How Google Authorship Changes the Rules for your Search Results

If you asked me what was the single most important thing that you could do right now to improve your SEO, I’d say make sure you are set up for Google Authorship. Hands down. Period. Full Stop. End of story. See, we’ve come to expect certain things to always be true. One of those was […]

Outsourcing Your Voice – Finding the Right Content Creator

Engaging content is the currency of inbound marketing.  Great content lets you attract traffic, capture more leads, and increase your sales. This message has been out there for a while now – “Content is King” –  and the most common objection is that “I don’t have the time.” The problem is it’s no longer optional. […]

Build a Content Creation Culture!

Good content is the lifeblood of businesses. It’s really the cornerstone of so many disciplines: Search engine optimization, user experience and design, customer support, marketing — more and more businesses and consumers both rely on the creation of useful, credible, and engaging content. When companies seek to create internal knowledge bases, they’re building content. They’re […]

Fire Your SEO Firm? Penguin 2.0 and The Evolution of Search

With Penguin 2.0 expected to come soon, there’s been lots of discussion about assessing the quality of links and cleaning up the ones likely to ding you in Google’s search results. Last week, The Sales Lion put out his thoughts about SEO and link-removing, which are based on an email from an SEO company to […]

Lead Scoring: How to Focus on the Most Important Leads

So, you’re rolling along with your content strategy, getting traffic via blog articles and generating new leads with awesome TOFU offers. But, how do you separate the good leads from the bad, the non-qualified from the qualified? Lead scoring is an often overlooked, yet critical, aspect of smarketing, which we discussed in our last post […]

Smarketing: Marketing and Sales Alignment is Critical

Now that you’ve become an expert in TOFU and MOFU marketing, the leads are rolling in. However, if you don’t have a strong sense of alignment between your marketing and sales teams, those leads could be dropping through the cracks. The traditional relationship between marketing and sales in most organizations has been marked by rivalry. […]

Build Buyer Personas to Create a More Effective Sales Process

We’ve talked about the buying process but another very important tool is the buyer persona. You may have heard the term avatar, buyer profile, ideal prospect, target market, or others to describe this or something similar. When I use the term, I’m talking about something very specific. A buyer persona as defined by expert Adele […]

How to Use Client Interviews to Grow Your Business

For every client we take on, regardless of what they come to us for, we do a survey of their employees, some of their clients, and if possible, a couple of their prospects. There is no better way to find out a whole lot of information quickly, including: Strengths and weaknesses of the company and […]

Convert Leads to Sales at the Middle of the Funnel

In our last post, we discussed how mastering the top of the funnel (TOFU) is crucial to attracting your prospects to your website and generating leads. Once you’ve generated some leads, you need to nurture, qualify and convert marketing leads into sales qualified opportunities. That’s where the middle of the funnel (MOFU) comes in. MOFU activities […]

Get More Traffic and Leads at the Top of the Funnel

How effective are you at attracting the right kind of visitors to your website and generating qualified leads? You need more than a healthy PPC budget and a website to generate high-quality leads online. You need to become an expert at TOFU marketing. In inbound marketing, the Top of the Funnel (TOFU) is the area […]