There has been no greater test of your business’s marketing strategy than the arrival of Covid, lockdown and furlough.
Read moreWant to know whether it’s best to use self-service or an agency? Now’s a good time to do your homework—to evaluate your requirements and choices—so you can put your plans into action when business gets back to normal.
Read moreWorking from somewhere that isn’t your normal place of work—there’s a lot of it about right now... ... So, whether you already have a remote working policy in place or not, onboarding HubSpot tools and integrations will make it work.
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If you’re a B2B company looking to sell a product, service or message, then you have your eye on one thing—clinching sales. And if your sales and marketing set-up is what it should be, then these conversions are the direct result of a smartly planned and implemented sales process.
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Do you do digital? If not, you MUST! Because digital is where it’s at when it comes to building inbound marketing muscle. And you’d better shape up or you’ll lose out...
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When it comes to technological support, sales and marketing has never had it so good. There are gizmos galore out there, all designed to help you smash your sales targets. It’s a bit like fishing—get tooled-up and you'll land a bigger, better catch—more quickly!
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So, how’s it going? We’re well into 2020. Hopefully, you got stuck into your digital marketing plans from the get-go. If not, here's the easiest way to get on track: Have a clear vision before you start. Do this by channelling your energy in the right places. It’s not too late to make 2020 your best online marketing year!
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Did you zoom triumphantly into 2020 with all digital marketing goals achieved? Or did you cruise in more slowly, feeling that things could have gone better? If the latter, now’s the time to learn from experience—to grease those wheels and make this marketing year the best yet. And it’s not too late!
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When it comes to digital marketing, your website is a powerful sales tool—so much more than an on-line brochure or storefront. It is a treasure trove of information and it’s up to you to be an expert miner and plunder its lucrative resources.
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Although there is truth in the old sales adage: “No doesn’t mean no, it just means not right now” there comes a time when even the most resilient and tenacious of us must pull our heads out of the sand, face reality and focus on high-potential leads. The success of your inbound marketing strategy depends on it.
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Remember outbound marketing—reaching customers with targeted approaches such as cold calls, email marketing, direct mail, advertising, print and account-based marketing (ABM). It was sidelined when inbound marketing strode in but it is still a valid and powerful marketing tool when it comes to growing your business.
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In a digital marketing world you must establish and maintain a competitive edge. For this you need a website—structured, good looking, well written and focussed on your target market. But did you know that your website can also be your hardest working salesperson?
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Involved in inbound marketing and sales? Wondering whether the Solent HUG is worth attending? Listen to what our committed HUGgers have to say…
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PESO is the acronym for Paid—Earned—Shared—Owned. It represents the segmentation of all marketing channels that can be utilised to build your brand. Each segment has its own identity but combine them and they become a more powerful whole that delivers better results and a more connected message.
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In the continual push for new business never overlook your existing customers. If you do, they will cool quickly and hotfoot it to more appreciative pastures. And, believe us, it takes a lot more than charm and tulips to keep them faithful...
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Not long now until the Lady Marketeers meet—just about the best collection of female marketing nous in the region. FREE to attend but register first.
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Netting customers is one thing—hanging on to them is another. Losing a number of clients over a given period of time is called customer churn. Too many losses will damage your brand reputation and bottom line—your ROI.
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Your business’s success depends on your Return on Investment—and it’s finding new customers/sales that determines whether you can put your feet up on a tidy profit. And sales rely on quality leads—the ones that are worth chasing because they will pay.
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Looking for the best support with onboarding your Inbound Marketing strategy? Come to the next Solent HUG! Meet and talk with HubSpot’s Senior Onboarding Specialist, Zara Flannery. WHERE: Eastleigh Football Club, The Silverlake Stadium, Stoneham Lane, Eastleigh Hampshire SO50 9HT WHEN: 4 December, 9.30am—11.30am
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If you are new to the marketing industry it pays to be able to build a first-class sales funnel. This is the vital first step in the success of your digital marketing campaign and will attract and convert new customers—the lifeblood of your business.
