Inbound Marketing Blog

Have you ever felt uncomfortable getting on the phone and talking with someone? How about setting the tone as the first point of contact for the sales process, and running connect calls with potential leads? When first joining the IMPACT Sales team, the connect call was always a huge hurdle I felt I would never be able to get over. I was comfortable speaking with people in person, but it did not resonate over the telephone. I stumbled through conversations, had noisy backgrounds, started calls completely unprepared and, needless to say, the calls were ineffective and  my confidence level just kept plummeting. I needed to find a repeatable call structure that I could use to truly qualify prospects and set our team up for good conversations.  

One of the biggest challenges many organizations have is that revenue is rarely impacted despite an increase in traffic, contacts, and bottom of the funnel inquiries.  This week, Bob and Nick took to Facebook Live to discuss how marketing and sales can better convert inbound leads into sales opportunities, optimize your content to rank 0, the importance of your homepage and LinkedIn Company page descriptions, and IMPACT Live. Just in case you missed us live (or if you want to relive the magic), you’ll find the episode’s show notes below as well as the recording.

Lead nurturing is like trying to date the perfect catch.  He or she isn't going to commit to based just on a first impression alone. They're in demand. They want to weight their options and they'll need more convincing before going with you. So, why do so many businesses go in for the final sale right off the bat?

Did you know that 25% of your email list will die off each year? Holy depreciation. What's important to note is that even if your subscribers have gone inactive but remain subscribed, they could be seriously hurting your email engagement rates (even putting you in danger of being flagged as SPAM.)

In late 2016, LinkedIn announced that Sponsored InMail is now available to all advertisers. This ad format allows you to send personalized messages to a targeted audience within LinkedIn’s platform. So, B2B marketers, perk up -- this one’s for you. While traditional email marketing is still one of the most effective inbound strategies, it has become a saturated market where your message can get quickly lost in user inboxes.

One of the first things we learn as little kids is to always say "thank you" -- and of course, not to put our mouths on the water fountain, but that's a lesson for another day.  If someone does you a favor, if you're given a gift...Saying thank you is just good manners 101.  What I learned during my first days at IMPACT, however, is that it's also Inbound Marketing 101. 

A Lead Magnet can completely make or break your lead generation success and it also plays a vital role in developing a Customer Value Optimization system. Even if you’ve never heard the term “Lead Magnet” used before, there’s a good chance that you’re already familiar with them and you’ve likely even downloaded one yourself at some point. Lead Magnets are extremely common with Inbound Marketing for one simple reason – they work, very well.

"Nothing haunts us like the things we didn't buy." I came across this quote several nights ago while I was scrolling through my Tumblr feed and my inner-marketer had a good laugh.  We've all visited a website, took a look around, and jumped ship without buying anything or filling anything out, right?  You innocently move on to a different website, and like clockwork, the website you were just looking at appears in an advertisement.  Before you jump to conclusions, this is not some sort of Internet sorcery. It's a marketing strategy called retargeting, and 1 in 5 marketers are doing it. (Source: Chango) Why? Quite simply, it's working.