Business Internet Marketing Strategies for You

What’s your plan? You heard me. What. Is. Your. Documented. Content marketing strategy? If you don’t have one chances are you’re having a hard time explaining to your boss why you need more budget and/or time to create it.

Continue to shoot from the hip, and you’re likely to join the ranks of the countless failed content-marketing wannabes of the world. Try a new approach, and you just might become your company’s newest marketing rock star.

Generating leads online — and converting them — is probably more about context than anything else. You have to show the right people the right offer at the right time. Mix in a “wrong” at any point in that process and your air-tight sales funnel starts leaking like a sieve.

You work hard to get people onto your website using things like paid advertising or social media or email. What we’ll talk about today is where you should send them (hint: a landing page!), why you should send them and a landing page optimization strategy.

You’re savvy enough to know that you must have a Google Analytics (GA) account set up. After all, ya gotta have a way to track what’s happening with your various online properties (like your website, social media, etc.). That’s all well and good but have you ventured into the world of data dashboards from within that GA account?

No? Not to worry. Step into my parlor ….

One size fits all may get the job done for workout clothes but not so much for your target audience. There are likely several groups you are trying to reach, and even within a single group there are different concerns and interests depending on where they are positioned in the sales process.

We call the groups you’re trying to reach Personas, and each persona could be at one of four stages in your sales funnel. Let’s look at how these all fit together and how you can use this information to generate more and better sales leads online.

One thing we see fairly frequently as we talk to business owners is a tendency to glom “SEO” and “lead generation” into one big category. The reality is that search engine optimization is one tool in the lead-generation arsenal. There are many other ways to generate leads online that you may not have heard of or thought about … yet. Let's look at how to generate leads using a few of these unconventional methods.

Many businesses we talk to have the same questions about email marketing that they do about blogging: what on earth do I write about … and why should I bother?

The answers are similar, too, and a weekly or monthly or quarterly newsletter may provide the perfect delivery vehicle for your email marketing messages. 

Have you ever discovered a typo in a link to your content that you just promoted all over the web? Worse, has this ever happened, and it was days/weeks/months before you discovered the mistake? Or would you say that the “(not provided)” keyword — probably your number one keyword in Google Analytics if you don’t use AdWords — is about as useful as dirt to your efforts to get found online? Yes? Listen up then and let us introduce you to the Google Webmaster Tools. 

According to Pew Research, in 2014 about 75% of the people who use the Internet participate in social networks. So, if you are still wondering IF you should be involved with social media get that thought right out of your head. Of course you should be creating social media buzz! The question is which social media strategy will work best if you are a B2B company?

You can have the prettiest website or the best products in the world, but if people can’t find you online you may as well turn out the lights and go home. And these days “getting found online” better include getting found on mobile devices. 

Here are the cold hard facts: 

• Google is the 800-pound gorilla of search.
• Google loves Google.
• Google+ is a great way to take advantage of these circumstances to improve the online presence of your business.

However, where do you begin?