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We live, work and play in an increasingly visual world and exploiting images of every type and video in your content marketing is critical to the success of your strategy.
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Looking for an Inbound Marketing Agency that will help your business grow? Visit the Breckenridge Stand at the Business Innovation South Expo. Chilworth Manor Hotel, Southampton Science Park Thursday, September 12 10am—4.30pm
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Check out this HubSpot Implementation Specialist—he’s Ian McKeown and he’s jetting in from HubSpot’s Dublin HQ to give you lucky Solent HUGGERS FREE digital marketing insights and hands-on support. Subject: Lead Capture Techniques—gated content strategy and how to create conversion points on your website Venue: Urban Reef Seafront Restaurant & Beach Bar, Boscombe Date: Wednesday, 18 September, 2019
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For the best ideas, come to the next Lady Marketeers meet...
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Looking for the best support with your Inbound Marketing strategy? Come to the next Solent HUG—Dancing Man Brewery, 19 June—and listen to HubSpot’s Principal Implementation Specialist, Stephen Fuery—he's flying in from Dublin to speak on ‘How to overcome the top five client struggles with HubSpot.’
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Who better to speak at the next Solent HUG on ‘Targeted Content and Thought Leadership’ than business entrepreneur, Peter Czapp?
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Yet another Solent HUG looms, promising FREE inbound smarts from HubSpot's Stephen Fuery, flying in from Dublin, and The Wow Company's Peter Czapp.
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When it comes to turning leads into customers, combining email and landing pages is a powerful tactic in the success of your inbound marketing strategy.
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When it comes to the Law of Attraction, inbound marketing has all the magnetism your brand needs to build looks, reputation and wealth.
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Just like free drinks at a networking event, January dried up fast! So how's your digital marketing strategy? Do you have one? Here are a few pointers why you must raise a brimming inbound glass to power you through this year and into the next.
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AI is surfing in. We’re fast handing over human skills and cognition to machines that do all the thinking and doing for us. It already impacts every aspect of online/inbound marketing but, unsurprisingly, it has massive ramifications when it comes to your SEO.
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Meet Jo Blogs, Breckenridge’s blogging superpower. She’s here to set you right about the importance of blogging as part of your digital marketing strategy. She knows her onions, so, if you are in any doubt about blogging’s value, feel free to plunder her expertise…
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When it comes to electronic commerce, converting browsing customers into paying customers owes much to words and the power of persuasion. So it pays to invest in influential copywriting – a potent, economical tool that will drive your readers to engage with your content and click your calls-to-action, increasing leads and whamming-up your conversion rates.
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When it comes to Inbound Intelligence, it pays to be up on the lingo. Here are a few of the main terms—and keep an ear out for changes as this is a fast-evolving industry.
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Ink pens (of every ilk), paper and typewriters may have been bumped out by computers, but copywriting is here to stay.
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Bold but true: copywriting underpins every function in a multi-disciplinary marketing agency—ignore it to your detriment.
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The goals that you set for your inbound marketing will guide your strategy and tactics and will determine what success looks like for you and your team. It is therefore important to set some really SMART goals.
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When it comes to muscling-up in today’s marketing ring, it pays to have a solid writing tag team fighting your corner. Why? Because it brings complementary communication skills to the canvas—skills that will help to strengthen and build your business.
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If you are looking for digital marketing support and direction, make sure you source a boffin proficient in all platforms!
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Email is still one of the best channels for driving marketing ROI so it comes as no surprise that marketers around the world keep sending billions of emails every day. Email marketing has traditionally been associated with outbound marketing and is indeed one of the prime examples of good old traditional marketing. Those who have managed to turn email marketing into a successful inbound channel, however, see better results.
