Author: Stacey Schall

Stacey is the head of inbound marketing at Schall Creative. She has a passion for communicating and believes that her left brain and right brain can work together in harmony. You can find her on Twitter @staceyschall.

What Should I Blog About?

“What should I blog about?” is one of the most common questions we hear from people doing their own digital marketing.

Blogging should be simple, yet people often do too much research to find the right topic. The worst thing you can do if you have an existing audience is to write a blog post for yourself and not for them. The blog is not for you, it is directed to inform your target audience about your main idea. If you follow these components you will be well on your way to creating an engaging blog.

Start with your current customers

First and foremost, always know that your current customers are the ones who are already familiar with your business or brand. Even if they are familiar with your brand, there are still things they will ask you about. Write those questions down, and answer them in a blog.

Not only will this keep them in the loop, but it will also give your potential customers a taste of the knowledge and expertise you give to your clients.

Think about potential customers

Odds are when you’re doing sales, you get a lot of the same questions from potential customers. They’re usually about cost, or the product or service you are offering. Answering these in a blog post can cut down on your time, and it can weed out the customers that aren’t a good fit. Stay away from broad topics and get specific. Always be honest and write like a human, not a robot.

Your experiences

As a brand, you want to tell the current and potential customers about your customer service. Storytelling goes a long way, and engaging the audience on the projects and experiences that you’ve encountered will help them envision themselves being one of your customers or remaining one.

Your competitors

Don’t worry, looking at your competition’s blogs or websites is not cheating. It’s a useful way to gather information about them. Staying up to date with the competitors in your area can help your business and tackle the important topics that need to be written about. Find something that you can provide a different take on, or something that you can explain in a more simple way, and do so.

Google your topic

Always make sure to research different ideas that you have. Having about three options will help you in creating an engaging blog. Google a couple of topics and then narrow it down based on the information you’ve come up with. What would spark your customers interest the most?

The Importance of Brand Personality on Social Media

personality in social media

When it comes to social media, small businesses can have a leg up on larger business for many reasons. A large company can have a harder time creating and managing their brand across multiple employees and departments, including their social media presence and personality. If you’re the owner of a small business, your brand personality probably overlaps with your actual personality. When this is the case, smaller business are able to make their social media account more personable, as long as they are ready to share their personalities in their content. Here are ways small businesses can share their personality on social media:

1. Tell a story

We all know you have plenty of them. If they are funny, informational, lessons learned or anything else someone else is probably, most likely, thinking or going through the same thing you went through. Help them out! Give pointers, tell them things you wish you knew! Put your story to use!

2. Ask questions

When speaking to someone on social media or within comments, ask questions! Find out what they are really thinking. By doing this you are allowed to get to the root of the problem. This is important when trying to make a human connection. Now when you do this in blog post it allows them to take a minute and think to themselves. Who knows you may be the one giving them inspiration. What do you think? Let us know!

3. Share your passion

Life is all about finding your interests and passions. If you don’t have either interest or passion in something you will not find enjoyment or passion in sharing it. This is a huge point because if your not passionate about something what means you sharing it is any what important. When you believe in someone and share it, it shows that you have passion and shows that you believe that it is important.

4. Write like you talk

Writing content for social media is not like writing a paper in high school or college. Spice it up! It is more fun for you and the reader to write like someone is talking to them. Write with the same spice or enthusiasm as if you were telling this story to a friend. Take a conversational approach to your writing it is just as freeing as it is effecting. Write as if you were speaking directly with a prospect or customer 1 on 1.

5. Show yourself or your people

If you’re a small business owner, odds are that the people following you on social media have also been acquainted with you in real life. Show your face through photos and videos so they can connect with you online the same way they do in person.

 

We have given you some pointers now go share your personality on social media! Let people hear you talking, teach your readers something your business is passionate about, paint a picture in their head, and give them inspiration and knowledge. Share your experiences, your passions, your why’s, and everything in between. Be you!

 

Debunking Marketing Myths

 

If you are spending money on marketing, you need to have your facts straight. We are here to help. It is easy to hear a bunch of rumors and or myths about marketing and what its all about. We are now debunking 5 marketing myths.

  1. You need to create content that everyone can relate to.

If you can create content that EVERYONE can relate to then you are one of a kind. Not everyone has the same viewpoints, thoughts, ideas, and likes and that makes it impossible to create content for everyone. If you’re trying to appeal to everyone, you are probably reaching no one. Instead, think about your audience and what makes them unique. Create a persona based on current customers, and think about that single persona when you are writing.

  1. Content marketing is just blogging.

Content marketing is a form of marketing focused on creating, publishing, and distributing content for a targeted audience online. Although blogging is a huge part of content marketing it is not the only thing. There are many other engaging types of media you can create, like videos, ebooks, interviews, case studies, success stories, and so much more.

  1. Marketing is an art, not a science.

SURPRISE! It’s both!! Marketing is just as much as a science as much as it is an art. Yes, marketing teams do a lot of designing and creating but before doing those things it is important to know the numbers on how those things work! For more detail on this point read more here.

  1. Only marketing professionals can create content.

False, false, false! If you’re an expert in your subject and you are focused on your audience, you can create marketing content. Having different kinds of content coming from different departments of the company can be beneficial to a company. Overall, you do not just have to be a “marketer” to create content.

  1. Sales and marketing dont mesh.

The biggest marketing myth right here is firmly being debunked. Sales and marketing should and do mesh!! Sales know first hand the question and problems both them and the customers struggle with. Marketing can also help sales in many ways as well. Check it out here!

 

If you are interested in something look into it and learn about it and make sure you avoid the myths!

 

Why Marketing and Sales Should Team Up

Overall, a business works towards the same goal and every part of the business should work in unison. A while back, we published a blog on how to build communication between sales and marketing and here are some of the reasons why marketing and sales should team up.

Better marketing

Being one team leads to better marketing. Sales knows first hand what people are asking and are concerned about. This information should be passed on to marketing so they can provide the answers before they even become questions or concerns. The buyer is researching the company on the internet and social media, and with that communication bridge the customer will be able to find exactly what they are looking for.

Easier Sales

With marketing addressing all the questions and concerns that you’re constantly answering in emails and phone calls, that leads to easier sales. Let your marketing team provide answers to prospects before the prospect even picks up the phone. Marketing also knows what is popular within their website, blogs, social media post, ect. which should be passed to sales.

Buyer Personas

Marketing knows what the business wants and aims for but sales knows what the business attracts and sells to. With both teams sitting down and working on buyer personas or ideal customer profile together it will increase the accuracy of what the company’s buyer personas really are.

Sales, Sales, Sales

All of the little things with these two teams working together really will add up and you will see the change. The superior results is the main reason your company should want marketing and sales to work together.

The company should drive the quote of “one team, one vision” to the whole company because that mindset will open doors to creating more leads and more conversations. It will take some reorganization for this to become and routine and ultimately work. But in the long run the work is worth it.

25 Tactics Offer

Girls At Work: Giving Back to Our Community

Girls at Work, Inc is a local nonprofit teaching girls that they CAN do it. Girls at Work, Inc. empowers girls with the tools to overcome adversity and build confidence to face current and future life challenges. They support and encourage their builders to not feel powerless but to feel powerful, strong and capable. 

Over the summer Girls at Work host camps where girls can come in and learn how to use power tools, learn to build things, and make friends. ‘Build Me Up Girls Summer Camp’ has been working on building picnic tables during their time at the camp.

Girls building the picnic tables like a pro.

As a thank you to First Responders for what they do for our community, Girls at Work summer campers along with the Girls’ Leadership Camp at Kimball Union Academy, decided to donate the picnic tables that they’ve built. Mayor Joyce Craig joined them alongside first responders from Manchester Police Department, Manchester Fire Department, American Medical Response, CarePlus Ambulance, Catholic Medical Center, Elliot Hospital, and Manchester Animal Shelter. In total, Girls at Work donated 10 picnic tables! Along with their picnic tables these hard working first responders also got to take home and wooden plank signed by the girls who made the tables.

Donating their picnic tables with the signed wooden planks.

Girls at Work found it extremely important to give back to our first responders for all the hard work they do day in and day out. “Sometimes you feel overwhelmed by the need. We want to take a moment and thank those who dedicate their time so passionately to our community” explains Elaine Hamel, the founder and program director for Girls at Work. It is important for us as citizens of the United States to understand the importance of first responders and Girls at Work was able to do that.

