Inbound Marketing Blog

In digital marketing, some things change fast. That's doubly true during a global pandemic.

Businesses are investing more in digital, and customers are showing a preference toward increasingly digital and personalized experiences, as well as fast service that enables them to engage on their time.

These trends lend themselves perfectly to inbound marketing—inviting marketers to provide content and advertising that is increasingly tailored to individual consumers or accounts.

In this article, we’ve updated the advice we originally provided in 2019 and added new strategies to help you refresh your digital marketing efforts for 2021.

You’ve probably heard terms like “inbound marketing,” “content marketing,” and “digital marketing” tossed around but didn’t know precisely what they meant or the methodology behind those strategies.

In this article, we’re going to dig into what inbound marketing is, how it works, and how it differs from traditional or “outbound” marketing.

Marketers, like everyone, were blindsided by the pandemic. New research from LinkedIn suggests that B2Bs in particular were more likely than B2Cs to have had their budgets reduced while facing more pressure to invest in short-term tactical marketing. 

For months now, businesses have increased their online presence to keep marketing momentum going. B2Bs accustomed to spending thousands on trade shows, conferences, and other in-person channels have shifted that spend to online channels to keep pipelines full.

You’re in the middle of planning content. If you’re already overwhelmed with keywords, topics, and content ideas, analyzing your competitors’ content might seem like one more tedious process.

However, researching your competitors is an opportunity to uncover their strengths and weaknesses and identify topics they either haven’t written about or haven’t written about well. With this juicy intel, you can seize open opportunities and beat competitors out of search positions by arming the audience with more or better information.

Here’s how to do it:

Poker players go all-in for one of two reasons: Either their hand rocks and they know the pot is theirs or it stinks and they want to scare everyone else into folding.

When done right, the payoff is big, but it takes confidence, timing, and the will to actually take a chance with your chips even when you can’t be sure it’ll pay off.

The same is true with inbound. Just like sitting around the poker table, it’s hard to win big by playing it safe with little bets here and there. Winners see opportunities and make big, smart moves.

If you’re a small to mid-sized brand, competing with industry heavyweights online (and elsewhere) can seem like a virtually impossible task. Search for any popular product or service and it doesn’t take long to realize big brands have a chokehold on the basic keywords people are searching for.

Depending on what these keywords are, this big brand dominance can consume the entire front page of results and beyond.

As a digital marketing agency, we’ve learned that inbound marketing works across different industries and for different companies. But we also realize that different industries, companies, and target buyers are all different in how they can find the most success with inbound marketing.

We don’t follow a formulaic approach to put our clients on the path to success. Clients who partner with us end up with a strategic, tailored digital marketing plan built on a firm understanding of the client’s persona, goals, and digital needs.

Read on to learn how we helped one client, The FDA Group, exceed their goals through inbound marketing using HubSpot.

Want to reach out and present your franchise opportunity to a wider audience of prospective business owners?

“Man, these leads stink, none of them close,” says the salesperson.

“Sales keeps dropping the ball on all our leads - it’s all credit and no blame with them,” says the marketer.

You’ve seen it before––the age-old divide between the sales and marketing. It’s a feud that can grind your company’s growth to a halt if both teams can’t get on the same page and work in harmony.

According to LinkedIn in 2020, "87% of sales and marketing leaders say collaboration between sales and marketing enables critical business growth."

With the task of driving new business clearly resting on the shoulders of both teams, the question then becomes: How do you bridge the gap and bring these two sides together for long-term alignment that has a measurable impact on your bottom line?

What makes your franchise stand out? If you don’t know, that’s a problem.