Inbound Marketing Blog

I have a confession to make: I have a problem with Retail Therapy. Sometimes, I get happy or sad (or even just bored) and want to buy something. Clothes, food, anything. I know, it’s terrible, but I take solace in the fact that I'm not alone. People are emotional creatures. When it comes to shopping, our emotions and mental states can change drastically as we go from Awareness to Consideration and ultimately, Decision Making. As any great inbound marketer, it’s our job to know and understand these emotional states and align our strategies to give consumers what they need during them to feel comfortable making a purchase.

As many of us know, it can be an incredible challenge to create a website with wonderful content that can generate leads and attract qualified traffic, but, once you do, it's extremely gratifying to see all that hard work finally paying off. Unfortunately, there are many out there who may decide to use that success to their advantage… We’re not talking “imitation is the highest form of flattery,” I mean they may straight copy your content, design, or worse, your entire site.

There’s one page that usually draws most of the attention from stakeholders during a redesign -- your homepage, but what if I told you, you should put most of your focus on another area? Your landing pages.

People put their best foot forward during job interviews.  They get fresh haircuts, don their best suits, make sure they don't have spinach stuck in their teeth -- long story short, they try to make the best first impression possible.  Everytime a new person lands on your website homepage, your business goes through a "job interview" of sorts.

Everyone's got some sort of profile these days. On Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram... With these templated formats, it's easy to create a presence and grab someone's attention around the web, but when it comes to a professional company profile on your own website, it can be a bit tougher. 

Content is at the heart of everything we do as marketers. Whether writing an email, creating a blog, developing the script for a video, or writing social media posts, at some point in our journey as marketers we sit down and write. Unfortunately, much of the time the stuff we write just plain sucks. I recently read the results of a survey by 4As that found only 4% of people believe marketers practice integrity. Do you know what that means? People don’t trust us.

If you won an Oscar, who would you thank in your acceptance speech? Your mom? Dad? Pet corgis, Django and Diego? All of them are deserving, but when people are racing against the clock to wrap up their speeches, it always makes me happy to hear them thank the team behind the scenes. Like in Hollywood, not all jobs in business come with the fame and attention they deserve, but truthfully, these are often the ones that make the whole operation possible. Every movie, project, or company is only as good as individuals behind it, which is why the team page is such essential piece of any business' website.

Getting to know people is hard, but getting to know people online, is even harder.  Human beings are not one-dimensional. We all sound, look, behave, and even smell differently, but these traits (some, thankfully) can't be experienced from behind a cold, digital screen. No matter how advanced technology gets, there will always be a divide keeping us from truly knowing a person we've only spent time with online and unfortunately for marketers, the same difficulties could be said about brands. Enter the about us page.