 

It’s Alive: Importance of Live Chat On Your Website

Why Your Business Should Start Using a Live Website Chat

A 2015 study by Zendesk proved the importance of live chat on a website. It found that 92% customers feel satisfied when they use the live chat feature, compared to other communication options like voice (88%), email (85), web form (85%), and social media (Facebook 84%, Twitter 77%).

Why Live Website Chats Work

Instant Help

Most of the time you just want your answer right away. When you send an email to a company it can be frustrating to get an email back saying they will get back to you in 24-48 hours. Live chat this you to speak with someone and get your answer as fast as they can type it. This leads to awesome reviews for your business from your clients.

Lets customers connect with you

It allows the customers speak with you on a more personal level than email. Of course a phone call would be the most personable form of communication with the customer, but phone calls take more effort from the user. A live website chat is the perfect combination of personality and ease of use. It is a real time conversation that can help you build relationships. To add a little bit more persuasion into your head look at these statistics. Live chat is 12% more effective than email and 29% more effective than phone showing the importance of live chat.

Competitive Advantage

According to the study, out of roughly 1,000 websites only 9% had a live chat feature. If your competitor does not have live chat and the customer has to send them an email in which they will respond within 24-48 hours, your company is more convenient to them which may increase your sales.

Increase in Conversion and Sales

Live chat is effective for whatever it is your business is trying to accomplish. A person who uses live chat is three times more likely to make a purchase, according to American Marketing Association. This is highly effective because your sales team or support staff are more able to change the experience for the customer which leads to the opportunity to create more leads.

More Data

Most live chat features ask a question to the customer prior to connecting them to a employee. Fields like ‘Name, Email, Problem’ are filled out and can also be funneled into your CRM or marketing software. All these questions lead to better reports on problems people are having. Live chats give you a direct connection to your users, and help you address the problems they are having in real time. These reports also collect data like how many people have visited your website, how many people have requested chat, how long each chat usually lasts, how many chats are accepted or ignored, and more. This gives you a way to improve your customer experience with actual data.  

Live website chats are quickly gaining in popularity, and users are starting to expect them on a site. The importance of live chat is a long list and we recommend setting up a trial so you can start delighting your website users and building your relationships.

Want to give live chat a try? Click here for a 30 day free trial!

How Disney Does Brand Guidelines Everyday

What You Learn Going From Writing for College to Writing for Marketing

Writing for marketing

In third grade, I thought that if I wrote a story it would end up in every elementary school library. But it wasn’t. Luckily, I had a special teacher fulfill a little part of my dream. She went out and had it printed on a hard copy and put it in my school library. To this day, I owe my passion for writing to her.

Fast forward to today. What you’re taught you in school is how you should always write? FALSE. I am on the verge of creating a petition for colleges to teach writing for marketing, like how to write social media posts and how to write a blog post, and other things I am actually going to use in my future. Most people know college writing, if you don’t then you know high school writing. All in all they’re the same. College writing:

  • •Introduction
  1. •Thesis
  • •Body Paragraph 1
  • •Body Paragraph 2
  • •Body Paragraph 3
  • •Other Viewpoint
  • •Conclusion

Basically that’s how it goes… but you need stretch it out to 12 pages.

Now, blogs can be a similar structure, but not too similar in writing style. When writing for marketing, people want hear your voice (and in my opinion, that’s the most important part). But there are different ways to write a blog, some of my favorite are:

This type of blog post is all in the title. The how-to blog post is a blog post that tells readers, well, how to do something. First thing first, you need to deiced something to write about and or tell your readers what to do.  Now write down the steps you believe are necessary for this topic. Once you have your how-to skeleton give it life! Write out your blog. Provide helpful information to your audience. Write out the points and fill in the bubbles. You can provide detailed information but still be to the point. Visualize it, make it eye catching and have fun!

You need to pick a compelling topic that goes along with something you can make a list for. Similar to the how-to post this will also have to have a skeleton built first. The outlining process is where you build up your lists. Now tell a story!

This is also known as the entertaining post. This post’s primary intention is to entertain. This kind of blog post is most free blog there is because you can write about almost anything with no type of outline. This type of content is mostly humorous content but sometimes can be informational. Make the post effective beyond its simple entertainment value.

This biggest difference between writing for marketing and writing for college is that you don’t need to fill up pages. In fact, it’s best that you make it really simple and easy for the reader to understand. You don’t need to fill it up with big words and repeat yourself to fill up space. Getting your point across in as few words as possible is recommended.

If you’re just out of school, this should be exciting. No more term papers, time to really enjoy writing!

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The Face Behind the Screen: Meet Erin, Schall’s New Intern

erin schall intern

This summer, Schall Creative hired me, Erin Loughran, as an inbound marketing intern. My responsibilities here include posting blogs and taking care of social media for Schall. I thought it would be a good idea to introduce myself and I’m excited to let everyone know a little more about me. I am a senior at Southern New Hampshire University where I major in Business Studies with a double focus in Organizational Leadership and Marketing. I have prior experience from previous internships in sales, hiring, quality control management, retail and more (I like to keep myself busy). Without further ado, here are seven things you don’t know about me!

          1. I coach Varsity Cheerleading.

My whole life I have been very involved in sports and have loved being part of a team. I’ve been involved in gymnastics since I could walk. During my freshman year I was the first one at the cheerleading tryouts and from there I cheered for 8 seasons on varsity through high school. I continued on to do cheer in college and even got to go to the NCA Nationals in Daytona, FL. Recently, I got the opportunity to go back and coach my high school team. So when this opportunity came knocking I couldn’t help but to accept. I’m excited for the future ahead with my team.

          2. I am an adventure enthusiast.

I love to travel and experience new things I’ve never done before. I almost always say yes to an adventure or to travel somewhere. I have the worst case of FOMO (fear of missing out) and I love to live life to the fullest. If it’s going to a concert, traveling, hiking, or anything else you can find my name on the list.

          3. I consider myself a Disney Junkie.

In May, I came home from the Disney College Program where I had been since January *sob*. If that doesn’t already scream she loves Disney then I don’t know what will. My whole family finds so much happiness when we get to go to Disney that when I got that opportunity everyone was thrilled for me . I thought I already knew the ins and outs of Disney but boy was I wrong. I now know everything that needs to be known about Disney and I couldn’t love the company more. I’m already having withdrawals from being there. If you ask me what it was like living in Disney, I would say it’s a whole new world (pun intended). But honestly, if your looking to plan a vacation there and you need some input, you know where to find me.

          4. I’m a people person.

I can talk to anyone about anything! I LOVE TO TALK (Sometimes a little too much)! I find myself to be very outgoing and I think that is why I believe that I belong in business. Now, at this point  I am still unsure of just what type of business I would want to go into, but I’m sure all the pieces will fall into place. So what if my people are kids and characters?

          5. I Love to learn.

I LOVE TO LEARN ABOUT NEW THINGS. I love to learn about history, people, I love to learn about anything…anything I’m interested that is and right now, it’s inbound marketing. Here at Schall Creative, I have been taking part of HubSpot Academy and I absolutely love it! Again, I’m learning about things I am interested in! Fun fact; when I was in second grade I could tell you everything you needed to know about the Titanic.

          6. I am DECA.

That was our motto my senior year of high school. I loved every single part about DECA and I owe it to this club for my love of business. I joined DECA my sophomore year of high school and from there I was loving it till the end of my senior year. I qualified for nationals my junior and senior year. Also my senior year I was the DECA Chapter President for my high school. Without DECA I am unsure if I would be studying business today. How cute are those blazers?

          7. My family is my everything.

Family is the most important part of my life. I have a very close family and I am extremely lucky for that! My parents are the most supportive, caring, loving parents I could ask for. My sister is the most giving, intelligent and perfect role model she could be to me. I would not be where I am today without every lesson, encouragement, insightful piece of information they each have given me and I owe everything to them and I will always love them more. 

There is a lot of things that make me, me but these are the seven things that if I didn’t have I wouldn’t be the same person I am today. I can share the passion and love of almost every one of these things with my family so that’s a pretty cool thing too. Now that you all know a little more about me, I hope that you have a better picture of the face behind the screen.

