Written by: At some point in our careers, we've all heard some “expert” tell us in no uncertain terms that we must do certain things or business will suffer. The trouble comes, however, when you see through the generalities and are still asking yourself, “But will that work for my business?”
We take a different approach to our inbound marketing services. While we stay on top of best practices and current technologies, we understand that every business is unique. The best way to understand your needs is to perform a thorough inbound marketing assessment that will reveal your core strengths and weaknesses, your business goals and your unique business situation.
We begin each evaluation by performing a business analysis to understand how many visitors, leads, customers, etc. your specific company website needs to meet your sales goals. This informs our recommendations as we look at all stages of the sales cycle:
Research and Awareness
The first step in getting your online presence to work for you is to, well, have a presence. 78% of Internet users conduct product research online before they ever approach a sales person, and it is extremely important that your website and online marketing is out there to speak for you during this critical research stage. The following components of your web presence are important during the research and awareness phase of the sales cycle.
- SEO (Search Engine Optimization) – SEO, along with SEM, helps you create awareness of your products or services at the moment when potential customers are looking for them. Did you know that 10.3 billion searches are conducted every month on Google?
- Do you have high quality websites linking to yours?
- Is your site properly optimized from a code and technical standpoint?
- Content – Valuable, keyword rich content educates your potential customers, reveals your expertise, and drives search engine optimization.
- Is your website set up to attract customers?
- Does your website answer key questions that prospects have about what you’re selling?
- Does your site promote you as an industry thought leader?
- Is your site readable on mobile devices?
- Social – Social media gives you a chance to interact with potential customers, and provides them advocacy opportunities.
- Is your site integrated with social networks?
- Is your content easy to share?
- Are you sharing content on social media effectively in order to attract new prospects?
Our inbound marketing assessment will identify those areas where you can make quick changes to gain immediate benefit (such as site optimization) and make suggestions for long-term strategies to improve reach through content marketing and social media marketing.
Lead Generation & Customer Acquisition
Getting people to look at your site doesn’t pay the bills! The next area of our inbound marketing assessment considers how well your online marketing completes the next steps of the sales cycle: converting visitors into leads and nurturing leads into sales. Common tools of conversion are:
- Landing pages
- Contact Us forms (Lead generation)
- Subscriptions to mailing lists (Lead nurturing)
- Subscriptions to social media (Likes, Follows, etc.)
- Social activity (Shares, Comments, Re-tweets, etc.)
- Content downloads (White papers, Catalogs)
- Purchases
Our initial business analysis will allow us to make recommendations about how inbound marketing techniques can work even harder to drive visitors to meet your sales goals.
Competitive Analysis
Finally, we examine your top three competitors' online presence. Specifically, we examine:
- Your competitors' website traffic relative to yours
- Visibility of your competitors' websites on search engines relative to yours
- Your competitors' comprehensive marketing grade compared to yours
With this information in hand, we can recommend a strategic plan to close the gap on competitors that might be further along in their marketing plans, or a plan to outpace, outrank and outsell your competitors. These recommendations follow the 4 pillars of inbound marketing that we follow as part of making your website a marketing machine.
Your Evaluation
Many businesses tell us they don't know how to track customers through the online sales channel, making it impossible to evaluate the effectiveness of their efforts. Our inbound marketing assessment will include recommendations for the reporting tools you will need to analyze your program's performance at each stage of the sales cycle.
You may not know how to take the first step to make your website a sales and marketing machine, or you may need some fresh new thinking to boost your revenue. Either way, we're here to help you understand the big picture and how your marketing activities fit into the overall marketing strategy of your company.
