It's a new year, you have returned to work with your batteries recharged, you are ready to fire up! You have a beautiful, freshly minted, marketing strategy. The highly paid consultants have left, the new plan has been rolled out at your all staff meeting, new drink coasters have been distributed to the team printed with your new mission statement!
The phrase Content Marketing is THE industry buzz word at the moment it seems. Why? For one simple reason, when done right it's very effective at generating high quality and well qualified leads.
Getting your website found by your target audience is step #1, task #1 and job #1 for almost all B2B marketers. Without traffic the best nurturing campaigns, white paper offers, calls to action and so on will be underutilised. You will be relying on your ever decaying, horribly expensive to maintain, outbound email list and no self respecting B2B marketer should do that.
Hubspot recently published this great list of A/B testing dos and don'ts. This is a great example of the fifth step of g2m Solutions' methodology...test, measure, analyse and improve.
If you are looking for a checklist to evaluate online marketing agencies you should consider this excellent list from Hubspot. Hubspot make some of the world's most powerful marketing automation software to drive traffic to your site, actively convert them to leads and customers, plus a really strong marketing analytics offering. They rely on a global network of agencies to implement and deploy their software.
So they should know (in the spirit of full disclosure we are a Hubspot agency, so I guess that means we should also know!)
That said it's a really useful list and if nothing else emphasizes one key point...
B2B Marketing is about generating leads for sales....period. This means implementing a clear process over time to CREATE MOMENTUM amongst your target audience it is NOT a series of monthly or quarterly campaigns.
Inbound marketing takes time. It also takes a lot of domain knowledge. It can be hard for businesses to find the necessary time or internal resources to learn and/or implement search engine optimization and social media campaigns (to name a couple) for themselves. In these cases, businesses can reach out to a third-party agency to manage their inbound marketing efforts.