What This College Student Loved About the HubSpot Inbound Certification

hubspot inbound certification

As college student, I regularly sit through four hour lectures. I take classes online and on campus, write lots of papers and participate in discussion boards, often just for the sake of getting the credit. So starting courses for the HubSpot Inbound Certification, I’m not gonna lie, I was thinking to myself ‘jeez how long is this gonna take’ *eye roll*. But by the end of the training I realized that everything I just learned from this marketing software company were things I have never touched on at my university. I finished the HubSpot inbound training and these are few things that really stood out to me.

It’s engaging

One of the great things about these training courses is that they are videos of someone speaking. I know what you might be thinking, “Someone speaking on camera… and I’m supposed to stay attentive?” While the person is speaking, slides are posted on the screen with notes and numbers and pictures. Even with this seemingly boring format, they do a great job with keeping you interested.They throw out surprising statistics that you didn’t know or they simply provide material that you really want to learn.

There are plenty of resources

They also provide you with resources you might find helpful like blogs related to the topic. If you’re a note taker like me, they give you the slides first hand to take note on for the exam at the end of the training. They also give you a study guide! Take advantage of that because the exams are not easy! But by the end of this training, once you pass the exam, you’ll want to hang up your certification certificate on the nearest fridge!

I’ve never learned this stuff

My major is Business Studies and I have a minor in Marketing. The courses I take at my university are centered around the basic knowledge of business and a little sprinkle into marketing. But HubSpot dives into inbound marketing, blogging, social media and so much more that I haven’t had the opportunity to learn in depth. I am excited and eager to learn more at HubSpot Academy.

Dental Marketing Case Study: 5 Years of Growth with Inbound Marketing

Dental Marketing Case Study: 5 Years of Growth with Inbound Marketing

The Challenge

We started working with Mann Family Dental in 2013, and like with all businesses, their challenges have changed a bit over the years. Initially, Dr. Mann wanted to start placing dental implants, and he needed a way to attract a new kind of patient. He also wanted to become a fee-for-service practice, and get out of the dental insurance network that was giving him headaches and stalling his success. Of course, from a broader perspective, he wanted more new patients.

Starting Point

Monthly Traffic: ~200
Monthly Leads: None

Solution

Phase 1: Hype up the website and start generating traffic.

We started creating content for the new procedures he was now offering in his practice. These were dental implants and sedation dentistry. He had also had great success treating patients with dentures, and wanted to grow that patient base as well. We designed and developed service pages for these procedures and focused on driving organic traffic to the site through blogging. We focused on long tail keywords and came up with unique blog content that gave helpful answers to our readers.

We created forms and started tracking conversions. At first our forms were simple “Request an Appointment” and “Contact Us” forms. We found that the page layout and increase in content was driving more traffic, more leads, and getting the phone to ring.

Dental Marketing Case Study: In the first 2 years, traffic went from 200 visits to 1000+ visits per month.

In the first 2 years, traffic went from 200 visits to 1000+ visits per month.

Phase 2: Lead Generation and contact management using HubSpot, Online New Patient Forms

With our blog strategy in full swing and traffic picking up, we focused our efforts on creating lead generation campaigns. Still focusing on dental implants, sedation dentistry and dentures, we created landing pages for people to learn about them and request an appointment specific to that procedure. We also got to work creating eBooks and other downloadable content to capture our visitors contact information.

Our main landing pages were hooked up with Google Adwords Campaigns, and leads started to take off. We used HubSpot to create automated workflows and nurture our new leads. The front desk learned to use the software to make notes when they spoke with a potential patient over the phone. We were starting to uncover the journey people were taking in order to become a patient.

Around this time we also developed custom online new patient forms. With the website secured with an SSL, we were able to customize a Gravity Form so the new patient could fill in all their information before stepping foot into the office. At first, the form submitted as a simple text document to the front desk. This wasn’t good enough for Dr. Mann, so we customized it even more and soon the information would populate a PDF form that was identical to the form people filled out in the office. This way he wouldn’t have to go looking for certain information, since all the forms, in person or online, were identical.

Dental Marketing Case Study: Over the next 2 years, we collected between 10 and 20 leads per month using our lead generation campaigns.

Over the next 2 years, we collected between 10 and 20 leads per month using our lead generation campaigns.

Phase 3: Adwords + content, middle of the funnel offers, more content for hungry leads, call tracking.

Our adwords efforts had been working well for about a year when local competition started to catch on. We had been more specific in our keywords, and that had made us stand out from the pack. But there came a time when the cost of clicks for those keywords tripled overnight. We brainstormed a solution in our strategy.

Looking at our analytics in HubSpot, it was clear that the eBook on dental implants had a high conversion rate, but that traffic to the landing page wasn’t great. We decided to start an adwords campaign that directed people to the ebook landing page, and to specify our keywords even more. We focused on the term “cost of dental implants” and variations of that, since that was a term a lot of people were searching for. Our leads from adwords went from about 6 per month to more than 30, without changing our budget.

Since these leads were at the very tippy top of the funnel, we knew we had to invest time and energy in our nurturing process. Luckily, we had lots of data in order to understand what kind of content we should get out to our contacts. We created a long form video where we had Dr. Mann talk about dental implants, similar to what he might say in a one on one dental implants consultation. We broke up the video into segments, and using Wistia we were able to add quick links beside the video in the case that a user did not want to watch all 30+ minutes.  We also recorded about a half a dozen patient testimonial videos to use in our automation. With this strategy we were able to re-engage our leads, and communicate our clients’ expertise effectively.

We also added more content to their individual service pages. Contrary to most “best practices” when it comes to online marketing, the users on their website were hungry for more content. They were researching a major medical procedure, and the more information we could give them, the more trust they had in the practice.

We also started using CallRail and it’s integration with HubSpot. This gives us even more control over tracking. Patients and potential patients are still usually most comfortable picking up the phone and calling, although the use of online forms is growing. With CallRail we can make sure we can track leads no matter what they are comfortable with.

Dental Marketing Case Study: Since implementing our new adwords strategy, we collect an average of 30 leads per month.

Since implementing our new adwords strategy, we collect an average of 30 leads per month.

The Outcome: 5 Years Later

3100%

Increase in web traffic

30x

Increase in leads

150%

Increase in new patients generated from website

In the 5 years we’ve been working with Mann Family Dental, they have more than doubled their revenue. They are now the premier facility for dental implants in New Hampshire, and they get patients driving up to 3 hours to see them. At about the same time we started working with them in 2013, they also hired a dental practice coach. With her help and expertise, the team learned how to follow up with leads and ask the right questions. Susan Leckowicz of Dental Coaches gave them the road map to turn these leads into patients, and brought success to so many other areas of the practice.

It’s been a long and rewarding journey with Mann Family Dental, and we are excited to take their digital strategy to new heights over the next 5 years.

Here are lots of big graphs:

Visits

Mann Family Dental Visits Chart After 5 Years

Contacts

Mann Family Dental Contacts

Organic Growth

Mann Family Dental Organic Results After 5 Years with Inbound Marketing

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How Your First Meeting With an Agency Dictates the Success of Your Website Project

website project

Web development is a unique profession. It requires technical ability, creative prowess, psychological expertise, and superb communication skills. To launch a website that really tells the story of a brand, and gets users to act, you need all of these things. But the most important part of the web design and development process is the communication between the brand and its agency. I’m not talking about responding to emails in a timely manner, or answering the phone at all hours of the night. I’m talking about how an agency gets the right information out of a client, and then takes that information to create something unexpected but also close to perfect.

“This site is so much better than our competition’s.”

“The look and feel of the site is exactly what we were after.”

“I’m thrilled that you were able to pull this off.”

These are all fantastic testimonials from clients. The website project measured up to their expectations, and that’s great. But as web designers and developers, we should be striving for more.

“You took what was in my head before I even knew it was there, and then put it on the screen.”

“You gave us what we didn’t even know we needed when we started this process.”

“I never knew our website could solve these problems we had.”

When we get these types of compliments, we know we really knocked it out of the park. To get to this point, the very first meeting with a client needs to set the stage. There are a few things that need to be present in that first meeting (or meetings) to get there.

Chemistry

Chemistry sort of feels like an arbitrary word for “we like each other,” but it is still important. If you don’t feel a connection with the agency across the table, it’s worth figuring out why. The questions you ask yourself could lead you to another issue that needs to get sorted out before you start working together. I recently spoke with a marketing director about what they look for when they are choosing an agency. “Someone I can see myself having a beer with,” was one of the first things he said. If you don’t have that chemistry, everything that follows could seem a bit forced.

