Posted by Patrick Murphy on Tue, Jun 01, 2010
For inbound marketing, your website and the world cup it is a simple answer, it needs goals. Imagine a world cup where the teams ran around with no intention of scoring any goals. Worse than that, where eleven men are sent out on to a football pitch with no direction as to what they had to achieve. Really would not make for a very successful football team. Well your inbound marketing strategy or website needs similar direction or goals as to what you want to achieve.
With inbound marketing and website design you sometimes have to think about your goals and what you want to achieve before anything else. Your goals for your website and inbound marketing can lead to very different approach to your planning, design, and promotion. We have come up with two basic goals your can have for your inbound marketing and website.
First Inbound Marketing strategy or Website goal: Your website is not the end it should be the starting point. Maybe all that is required from your website is simple information about your company, your products or your services. Your website could simply be a website to provide your clients or your potential clients with information. Remember Inbound Marketing starts with someone asking a question or looking for more information.
Second Inbound Marketing strategy or Website goal: Most company's goal is for simple lead generation and if this is the case then try to view your website as part of advertising strategy. While it is fine to provide information on your website you should look to take it a stage further and find ways to engage for the purpose of generating leads.
When thinking about inbound marketing and your website these should be just the starting point for your strategy. Regardless of why or what your inbound marketing or website goals is make sure you have one and stick to it. To help you along, SiliconCloud are running a free webinar this week on how to make the most of your website. You can read more here: Website Redesign.
Posted by Patrick Murphy on Mon, Mar 01, 2010
It appears that a Social Media Strategy is the new strategy to have. Companies seems to be jumping in left and right into social media without any idea why they should use Social Media or why they might need a social media strategy. Companies feel the pressure that they need to be in involved and engaging in social media and hope that something could come from it.
Before you start building your Social Media Strategy should you consider why you need social media or what benefits it can bring to your company. To help you along here are some reasons why you or your company needs to consider a social media strategy.
1: Listen to your customers. If you already do not have a social media strategy, then this is a great place to start. Why, because now you can tap into what people, clients, partners are saying about you, your products or your services. The added benefit of listening to your customers is you can find out to whom they are talking to, and what they are thinking about your competition. By listening to your customers provides valuable insight into your own offering and makes an excellent starting point for making changes, playing to your strengths, your competitor's weakness and otherwise building offerings that will appeal to your audience.
2: Your social media strategy can help you build your brand. Part of your social media strategy can be about creating awareness about a new service, product or a brand. More and more consumers are consulting online first before making any purchasing decision. So by getting a customers or people talking your product means they can also share their views with hundreds of friends on Facebook or Twitter and that is a massive amount of potential exposure.
3: Become real. Generally your social media strategy should be about engaging is not pushing corporate speak. Most people view companies or corporations as impersonal and faceless. So use social media and your strategy to connect your brand or profile to a personality. This can help make your business seem more approachable. Regardless of how you engage in social media try to let your personality shine through and build a bond between you, your company and your clients.
These are just 3 reasons there are many more. But in simple terms your clients, potentials clients are out there why are you not?
To help you build your own reasons for your Social Media Strategy. SiliconCloud are running a webinar next week on "How to Googlize your Business". Since Google appears to succeed at everything online we are running a webinar on what you can learn from Google and their website for your own business advantage.
Click here to register Social Media Strategy
Posted by Patrick Murphy on Mon, Mar 01, 2010
Ok Internet marketing goals really I have a web site is that not enough? Not really everything needs directions regardless if it is your website or your business, it needs goals. So does your website or online prolife and what it needs is some Internet marketing goals. It is essential to set your internet marketing goals and define who your target market is. Because without any clear understanding of what you want to achieve from your website and who you want to achieve it with your internet marketing will not be focused and will not deliver the results you were looking for.
While your internet marketing goals could be as simple as increase traffic, increase conversion and bring repeat traffic back to your website, what else can you add to your internet marketing strategy? Here are a few other ideas you should consider.
1: Increase your company or brand awareness. Your website presence can be spread though the internet by your content and your social media network. By using this network you can quickly increase the public perception of your company and develop uniqueness that makes if distinct and stand out from others.
2: Build a reputation. Your internet marketing goals should seek ways to influence the way people experience and perceives your brand. This could be monitoring social media or forums to see what people are saying about your brand and your website.
3: SEO improvements. This one should be part of any internet marketing plan and regardless of your goals. Your goals should cover general increase in SEO improvement and number of inbound links. Try to create content that people want to link to and ensure that the pages our optimized from a SEO point of view.
By having distinctive internet marketing goals allows you to build campaigns that target and fulfil your internet marketing goals. For example run a link building campaign maybe through social media while at the same time go through your current website with a view of optimizing your website for relevant keywords.
Simple as 1,2,3?
So to help you build your own Inbound Marketing Goals. SiliconCloud are running a webinar next week on "How to Googlize your Business". Since Google is top website in the world we will go through what you can learn from Google and their website for your own business advantage.
Click here to register Internet Marketing Goals
Posted by Patrick Murphy on Fri, Feb 05, 2010
As with all business aspects and activities it is essential that you have some goals and targets for your inbound marketing campaigns. By having goals it will help you get the most from your time, resources and your budget. It is also important to have benchmarks that you can measure, compare against and look to improve your performance.
Here is a list of some goals that you could use for your website and your inbound marketing campaign.
1: Your Position: Your goal is to have top positions for your targeted keywords. Remember it is important that these targets reflect high volume and high intent keywords in the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing.
2: No of Visitors: This might work best for non-transactional sites which do not have clear outcomes and are seeking to increase brand or profile awareness and interaction.
3: Outcome Goals. This can be straight forward for transactional site and harder for other sites that are non-transactional.
4: Cost Target: We use HubSpot for our Inbound Marketing and that provides us with a monthly savings on organic search. Our goal is to increase our savings every month.
These are just some goals, what goals do you have to add?
You can use more specific objectives or goals for your inbound marketing as your experience increase. Try to create objectives to achieve a realistic and achievable share of organic search that is combines with outcome, value based and cost focused objectives.
Remember that all goals should be SMART goals even for Inbound Marketing. To recap from school SMART goals are:
- Specific: A specific goal has a much greater chance of being accomplished than a general goal.
- Measurable: Establish criteria for measuring progress toward the attainment of each goal you set.
- Attainable: Goals should be appropriate, achievable and agreed
- Realistic: Your goals should represent an objective toward which you are both willing and able to work to.
- Timely: Goals should be grounded within a time frame.
We at SiliconCloud understand the challenges for business to grow. That is why we are running a free webinar on "How to Grow your Business with Internet Marketing". Where we will cover topics such as:
• The changing nature of marketing and how to transform your business
• How to hire a marketing team in this changing world
• How you should communicate to the company and board about what is going on in marketing
• How a you should use social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn
• How to measure and understand which of your marketing efforts are working
Register now, as space is limitied