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As a marketer, a large part of your job is to track and optimise your performance over time. You need to record your results against your goals to see how on-target you are, and so you can continue to improve moving forward. That’s why reports, both within your team and for your colleagues and bosses, are so important.
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HubSpot is probably the most intuitive, useful blogging platform around, and I’m not just saying this because we’re a HubSpot inbound certified agency. It’s more truthful to say we chose to become HubSpot certified because it’s so great.
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Your landing pages: not always the first place a customer lands on your website, but the page they arrive at after clicking a call-to-action in an email, a blog post or on social media.
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In short, inbound marketing is a way to get customers through the door by delivering the content they want, precisely when they want it. Although inbound marketing methodology is a framework that applies industry-wide, there are many ways to tailor it to your niche.
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Email has been around for 45 years now, overtaking text messaging to become the number one method of communication in 2013. For a few years now, it’s been one of the most popular smartphone activities. In 2016, email marketing is showing no signs of slowing down.
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Whatever your company’s focus within the marine industry — whether fishing, boat building, repairs, marine engineering, shipping, yacht sales, rentals or supplies — marketing your business must move with the times.
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As a charity marketer, you’re probably used to bootstrapping to make your budget go further. With limited cashflow from trading income, government grants and donations, it’s important you know how to run a successful but thrifty inbound marketing campaign. Only then can you maximise your return on investment.
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All types of companies — from small and medium-sized businesses to large multinationals, whether in the private or public sector — can benefit from implementing an inbound marketing strategy.
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Inbound marketing for the healthcare industry shares the same characteristics as inbound marketing for other industries, but it comes with its own specifics as well.
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It’s widely agreed these days that inbound marketing is better than outbound marketing, with more and more brands making the switch from old school marketing techniques to newer ones. But does that mean we should completely forget about outbound?
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We’re leaving winter behind and entering the spring months, so what better time for a review of how the year is going so far? The end of a quarter is also a new beginning, and the chance to start afresh with an updated set of opportunities and goals for the next three months. After all, Fast Company has reported that 90-day goals are better than annual ones.
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Easter is on its way, and with it comes the opportunity to plan an array of holiday strategies across your inbound marketing channels.
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As a SaaS company, your product revolves around solving a problem for your customers. The content you publish can serve the same function. If your aim is to make your clients' lives easier and more efficient, why wouldn't you start via your approach to content marketing?
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As marketers, part of our role is to move prospects through the sales funnel, from awareness to consideration to decision stage, until they are ready to buy. By gathering information on and scoring our leads, we know more about how to market and sell to them. This makes it much more likely that they will go on to purchase, request a consultation or be receptive to a sales call when it comes their way. The better qualified a lead, the more chance we have of closing the deal.
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The beauty of the tried and tested inbound marketing methodology is its universality; you can apply it industry-wide, as it lends itself to being tailored precisely to your buyers’ needs. Successful tech or SaaS inbound marketing relies on content and messaging that champions thought leadership and problem solving ability.
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One of the topics we talked about at our What’s the future in Digital Marketing event last September was the trendiest inbound marketing moves in 2016. One of the questions asked of our panel was what do we, as inbound marketers, need to stay on top of and incorporate into our strategies for this year?
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Email marketing nurtures leads and creates customers, and is on the rise even in the age of social media and content marketing.
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Did you kick off 2016 with all the best intentions for implementing an inbound marketing strategy, setting SMART goals and (more importantly) achieving them? The next step is finding ways to monitor your progress against these targets throughout the year.
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More and more companies are waking up to the need to invest more into their digital marketing; 77% of companies planned to increase their digital marketing budget in 2015, up from 71% in 2014 according to Econsultancy’s Marketing Budgets 2015 Report.
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Reporting the results of your inbound marketing efforts to your boss and sales team is no easy feat. The KPIs you normally use to measure your success, such as reach or website visits, probably aren’t the same as the ones they care most about. They need to see the direct impact of your marketing activity on their bottom line ROI.