The Right Questions

It’s the agency’s job to ask the right questions when you discuss your website project with them. In my eyes, this is the absolute most important part of my job. In every discovery meeting, I search for the answers that get to the bottom of their needs. My main goal is to uncover a real challenge that they are having, even if they think it’s unsolvable at this moment. It’s more than having your list of questions prepared. It’s reading the client or prospect and getting deeper into things that might seem unrelated to the website.

Trust

It’s the agency’s responsibility to earn a client’s trust early on in, preferably well before any contract is signed. An agency should never have to twist someone’s arm to get them to sign a contract. The day that contract is signed should feel like a happy moment, because that trust is there. A website project isn’t something you buy off the shelf, so a company really has no idea what they are going to get when a project starts. So they have to have a deep understanding of how the agency works and really why they do what they do, and trust that process for their own brand.

Ownership

When an agency understands the client’s needs, they need to take ownership of the project to get there. The agency’s #1 goal should be seeing that client succeed. And if everything is working the way it should be, this sense of ownership will be automatic.

Our Favorite Things About the Manchester NH Millyard

manchester NH millyard

HubSpot and Ecommerce with WooCommerce and Revenue Conduit

HubSpot and Ecommerce with WooCommerce and Revenue Conduit

Yes, HubSpot and Ecommerce do go together. And Revenue Conduit will get you there.

To be completely honest, when I think of HubSpot users, the ones that come to mind are mainly B2B and big ticket B2C companies. Since nurturing is such a big part of the inbound methodology, quick buys on ecommerce websites never really struck me as fitting into the category of being a great fit for HubSpot.

Then a potential client approached us and told us they were looking for a way to increase their online sales. The product was clothing, underwear to be exact, and something that really intrigued us. So we started doing some research.

A big part of why this company was so enticing for us was that they were selling on Amazon, and their Amazon sales were taking off. In the past few months, their sales on Amazon have come to account for 90% of their business. Exciting? Yes. But also scary. They knew the market was there but wanted more control over their marketing and sales. They wanted more traffic to their website so they could steer their own ship.

They were using Woocommerce and were happy with how it was working. So we started looking at how it could integrate with HubSpot. It turns out there are technically two ways Woocommerce can integrate with HubSpot. Although that’s only technically. Because the first thing we tried really didn’t do anything valuable for us.

Zapier

Don’t get me wrong, Zapier is a fantastic tool for many things. It’s a great way to frankenstein tools together to come up with your own marketing machine. We use it for my non-profit because we have more time than money and it gets the job done. It will take contacts from our forms to our Mailchimp account and into our CRM. Send an email to whoever needs to know about it. The possibilities are endless. But for this application, I don’t think it should even be advertised as an integration.

There is no way to get the data you need when you link Woocommerce to Zapier to HubSpot. Every new customer comes in as direct traffic, and they all come from Ashburn, Virginia. We didn’t even try to sync up more fields other than the name and email because we knew we would miss out on the info we needed if we went this route.

Woocommerce Zapier HubSpot

The only solution I could think of was a two step check out. The customer could fill out their email first on a HubSpot form before they get to the cart. That way, we would have the their original source and pages visited before they got to the Woocommerce checkout form. We found our ultimate solution before we tried this. But if you’ve done it this way, let me know how it turned out.

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HubSpot and Ecommerce with Revenue Conduit

I admit we were being cheap at first. We thought we could create our own solution and didn’t want to pay for something else on top of HubSpot. But we didn’t do enough research about Revenue Conduit to even know what it was capable of. We are learning now that it is so worth the $100/month.

This is a robust tool, but I’ll try to break it down by just what it imports when you sign up. I plan on doing more posts about this as we dive deeper into Revenue Conduit.

Fields

Revenue Conduit automatically imports a ton of customer property fields when you sync it up. You have your obvious ones like First Order Date and Total Value of Orders, to Products Bought and Abandoned Cart Products. All the data you need is there for you to create some pretty specific smart lists and segment your marketing effectively. I’ve already created a list of shoppers with boys and one of shoppers with girls so I can target the right products to the right people.
Revenue Conduit Fields

Lists

The smart lists that have been populated into my account during these first few weeks will be extremely useful. I already have lists of new customers, repeat buyers and best customers. We’ve saved so much time as these have all populated without us having to do much of anything.
Revenue Conduit Lists

Workflows

OK, workflows can be scary for me. Just because my head starts to hurt when I think about how they work and what they do. But when I dive deep, it’s pretty addicting. Revenue Conduit automatically imports almost 20 workflows when it’s hooked up. They have workflows that are internal, which set fields like Order Recency Rating and Order Frequency Rating, and also ones that are set up around marketing emails for your customers. This month we will focus on getting the New Customer Welcome & Get a 2nd Order workflow up and running, and then continue doing more throughout our contract.
revenue conduit workflows

Historical Data

As our 14 day trial was ending, all our client’s historical customer data was imported. This means we have the values that were spent, order frequency, and even products purchased from all of their customers over the past 2 years inside HubSpot and at our disposal. Our client was told their customer info was being imported into Mailchimp, but Revenue Conduit found way more contacts than what we had access to initially. Since this client has their highest conversion rates from email marketing, having all these historical contacts will be huge.
Revenue Conduit Historical Data

Coupon Code Generation

Another big reason we started using Revenue Conduit was their dynamic coupon code generation feature. Our client had a coupon that was displayed on a pop-up after someone signed up for updates. The problem was that people were using the code over and over, and they could only change it once a quarter or so. With dynamic coupon codes, we can keep track of who has coupons, who has used coupons, and when they expire. And we don’t have to worry about them being passed around in a forum.
revenue conduit coupon code

Bottom Line

Don’t write off using an inbound marketing software like HubSpot because you’re an ecommerce company. The “Delight” part of the inbound methodology is much bigger than the “Convert” part in this type of setup, but the results are still just as powerful. We just synced up our client’s data and are already so excited about the things we can do with all the information. This solution is perfect for a growing ecommerce company that wants to put out marketing that matches the quality of the big guys.
 



Greatest Lead Generation Tips



Girls at Work: Building up Girls (and Walls) and Knocking Down Barriers

Girls at Work

On a chilly day in February, 7 young girls showed up at our agency with lumber and power tools. They were there to build us a room divider. When someone comes over to build you something, you expect them to be 1. male 2. an adult 3. maybe kinda stinky (in a good, hard working kinda way). These girls were 1. female 2. not adults and 3. totally adorable. They had participated in a Girls at Work after school program with the Manchester School District. After their 8 week session ended, they wanted to keep building, so Elaine Hamel, the E.D. of Girls at Work, had an idea for them build an awesome project for our office.

Girls at Work, Inc.

These girls are total pros with a power drill.

Once they arrived, it didn’t take long for them to get to work. Using nail guns (nail guns!), they had pre-built the panels at the Girls at Work headquarters down the road, and when they got to our office they laid them out of the floor. We watched in awe as these powerful little girls started powering up their tools. They used clamps to hold the panels in place and used power drills to screw them together. I was absolutely blown away by how skilled these girls were with the power tools. I have built with Elaine once, and let me tell you, it’s not easy to drill a screw into a board. These young girls have already broken through whatever barriers they had to in order to become comfortable with woodworking, and it’s a beautiful thing to see.
 
By teaching girls to build, Girls at Work is doing more than just telling them that they are capable of anything, but showing them too. In the United States, 58% of college graduates are women, yet women make up only 4.6% of S&P 500 CEOs, and 24% of workers in STEM fields. Men still hold the majority of high paying jobs, and there is still a 23% gender pay gap.

Girls at Work

Celebrating their awesome work with a powerful pose.

Girls at Work, Inc. isn’t trying to turn all these girls into carpenters and woodworkers (although it would be cool if a few of them turned out to be), but they are using woodworking as a vehicle to show these girls that just because they haven’t seen many women in these professions, that doesn’t mean they are not capable pursuing them. At the same time, they are also showing the world around us what these girls are capable of. A parent might get a little scared to see their daughter operating machinery simply because they have never seen a girl with a power tool. Showing these images to people can help to start changing minds on gender stereotypes, and open up opportunities for girls and women to pursue careers that aren’t traditionally seen as female.

At Schall Creative, we now have this incredible piece of furniture to show off to our friends and clients. It is probably the coolest thing in our office, and it is already inviting people to ask about it. When we tell the inquisitor that it was built by girls, their amazement increases ten-fold. So, a heartfelt THANK YOU to Elaine Hamel, Girls at Work, and the incredible girls who built it. You guys rock!

