Not Just Any Marketing Blog

While many marketers have heard of Inbound Marketing, they are unsure as to whether it is a good fit for their business, or what tactics they need to undertake to achieve positive results. To help, we have developed an Infographic to cover what you need to know before you start Inbound Marketing. 

When revenue is down the fingers start pointing. Sales and marketing teams are each quick to absolve themselves of responsibility and while this can be toxic, the reality is that you need to establish where things are falling over.

Whenever I get asked how to improve a company's sales and marketing performance, I always look to the data that can give me the indicators for success, not just the top level stuff. While this may sound obvious, quite often people get caught up in the larger metrics and miss the true indicators of performance which are the small things that collectively have big impacts.

Until recent times you had to choose between a tech guy and an effective communicator as they were rarely one and the same. However, finding an online marketing consultant with both skills nowadays is not nearly as rare, largely because of digital tools that allows more marketers to be effective on-line without the hard core programming background.

Today's objective for business owners however, is finding an online marketing consultant that has a level of commercial nous that allows them to comprehend the necessary requirements to delivering marketing ROI.

I'm a big fan of professional profiling and insights assessments. I did my first one in 2006 and another about 18 months ago. The result of my most recent assessment is a 62 page, independent insights report that tells me, warts and all, my strengths, weaknesses, behaviours, motivators, self-perceptions, external perceptions and much more. I read this report regularly and challenge my choices based on these elements. 

In recent years Inbound Marketing has really taken off as a prominent marketing method amongst progressive companies worldwide. With Hubspot setting up it's Australian office in the back half of 2014, it's quite clear that as far as marketing solutions go, Inbound Marketing is well and truly here to stay.

However, it's important to note that Inbound is not for everyone, not because it shouldn't be used by anyone, but rather that it doesn't suit some products, services, industries and business sizes as well as others.

Watching the social interaction of kids is one of the most fascinating things about being a parent. Their cheeky characters start much younger than you expect and most interestingly, they learn how to 'play the game' young too.

I was watching my son play with one of his friends on the weekend and there was a power struggle over the most uninteresting, beat up toy truck you could imagine. There could have been ice cream, new bikes and puppies juggling kittens and it still would not have taken their attention away from this old truck.

Being a marketer today is hard. The landscape of marketing solutions is saturated, with more mediums than ever before, and more pressure on you to perform.

So, how does the modern marketer know where to put their marketing budget to get the best return? The answer lies in understanding these 4 key elements. 

It seems to me that the term integrated marketing solutions gets bandied around a bit too loosely nowadays. Anything with a bit of tv, radio and print is considered an integrated campaign.

In the purest sense, integrated marketing is when we create and deliver value through utilising multiple means, focussed on achieving an objective. So, with the plethora of brilliant tools at a marketers disposal, why is there still an unnecessarily large bias to these traditional methods?

Marketing isn't what it was 10 years ago. Buyer behaviour has changed and buying email databases, sending direct mail campaigns and telemarketing just doesn't work the way it used to.

Today, an effective lead generation company is one that positions your company right where your prospects are and develops content that has people want to connect with your business.

Think of your own experience, you are much more likely to engage with marketing content that helps you, marketing that helps answer questions, not marketing which interrupts you.

Do you know who your customers are? No, really - if I asked you to tell me the varying challenges, needs and objectives of your customer base and how you segment your customers based on this level of insight, could you do it?

It's easy to fall into the trap of segmentation based purely on demographic data, customer types and geography. However, using this data alone means you lose sight of the individual at the other end - the actual person you should be communicating with.