Inbound Marketing Blog

In the last decade or so, local small businesses have experienced a fundamental shift in the way customers find them.

Print advertising, yellow page listings, and outdoor advertising—while still relevant in some cases—have gone by the wayside.

In their place, we have the most advanced discovery engine ever created: the internet. Savvy local business owners shifted with their customers, prioritizing increasing local search ranking via engine optimization (SEO), conducting internet advertising, and participating in social media.

However, between the pandemic and advances in technology, things have changed again, and will continue to do so whether or not local businesses are prepared.

A lot can change in a few years. Maybe your company rolled out new products. Maybe it shifted its focus on particular services — or finds itself serving different customers. No matter what’s changed, your marketing strategy needs to evolve accordingly. An important part of that evolution may be updating your buyer personas.

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:

As a small to mid-size franchising company trying to grab leads online, you know how hard it can be to push yourself to the top of search engine results.

With prospective franchise owners turning to the web more than any other source to find the right opportunity, getting yourself noticed in search engine results is key.

Google is constantly changing the way it ranks search engine listings, but each change they make underscores a very obvious goal: Websites that stay relevant with great content get to shine at the top.

For something that can work so well, executing a B2B website content marketing campaign sure can be difficult.

First, you have to figure out to what to write about. It's easy enough to list out your most important target keywords or talk to your sales team to see what customers are asking about.

But then you have to take those ideas and convert them into content that people actually want to read, and that has a chance to make it into potential customers' search engine results.

There's also a sometimes-prohibitive time commitment involved with B2B content generation. It takes a long time to write quality content, not to mention any social promotion, ad promotion, or outreach programs that are part of your post-publishing plan.

So how can you be sure the content you're producing worth the time investment and worthy of search engine placement? These five strategies are typically where we start for our B2B clients that are new to content marketing.

This post covers how to write an effective headline with tips you can apply to blog posts, articles, and social media with the intention of earning clicks and generating leads.

Writing a click-worthy title or headline is easier said than done. And generating a lead based off of that click is even more challenging. Read on to learn six things you can do to make your first impression count and keep visitors engaged.

Are you in charge of blogging for your business? If so, I have good news and bad news.

Here's the good news: you're working for a company that's embracing a marketing strategy built for the 21st century. Blogging takes advantage of the fact that so many potential buyers use search engines. In August 2021, for example, people conducted 5.7 million Google searches worldwide in a single minute.

Even back in 2015, “89% of B2B researchers use[d] the internet during the B2B research process” (Google). How many more might be researching online now?

And the bad news? Blogging can be a lot of work. While creating content can be relatively inexpensive compared to channels like paid search advertising, it does take time. And when you're doing it right, a lot of it.

So, how do you do it right? I could write pages and pages of blogging DOs and DON'Ts, but if your post meets these five criteria, you're on the right track.

Quick question: If you were about to play a game of darts with a friend — and let’s just say for the sake of argument there’s some money riding on this — would you pause to put on a blindfold before throwing the first dart?