Pallet Room Divider

To learn more about Girls at Work, visit their website.

9 Inbound Stats That Will Make You Wonder Why You Haven’t Started Yet

9 inbound stats

As time goes by, more and more companies of all sizes are implementing an inbound marketing strategy. They’ve researched inbound stats like these, created their plan of attack, and embarked on a complete change in the way they get the word out about their businesses. Change isn’t easy, but sometimes the cost of inaction is greater than the effort needed to make that change. Inbound marketing is one of those changes that businesses are finding to be worth it. Here are 9 inbound marketing statistics that will make you wonder why you haven’t started implementing inbound marketing yet.

  1. Companies are 3x as likely to see higher ROI on inbound marketing campaigns than on outbound, regardless of size and type of business. source
  2. 68% of online buyers will spend considerable time reading content published by a brand they are interested in. source
  3. Marketers who check their metrics are 3x+ more likely to achieve positive ROI. source
  4. Companies that blog generate 67% more leaders per month than those that don’t. source
  5. 8 out of 10 people identify themselves as blog readers. source
  6. Inbound leads cost 61% lower than outbound leads. source
  7. 80% of business decision-makers prefer to get company information in a series of articles versus in an advertisement. source
  8. 84% of 25 to 34 year olds have left a website because of intrusive or irrelevant advertising. source
  9. 95% of those who opt into email messages from brands find these messages somewhat or very useful. source




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Stacey and Fred Schall Are the New Manchester HUG Leaders

Manchester HUG

Early this year, we got word from HubSpot that we are the new Manchester HUG Leaders. While we are not against actual hugs (we really do love them), this kind of HUG stands for HubSpot User Group.

A HUG is exactly as it sounds, it’s a group of HubSpot users who get together once a quarter and talk shop. The Manchester HUG will be held at our location in the Manchester millyard, and there will be a whole lot of inbound marketing up in here.

What’s a meetup like?

A HUG meetup is about 2 hours long and ours will be held in the evening once a quarter. We’ll have some time for networking and then we’ll have a presentation for our attendees. Presenters will range from marketers, creatives, business owners and even speakers they send us from HubSpot HQ.

Oh, and we’ll also have snacks.. and drinks.. both very important.

What if I don’t use HubSpot?

We won’t shun you if you aren’t an actual HubSpot user. HubSpot’s philosophy is about teaching everyone about inbound marketing, and we want to do the same thing.

Are you going to try to sell me?

Absolutely no selling. Only teaching, talking, laughing, eating and drinking.

What if I’m your competitor?

Please come so we can learn all your secrets! Just kidding. But seriously, we want to use this HUG to bring all of the Manchester area inbound/digital marketing agencies together. We will all benefit from mingling and learning from one another.

We’ll see you in the millyard!





Register for our next meetup here!




How to Get Inbound Marketing Buy-In

inbound marketing buy-in

As marketing director, you’ve done your research. You are certain that inbound is the best way to market your company going forward. But even after you’ve had conversations, presentations, and even built excitement amongst your colleagues, you’re still spending your time creating magazine ads and laying out proposals. Why is inbound marketing buy-in so hard to accomplish? From my own experience, here are a few reasons I’ve seen.

Ugh, change.

First and foremost, change is hard. Doing something new requires vulnerability. You need to be a novice at something before you can be advanced, and being a novice kind of sucks. A company will put off a change as long as they can. And they can put it off until the alternative to change becomes the worse option.

Fear of Transparency

Inbound marketing is transparent. It means a brand will need to be constantly communicating with their audience. There is a lot of fear centered around showing too much, or saying the wrong thing, and getting a negative reaction.

A lot of businesses are afraid to show themselves wholeheartedly.

What happens if someone leaves a negative comment? What if we didn’t do enough research before posting something? What if we get negative reviews? What if they hate the real us?

Complete accountability

With a complete inbound marketing strategy, you have solid results that are clear as day. You can see what is working and what’s not, and that could mean waving the white flag on a campaign you’ve worked really hard on. If it’s not working, you have the evidence to let it go, but that means admitting it didn’t work the way you had expected it to.

Lack of Resources

When you start with inbound marketing, positions may change, or you may need to hire different types of employees to fill the needs of the strategy. This means a lot of leg work for the company that they may not be too thrilled about.

So how do you get past all this?

Understand your company.

To make a decision like this, you really need to have a handle on your company’s financials. You need to know how they’ve brought in sales in the past. What has worked, what hasn’t worked, and why. You also need to know what your company’s goals are, and most importantly, why they’ve set those goals. This takes a solid amount of trust from your company’s leaders, but it’s a necessity for anyone who is in charge of marketing, no matter their strategy.

Do your homework.

Learn as much as you can about inbound and how it works. There are tons of resources that give solid statistics about inbound. Go further and read case studies and find out how an organization earned their success.

Don’t got it alone.

If you can find an inbound agency that you trust, don’t be afraid to collaborate with them. Get your leaders in a room for a workshop with the inbound agency. The agency will be seen as an outsider and marketing expert, and could get some points across that you haven’t been able to (even though you’ve been telling them for months).

Don’t just tell them, show them.

If you have the resources, run a small scale inbound campaign and track your results. Something as simple as an email marketing campaign with tracked results can really paint a picture for what is possible. Numbers don’t lie. Show them what it would look like if the results you got from your small scale campaign were the same for every marketing action your company takes.

Research your competitors.

Download a browser extension called Ghostery, and see who is already doing inbound among your competitors. Look for applications like HubSpot, Pardot, Infusionsoft, and Marketo. If there are others, research them to gain insight on the tactics they are using. Beating out competitors can be the ultimate motivator.

Let them realize it – don’t drill it into them.

Don’t become a broken record. If you find yourself repeating your inbound pitch over and over, you need to find another way. Ask questions, uncover their goals and their struggles, and lead them to inbound as the answer.




Inbound Marketing Checklist



Traditional Marketing vs. Inbound Marketing: Old Way vs. New Way

Traditional Marketing vs Inbound Marketing

There are lots of statistics that show Inbound Marketing as more effective and a better investment than traditional marketing. Still, a lot of businesses have a hard time changing their ways. I get it, change is hard. But this change is so worth it. Let’s take a look at the difference between the old way of marketing (traditional marketing), vs. the new way (inbound marketing).

Old Way: Cold Calling

For salespeople, this is one of the most significant changes they’ll see when their company jumps into inbound marketing. In the past, marketing has been in charge of branding and messaging, and not gathering leads. The sales person would do their own prospecting, based on company size, location, industry, and position. And it would be up to them to figure out how to make contact. Cold calling, of course, is a popular way to do that. As buyers continue to trust salespeople less and less, cold calling works less often than it once did. So sales people have to get used to lots of rejection.

New Way: Following up with leads

As an inbound marketing strategy picks up steam, a salesperson will have more leads to follow up with and to nurture, and less prospecting and cold calling to do. As your content grows, and your brand becomes a recognizable thought leader, more qualified leads will seek you out. Not only will the sales team receive leads with contact info, but they also have information as to what type of content the lead is interested in. When you do contact prospects cold, it will be easier to make contact since they may have already heard of you and respect your brand.

Old way: Free consulting to close the sale

Some sales cycles can be really long. It usually depends on the price tag associated with the sale, and the amount of education needed to close. Sales people often have to take on the role of educator once their prospect becomes a lead. This not only means teaching the lead about your product, but also showing them how they can apply it—which becomes free consulting.

New way: Free content to close the sale

As a salesperson, I want to be doing less educating and more selling. There is nothing wrong with giving people information, but if it takes up valuable time it can become a detriment. When implementing an inbound marketing campaign, you can compile a list of topics that you find yourself educating leads about, and have your marketing team turn them into online content. A prospect has a question about something? Well wouldn’t you know it, we just published a blog post about the exact subject. Write up your answer in an email and let them know they can explore it more at this link. Now, they get their answer, and more, as they poke around and check out all your other content. And you can collect data, and see which topics they are most interested in without them even telling you. Magic.

Old Way: Blanket an area with direct mail

Direct mail used to be a great way to get the word out about your company or product, until everyone started doing it and the term “junk mail” was born. Direct mail can still work, but along with other forms of traditional marketing, it is becoming less effective over time.