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The start of a new year is the ideal time to consider and set your inbound marketing goals for 2016. Setting your objectives means initially reflecting on your performance with each channel in 2015 and then deciding what you want to achieve over the next 12 months.
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Inbound marketing efforts would be meaningless without the biggest inbound discovery tool of them all. With over 3.5 billion queries performed via its search engine every day, Google is king when it comes to attracting visitors to your website and content.
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It doesn’t matter whether 2016 is your first year of inbound marketing or you’re simply ready to step up last year’s game to improve your results. The first step towards success is perfect planning.
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Digital and inbound marketing is an ever-changing, always evolving space. As you gear up for an incredible 2016, it's vital to plan around the latest trends.
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Of all the metrics that can measure the success of your email campaign, the click-through rate is by far the most telling. But how does one achieve a decent click through-rate? The answer is: segmentation.
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After reading this post you might find it necessary to change your job title to Publishing Manager. This is not an exaggeration. Consumers and buyers seek information and, as a marketer, it is your job to provide it. This means creating relevant content of a high quality and lots of it.
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Finally the dreadful days of cold contacting leads that do not want to hear your sales pitch are over (insert cheering from sales reps from around the world here!). Instead of being the cause of frustration for possible prospects (and themselves) the sales team can now work with warm or, even better, hot leads.
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You know that your company website needs fresh and engaging content. As a marketer, you will need to deliver content that will stand out above the rest in order to grab (and keep) your audience’s attention. But with so much content creation and social media traffic happening on the web, how will you expand your online presence with your content on a tight budget and limited time? Here are 7 tips to assist you with mastering the skill of fast, effective and inexpensive content delivery... and turn you into a content ninja!
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Why? Because bloopers are bad for your brand – your sales. Whether you believe English to be evolving or devolving, spelling and grammar matter when it comes to credibility and making your marketing work.
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So you’ve invested in awesome content and transformed your company website into a lead generating machine - and you've most likely already celebrated your first genuine lead off your website. It’s a win and an exciting time for your company. The pressure is on to take your leads through the marketing process until they are sales-ready. Aligning the Sales and Marketing teams around the same goals and buyer personain order to increase As a marketer, you know that having gained more leads is huge step in the right direction, but that it’s not enough and won’t, by default, mean more sales. You now have the job to nurture those prospects and prime them for the sales team. What is the best, proven and cost-effective means to achieve this? The answer is simple and probably right at your fingertips: email.
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Do you have a buyer persona? Are you using it effectively?
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What is Smarketing and why is it so important? Sales + Marketing = Smarketing. In a nutshell, it is about aligning the Sales and Marketing teams around the same personas and goals in order to increase revenue. As a marketer who has time constraints and pressure to keep up with marketing trends and show ROI - Smarketing makes sense and should be the next step in your marketing strategy.
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Justifying your marketing spend and determining the ROI (return on investment) for major sales campaigns are obstacles every marketer faces at one point or another. Without enough data and an adequate means of interpreting and reporting on what the numbers mean, it’s near impossible to make smart, informed decisions as to what will improve your bottom line. The good news is that marketing can indeed be measured. By making sense of the marketing-sales cycle, you can identify what worked (and what didn’t) and adapt your plans accordingly. This is called closed-loop marketing. And by equipping yourself with the right tools, you can efficiently (and confidently) justify and report on your marketing strategies.
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Three words trump all others in the marketing arena: Generate. More. Leads.
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What is Inbound Marketing? Inbound Marketing (IM) is a term coined by Hubspot, Inc., a US-based Tech Company, and it describes the strategies, processes and tactics a company can use to attract their ideal clients by delighting strangers, converting them from leads to clients, nurturing existing clients and keeping them happy. As an online marketing strategy, it is based on a four-step action process specifically sequenced to generate leads and clients by means of content creation and other "customer delight" methods.
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