rely on data
• Dashboards are effective because they provide frequent, public, and transparent communication around progress towards goals
• Examples sales and marketing dashboards and reports
• The role of data in issue resolution and problem solving

(Hubspot)---Content that Converts

Creating Content that Converts

When creating content for your website or blog, you want to make sure that the content is compelling enough to grab the viewers attention. Content quality is the most important factor to increasing conversion rates. Therefore, you need to make sure that your content is interesting enough to help convert visitors into leads. Once you visitors become leads then they are one step closer to becoming customers which is the end goal of your inbound strategy.
   
The Buyer's Journey is an important measure to consider when developing your content. If you go through the various stages of the consumer's buying process, then it will be much easier to target the wants and needs of the consumer. Awareness stage content helps educate on nature of problem in general. Consideration stage content helps educate on specifics of problem. Decision stage content helps educate on solution strategies. Use analysis to determine which stage of the Buyer’s Journey needs refinement.

(SEO)---Site Readiness

Google Toolbar

In this blog post I will give you a little information on three types of links that can be used to help build your link campaign. These are effective ways of marketing your company by getting your site out and by receiving help from others.

Types of Links

One Way Linking:

One way links are links to your sites from sites which do not receive a link from your site. It's considered the best way to improve the ranking in search engines. The biggest advantage of one way linking is you are automatically protected from bad back links. Since one way linked sites offer tremendous value it is more likely to be stay there for a longer period of time. To gain the most benefit from your links, the link back to your web page should be one that can be followed by the search engine robots. By using this long-term game plan you will be able to safely build links for optimum link popularity success.



Reciprocal Linking:
Reciprocal linking says what the name suggest, that two web sites agree to link to each other. This is the most popular practice in linking building campaign today. This link basically explains that the site at the other end of this link feels that my site is important enough to link to, and I feel that their site is important enough that I am willing to let visitors leave my site via this link. Getting quality links is the very important in reciprocal linking. The good quality links consists of relevant theme, good page rank and good value add to customer. Rather than competitive, complementary sites should be considered. Study your competitor’s site, complementary sites and examine their link pages; this will give you valuable input regarding potential link partners.

Triangular Linking:
Triangular link trading is an attempt to fool the search engines into thinking that you haven't really engineered a reciprocal link trade. The way this trick is played is that you use two websites. You have your cohort link to your website A and you link back to him from your website B. This way the search engine will not see the trade, and will instead think that you "earned" the link. This is great technique, which can manipulate reciprocal linking into one way linking.

(SEO)---Search Engine Optimization

On Page Optimization Factors

Keywords

Keyword list is a list of significant and descriptive words that will be used to render the 

content to users in searches.The words should be similar to the theme of a web site and should be easily integrated in the web site content. Keywords are mental images linked to what lies in the heart of your customer. Keyword selection is based on consumer persuasive research.

HTML Tags
HTML Tags should be integrates with the keywords for greater optimization of the website. Various HTML Tags include Title Tags, Meta Tags, Alt Tags, etc. Title tag is an HTML code that shows the words that appear in the title bar at the top of the browser. Below is an example of a Title Tag:



The Meta Description Tag is part of the HTML code that allows you to give a short and concise summary of your web page content. Below is an example of a Meta Tag:



“Alt Tag” is defined as the alternative text that the browser displays when the surfer does not want to or cannot see the pictures present in a web page.

Content
Content is what makes the website good or bad and content is the major factor which attracts more and more visitors to the site. Search engines also give very high importance to the sites, which are full of relative content. Considering the main reason behind the website i.e. information, search engines emphasis more on content than anything else. Original and Well Written Content Answers these questions:

• What does your audience want to find?
• Will you have to do addition research?
• Are you an expert writer or do you have one on staff?

(SEO)---Search Engines

Difference between Search Engines and Directories

Search Engines are considered the top reason for why so companies gain visitors to their website. So what exactly is a Search Engine? A Search Engine is a program that searches documents for specified keywords and returns a list of the documents where the keywords were found. Some of the major Search Engines that you may be aware of:

A Web Directory is a web search tool compiled manually by human editors. Once websites are submitted with information such as a title and description, they are assessed by an editor and, if deemed suitable for addition, will be listed under one or more subject categories. A website search directory indexes a web site based on an independent description of a site. While directories perform many of the same functions of a web page search engine, although their indexing format is different. The main difference is that directories do not spider your site to gather information about it. Instead they rely on a few text entries, typically a site title, domain name, and description to determine which keywords describe your site.. Here are some examples of directories:

(Hubspot)---Amplifying Your Content With Social Media

Why Social Media is Crucial to your Inbound Strategy

Social media has become one of the most important ways to attract consumers to a business. Social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are being used by thousands of internet users every day. As a matter of fact, Internet users spend 4X more time on Facebook than Google. Consumers are checking their social media accounts for the latest news, trends, and events which makes advertising a business on social media more prevalent. There are millions of people using social media, so what does that mean? There's a lot of traffic! Below is a list of different social media outlets for marketers to target.

   

   
You can use social media to go through any of the steps in the inbound methodology: attract, convert, close, or delight. You can use social to attract visitors to your site. A study showed that 74 % of marketers saw an increase in traffic after spending just 6 hours per week on social media. Once you attract these visitors, use social media to convert them into leads. Social media is effective for customer acquisition, so use it to engage not just leads, but customers too. Social media can also be used to delight, which is staying connected with customers and keeping them happy. The inbound methodology is very important to remember when making your inbound strategy.

     Social can be used to help you business foster connections with prospects. Once you establish these connections, it allows you to gain information about consumers to keep them happy. Not only will you know about the customers, but they will get to know about you and your company as well. This will make it easier to show your personality with socially shared content. Don't be afraid to show what makes your company special. Enjoy this process and be you!