New Way: Target your audience with social ads

Social Media has bloomed into an incredible way to reach your target persona. Facebook ads allow you to target people based on their interests and their activity, rather than just their age and income level. You’re no longer guessing, “Well, they are high income earners, so they might ski! Let’s send them this direct mail piece we spent a bunch of money on and pray that we’re right!” Now, you can target someone who has voluntarily listed skiing as one of their interests. And that’s just the basics of social ads, it gets a lot more in depth (and borderline creepy) than that.

Old Way: Guess what your sales will be

The old way of marketing is very hard to measure, especially for small businesses. There is no such thing as an engagement rate for a billboard. The company that places your billboard might tell you it gets x amount of views every day, and you will have no idea if that’s true. The ROI for most traditional methods of marketing and advertising is almost impossible to measure. If you can’t measure any data you can’t project your sales based on your efforts.

New Way: Project sales based on data

Now that your inbound strategy is showing you solid results and you can equate your marketing efforts to your sales, you’ll be able to forecast what’s to come more effectively. Statistics like Cost per Customer Acquisition and Leads to Sales Ratios will become your best friends. No more stress wondering where your company will be 6 months from now. As long as you put the work in, you know where you’ll be.

Old Way: Trade Shows and Networking events

Face to face networking is great. Put in a few hours every week at an event in your area, come away with some business cards and maybe even some meetings booked. Closing rates are high, but you can only meet so many people. Every event takes a lot of energy, and if you have no follow up, there’s no way of building on what you’ve already put in to grow your results. Sure you can collect email addresses, but a lot of attendees won’t give theirs up (because they don’t want spam). Every time you break down a trade show booth, you’re back at where you started.

New Way: Linkedin Groups and Webinars

Meeting and connecting with people online give you an ongoing line of communication with them. Want to join my free webinar? Give us your email to register. Start a Linkedin or Facebook group and you have an easy way to send a message and start a conversation. The content you post or talk about will help you earn their trust, so they won’t run away (like they do at a trade show when you make eye contact with them).

Old Way: Looking at marketing as arts & crafts.

In the past, sales and marketing were two different worlds. Sales was data driven and focused on closing, while marketing was creating images and messaging that enticed their target audience. Sales looked at marketing as something that wasn’t completely necessary as long as the sales team was solid. And marketing didn’t have an data to prove them wrong.

New Way: Looking at marketing as an extension of your sales team.

Now, sales and marketing work together to get a lead and close a sale. Sales relies on marketing for key information on a lead that helps them shorten their sales cycle and close more sales. Marketing relies on sales for key information about what their prospects and leads are struggling with, so they can create great content. One needs the other in order to succeed.

As traditional marketing continues to become less and less effective, inbound marketing becomes more and more crucial for business growth, and even survival.




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How to Build Communication Between Sales and Marketing

sales and marketing

In order for a content marketing team to create great content, they need to understand the problems prospects are having.
 
If marketing does not have access to the problems that the sales department deals with from day to day, they are going to be coming up with topics out of thin air. That’s how you end up with content that sits in a sea of sameness, and doesn’t really connect with your audience.
 
Your prospects, leads and customers are unique. Their problems are unique. And they are the best source for creating unique content. Unique content is the key to success in content marketing. Therefore, your prospects, leads, and customers are the key to success in content marketing. Your marketing team needs access to the information your sales team deals with on a daily basis. They need to communicate.
 
Having access to marketing information also helps out the sales team immensely. Having content for leads to consume, and knowing which content they have consumed, means the sales team can do less educating and more selling.
 
You need to set up a system to harbor communication between sales and marketing. The alignment between these two departments is known as “smarketing,” and it is imperative for content marketing success. Here are some ideas that can help.

Have sales and marketing meet on a regular basis.

Make sure there is a time and place for marketing and sales to meet every week to go over the sales funnel. They can brainstorm ways to move a prospect down the funnel, or think about how they are going to close a deal based on the content they’ve consumed. Sales can also discuss the conversations they have with leads, so marketing can learn about their problems and come up with the right content that can help solve those problems.

Make sure they are working in close quarters.

They don’t have to be on top of each other, but it makes sense to have their work days intertwined. This will help encourage relationships between the departments and make it easier for them to communicate when they need to. It’s hard to learn about a salesperson’s prospects when they work from home all week long. It can be done, but if you have them in close proximity of each other it will help.

Use tools that encourage communication, that both departments have access to.

Simple tools like Slack can open up communication between sales and marketing. It’s also a good idea to make sure the CRM the sales team uses can link up with the marketing software the marketing team uses. HubSpot’s marketing platform and CRM allow leads to seamlessly travel from one to the other, so there’s no chance of dropping the ball.

Make sure they understand why this is so important.

This shouldn’t be too hard once the engine is humming. When there’s a big sales win, have a recap of what made this a success. What was the buyer’s journey like from start to finish? When sales and marketing work well together, you should be able to see where each department had a big part in converting the customer.
 
There needs to be more than just a hand off between marketing and sales when it comes to a lead. With the right communication systems in place, these two departments can help each other through every stage of the buyer’s journey.

Don’t Take It Personal– Why Email Unsubscribes Are a Good Thing

unsubscribes

What’s the first thing you do when someone unsubscribes from your email list?
 
Do you curse? Wonder what went wrong? Blame them for being a big ole meanie? Well, you really shouldn’t let it get to you. Don’t go sulking around the office because of a little bit of contact turnover—unsubscribes are a good thing.

Not everyone is into your content

And that’s OK. In fact, it’s better that way. The more diverse your email list, the harder it is to understand what they consider valuable. When you understand that your target persona is unique, you’ll realize that those people that unsubscribe just don’t fit into that mold. You simply can’t please everyone.

Unsubscribes boost your conversion rates

Why would you want someone on your list if they never open your emails? They are just dead weight keeping you from hitting your goals. Instead of trying to keep people on your list, focus on reaching new contacts that actually open your emails and click on links to take their place.

They keep you on your toes

Unsubscribes give you the challenge you need to create really great content. If your content gets stale, having your contacts jump ship might give you the motivation to pay more attention and get back on your game.
 
If your contact churn is getting out of control, don’t hesitate to do some research to figure out why. Send out a survey to your contacts and ask them what they like and don’t like about their content. Give them the opportunity to let you know what challenges they are facing and what type of content they would like to receive in their inbox.
 
Be honest and helpful with everything you post and understand that the web and your audience will change at a rapid rate. And most importantly, don’t cry over your unsubscribes.




Inbound Marketing Checklist



Great Brands Get Inside the Heads of Their Personas

Great Brands Get Inside the Heads of Their Personas

The following is an actual text message exchange between my brother and I.

Email Subject Text

I know what you’re thinking. Who talks about email subject lines with their siblings? My brother works at Constant Contact and I own an inbound agency so this is something that happens. And yes, he did change the subject by telling me how excited he was to have just purchased his first squatty potty.

After this exchange, I knew it was just a matter of time before my favorite daily email had this same idea. A few weeks later, this happened:

brands get in audience head

TheSkimm is totally inside my head, and I love it. When I read their emails in the morning the voice that I read it in is the voice of my best friend. It sounds like we’re in college studying for an exam on current affairs and having a blast while doing so. They are such a perfect example of knowing your audience.

Mailchimp (sorry brother) posted a blog a while back about how they get to know their target personas. After gathering data from actual users, they created a handful of their target personas. But then they took it a step further. They created posters of each persona, complete with a portrait of them surrounded by a bunch of adjectives about that persona. They printed the posters and hung them up in their headquarters, so they are always thinking of them.

It just so happens that their “power user” persona has very similar characteristics to those of my husband and business partner, Fred. They even have the same name.

Example of use of Personas by Mailchimp

When he saw this, he was the opposite of creeped out. He was excited to see that the brand behind a product he loved, really knew him.

So how do you get inside the head of your target personas? Simply put, you have to listen. And I mean, not just listen, but like really listen. It’s not enough to know their age and income level, you have to get to know their struggles, passions, and even their language quirks.

When you meet with a great prospect who would be an ideal client for your company, take really great notes. Write down their questions word for word, and even pay close attention to the subjects they bring up that are unrelated to what you offer.

Put together a survey and send it out to your best clients. Encourage authentic, well thought out answers. Ask the people you know really trust you so that you know they’re 100% authentic.

Here are some tips from a HubSpot blog post for creating buyer personas.

  • Look through your contacts database to uncover trends about how certain leads or customers find and consume your content.
  • When creating forms to use on your website, use form fields that capture important persona information. For example, if all of your personas vary based on company size, ask each lead for information about company size on your forms.
  • Take into consideration your sales team’s feedback on the leads they’re interacting with most. What generalizations can they make about the different types of customers you serve best?
  • Interview customers and prospects, either in person or over the phone, to discover what they like about your product or service.

These are some great guidelines, but it’s up to you to take it even further like TheSkimm and MailChimp do. Become obsessed with you buyer persona and get inside their head.



Inbound Marketing Checklist



10 Tips for Writing Snappy Headlines

snappy headlines

Web Pages With Purpose: How to Create Stellar Non-Profit Landing Pages

non-profit landing pages

With the online tools available today, non-profits have a lot at their fingertips that can help them create the perfect campaign. Using email marketing, social media, and blog content, there are so many ways to get your message out there and to encourage your audience to act.

Landing pages are an integral piece of every online campaign. The landing page is where the magic happens. It’s where a visitor becomes a contact, and/or a contact becomes a donor. Here are some ways to make sure your non-profit landing pages are successful every time.

1. Focus on one main goal

A landing page should be free from anything distracting the user from the one main goal. Get rid of your menu items or any links that could lead them astray.

2. Make an impact

Have a catchy headline and compelling images that make the user want to stick around. Make sure they know where they are, but don’t be afraid to try something new and different.

3. Have everything in one place

The story, information about where the money will go, and the call to action should all be on the page so the user doesn’t have to jump around at all during their journey. If you can collect payment on the same page, that’s great. But if you have to go to an external secure page, make sure it’s as simple as possible.

4. Take out anything unnecessary

Keep all the copy short and sweet. Use bullet points or small paragraphs. Visitors on average will read 20% of the copy on any giving web page, so make yours easy to skim. When revising your copy, continue to ask yourself, “Does this really need to be here?”

5. Have a clear call to action

Your call to action should tell your user what to do next. Don’t ever assume they know the next step. Use a color that stands out and make the copy time-based.

6. Test your messaging

Try some A/B testing for your copy and your images. This kind of testing can go a long way in understanding your target personas going forward.





25 Tactics Great Websites Use




How This Kickstarter Got Me to Buy a Hoodie I Didn’t Need

storytelling

Have you ever been on Kickstarter, seen something super cool, but still didn’t buy it? Have you ever come SO close to submitting your credit card info, only to remember that you don’t actually need a panini press that toasts a picture of Jesus into your grilled cheese?

This isn’t one of those almost stories. This is a story of a product I purchased and what got me to support the product.


Did you connect with this video? Are you interested in this product?

Yeah, me too. So much so, I became backer 170 out of 601. And it wasn’t because this Kickstarter campaign came from my hometown.

But why did Yesler Apparel‘s video get me to join 600 other people to become a backer? And all for a hoodie?

The story.

The second I was introduced to a compelling narrative, I was hooked on the campaign. I had to watch their video until the end–and I was sold before the end of it.

Data BrainYou’ll find that there’s a lot of interesting neuroscience behind storytelling in marketing and how all of that is more convincing than a sale price, or some great photography of the product.

Studies show that stories engage more of the brain than facts and figures. Facts only engage two areas of the brain, the Broca area and the Wernicke area, whereas stories engage those parts, but also much more.

Some of the other parts of the brain that are engaged by storytelling are the motor cortex, sensory cortex, and the frontal cortex.

StorytellingOur brains are built to connect with compelling stories, and its been one of the most fundamental communication methods.

Storytelling is a way to plant thoughts, ideas, and emotions into the listener’s brain without either person realizing it. So your experience is transferred to the listener, and they experience it too.

“While the brain watches a story, you’ll find something interesting—the brain doesn’t look like a spectator, it looks more like a participant in the action,” said author, Jonathan Gottschall, in his book The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human.

According to a study by researchers in Spain, more of the brain is engaged when descriptions using the senses are referenced. A few examples of this would be, “he had leathery hands,” or “she had a sultry voice.”

Descriptive language appeals to all of the reader’s senses and is specific. This is a way to show details rather than tell them to the reader via touch, taste, smell, sound, and looks. They are descriptions and details about a subject that your audience will remember and make them experience what your character or characters are experiencing.

One author example is Douglas Adams, most famously known for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which is chock full of his clever and quirky descriptions. “Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green plant whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.” – from the beginning of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

And another author known for his descriptions is Neil Gaiman, who is most known for his novel, American Gods. “I remembered being just-sixteen, and kissing red-cheeked, fair-haired Callie Anders, who lived there, and whose family would soon move to the Shetlands, and I would never kiss her or see her again.” – from the novelThe Ocean at the End of the Lane.

The brain releases dopamine when it experiences an emotionally-charged event which makes you able to remember it with more accuracy.

Its how our brain is wired. When stripped down to its skeleton, a story is a cause and effect.

We think this way.

So how do you make use of our biological wiring?

You take the time to tell a story. It doesn’t need to be complex with lots of layers. It just needs to be something with details that people will hold on to.

Yesler’s Kickstarter campaign accomplished telling a story that compelled me to purchase their product.

The best marketers have figured this out, and they use some stellar storytelling in their campaigns.




25 Tactics Great Websites Use



Marketing Skills and Tools to Help You Pull off Doing it Yourself

Marketing Skills

If you own a small business that doesn’t have the budget to outsource your marketing or hire someone to do it, you have to do it yourself. No questions asked. You won’t survive without it. Not having a marketing budget is not an excuse for not doing any marketing.

You’re going to have to put a good amount of effort in if you’re competing with companies that have marketing teams. And if you’re competing with companies that do it themselves just like you, well these marketing skills will help you stand out from the crowd.

Basic HTML

Ok, don’t freak out. Code is not as hard as you think it is. Everyone can learn to code, if they put some time in. Even if you are using a Content Management System like WordPress, there are times when you need to take a look at the code and understand what you’re looking at. The theme you’re using might have limitations, or there could simply be a bug you need to fix.

You don’t really need to know how to code a webpage from scratch, but you should be able to pick out a header tag, an image, and a link when you look in the code view of your site. Other things that are helpful would be knowing how to add paragraphs and breaks so you can make sure your content is formatted in a way that’s easy to read. As I am posting this blog, I’m writing everything in the code view of my WordPress post to ensure that everything comes out exactly the way I want it to. And I am not a programmer.

There are some great resources such as w3 schools , and Codecademy for beginners and advanced coders.

An understanding of SEO

Search Engine Optimization is an absolute necessity in this day and age. There is no such thing as an offline business any more. Just because you don’t get business from your website right now doesn’t mean people aren’t looking for your services on the web. They are. Depending on how savvy your competition is, a little SEO knowledge can go a long way. Moz has a fantastic eBook called The Beginner’s Guide to SEO that you should check out. If you’re using WordPress, there are a few SEO plugins that can help you get started in practicing SEO. The one we recommend most is called Yoast.

Graphic Design Knowledge

You don’t have to be an artist, but if you are creating marketing pieces and you don’t have the budget to hire a designer, an understanding of how graphic design works will take you far. When it comes to printing you should understand that images should have enough DPI so they don’t come out fuzzy. Also, knowing the difference between a vector file and an image file will make your printer love you. Something as simple as sending over the right file type can save you and your printer time and money. Extra brownie points for understanding the difference between a PMS color, CMYK and RGB. (Honestly, if I was your printer I would send you actual brownies for being my favorite client)

When it comes to designing for the web, a key thing to understand would be which file type to use. There are many different types of raster graphics, and some are better in places than others. Also, understand file size and weight so your images don’t take forever to load.

If you are dead set on creating custom graphics yourself, you really should invest in Adobe Creative Cloud. You can purchase the programs you need for a monthly fee instead of paying for the entire software up front. If you want to look professional, it is so worth it.

For for something a little more plug and play, try Canva. You can create everything from a Facebook header photo to a full blown presentation, and it is so easy to use.

Writing Skills

If you’re worried about spelling and grammar, check out grammarly. It’s a free app that corrects your writing, but it’s like your regular spellcheck on steroids.

To better the the voice and tone of your writing, read and write as much as you can. I find, the more you read engaging content, the better writer you become. If you have someone who can give you feedback on your writing before it’s published, that is always helpful.

Psychology

To influence potential customers to buy your product or service, you need to have a basic understanding of consumer behavior. There are so many great books on this subject that can really change your thinking on marketing and even the selling process.

Inbound Marketing 101

Inbound marketing is taking over when it comes to marketing strategy. It’s less about buying the right ad space and more about creating the right content. HubSpot has so many great resources for anyone to dive into this world. They also have a free Inbound Certification that I highly recommend. Getting started on your Inbound Marketing strategy now will keep you ahead of your competition. If they are already doing inbound, then you have some catching up to do.

Marketing is a huge part of building a business, and it takes a lot of time and energy to bring results.

My advice? Read, study and read some more. If there’s one thing I know about small owning a small business, it’s that you have to know a lot of stuff. Download eBooks, read articles, connect with other business owners and learn from them.

The good news is that after you’ve put all the time in, you’ll have an understanding of what it takes to get it done when you are able to delegate these tasks. This will make you a better leader if you’re hiring someone in house, or will help you choose the perfect marketing partner if you’re outsourcing.




25 Tactics Great Websites Use



If You Had to Stop Networking Tomorrow, Would Your Business Survive?

stop networking

In a small business centric area like New Hampshire, face to face networking is a big part of starting a business. There are plenty of opportunities for anyone to get involved, attend events, and join networking groups. When we moved to NH from California and planted our roots for our digital agency, face to face networking gave us the boost we needed.
 
We jumped right in and joined the Chamber and a BNI chapter. We met some amazing folks, made great connections and lasting friendships. We still think of networking as a big part of how we’ve grown, but we found there is a downside.
 
Face to face networking is hard to scale and hard to predict. To scale your referrals you need to spend more time networking, or hire more people to help you network–and you still won’t know what kind of results you’ll get. It’s hard to predict what kind of opportunities you’ll get with face to face networking, because it depends on who is in the room. Networking can bring in great results, but if you rely on networking to bring in the bulk of your business, it can be risky.

What would happen if tomorrow you got sick, injured, or simply burnt out and had to stop networking for a while? Would your business survive? Or would those referrals simply stop because your physical presence wasn’t there to receive them?

Earlier this year, I got burnt out from too much networking. Naturally an introvert, it took a lot of energy for me to be out in front of people for hours every week. I had lost my oomph and I needed a change. And it was scary.
 
Thankfully, we had started an inbound marketing strategy for our agency, and had built a marketing funnel through our online presence. With blog posts, calls to action, landing pages, email marketing, and a system to back it all up, we had leads coming in that had found us on their own. I could make changes to our strategy, try different things and put in the effort we needed to keep our sales up, all during normal business hours.

Hitting our Target

With our new strategy we have more control over the types of leads we have coming in. When you network with a group, the referrals you receive are usually the people and businesses that your group members already know. So if you are looking for businesses that are outside of their network, it gets really difficult.

Inbound Marketing Persona Example
Now, we tailor our messages to the types of personas we know will benefit from our services. We focus on the type of persona that we are looking for, and create their buyer’s journey with content. The leads we have coming in through our inbound marketing strategy are people we would have never met through networking, simply because they aren’t within the circles we formerly networked with.

Perfecting our Formula

Traffic, Leads and Sales Funnel
At the start of each month, we take a look at our efforts and the results from the month prior. The three main categories we look at are traffic, leads, and sales. The more we blog, the more traffic we tend to get. As the quality of our content increases, so will the quality of our leads. And the more we improve our inbound sales process, the more sales we close. By looking at solid numbers, we have more control over how we perform.
 
We use to say things like, “Oh, well everyone is on vacation this month so that’s probably why our sales are down.” Now we say, “We need to focus on taking better advantage of our traffic by improving our Calls to Action.” or “Let’s write more blogs this month and see how that changes things.”
 
With our inbound strategy, leads and sales is less of a guessing game, and we know that the amount of effort and thought we put into our strategy will directly correlate to the outcome.

Networking is Still Important

Still Networking
Of course we haven’t given up on networking completely. We still get some of our best leads through our networks, but we no longer rely on it for the majority of our business.
 
We’ve taken control of our marketing funnel and turned it into something scalable, and we’re so happy we did.

 

 




25 Tactics Great Websites Use



3 Viral Marketing Campaigns that Convey Emotion

viral marketing campaigns

What makes people want to share? These viral marketing campaigns have figured it out. If you tap into a user’s emotion, they naturally want to share your work.
 

When a user experiences a strong emotion, it is natural for them to want to share that emotion. Here are a few viral marketing campaigns, and the emotions that they tapped into to get their work shared.

Amusement

A set of quirky commercials from Old Spice took off after their original 2010 Super Bowl spot. While I’m not a consumer of their product, this is a memorable commercial for how ridiculous every beat of this punchy script is.
 

 
This series of commercials were memorable in promoting a specific product. They are using humor to make their product memorable and, more importantly, shareable. When someone watches something that they are amused by, it’s natural for them to want to share that amusement with the people around them, which is why this video in particular reached 12 million views in 6 months. It has 51 million views to date and it was posted almost 5 years ago. Taking a look at the comments on the YouTube post, the viewers are all conversing and sharing… still, almost 5 years later

Shock

As promotion for the movie Carrie in 2013, a coffee shop in NYC was rigged to make it seem as if a customer had telekinetic powers, just like Carrie. Watching this video for the first time, it’s hard to not have a physical response to it. The viewers tend to feel a portion of the shock and fear that the coffee shop patrons are feeling.
 

 
A video like this makes people say, “Oh my gosh, I gotta show this to so-and-so,” so that they can share what they just felt.

Pride

Dove has spent less time promoting their products, and more time focusing on positive beliefs in relation to body image and self-perception. Their first campaign was Real Beauty Sketches, which explored self-perception versus external perception. They’ve continued to explore perception through their Self-Esteem Project.
 

 
All of the videos in the Self-Esteem Project reinforce the company’s vision “of a world where beauty is a source of confidence, and not anxiety.” These campaigns support their mission of positive self-esteem for children. As more and more people understand the importance of this mission, they share videos like these out of pride. They are proud to support these views and they want the world to know.
 
These viral marketing campaigns all focus on emotions, and they’re unique and memorable. Each production started with a goal, and that goal was to make their viewers feel something. If they are successful in reaching that goal, the shares will come naturally.




Inbound Marketing Checklist



Viral Nonprofit Marketing: 4 Types of Examples

nonprofit viral marketing

The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge of 2014 raised $115 million. This is the kind of success every nonprofit wants. If you don’t remember what the challenge was about, here’s a video you might enjoy.
 

 
The most important part of the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, was that it made people aware of the ALS Association, and the disease they were collecting donations for, amyotropic lateral sclerosis.
 

For any nonprofit that wants the kind of attention that ALS received, the biggest struggle is coming up with a viral nonprofit marketing campaign. Once that’s accomplished, its a matter of utilizing video to promote it.

 
There’s different messages for videos that an organization could utilize to: kick off a fundraising campaign, thank participants, create awareness of problem, or to inform viewers what your organization is all about. The most important thing about these videos is that they are unique to the nonprofit, are honest, and aren’t forced.
 

Interactive

 
The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge is what you would call an interactive campaign. It enables participants to create their own content promoting the campaign, and also the non profit.
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fl1I17Srh8
 

Popular Culture

 
An organization might use popular culture in their campaign to leverage what their audience is already familiar with to draw attention to their message. A great example is when the Children’s Hospital at Dartmouth Hitchcock created a video of their patients lip syncing to Katy Perry’s Roar.
 
Another great example is when the Salvation Army used #TheDress to draw attention to a campaign to #StopAbuseAgainstWomen.
 


 

Infographic Campaigns

You’ve probably seen those infographics that present information in a fun way. Those work for nonprofits too. Infographic videos are great for sharing facts about an issue, or about an organization in general. There are many people who simply can’t absorb a message unless it’s laid out visually.
 
Charity Water does a great job illustrating facts and figures as well as telling a story in this campaign.
 

 

Storytelling

 
What grabs people the most are stories. Viewers will remember what emotionally moves them. And these videos make the situations tangible. Save the children accomplished just that in their viral campaign.
 

 
Viral campaign planning isn’t easy, particularly if that’s what you’re aiming for. Your best bet is find something that resonates with your cause and organization. Talk to the people your organization supports to find a story, or an idea. You never know where the next big hit could come from.
 
Here’s an example of a Thank You video that then kicks off a new campaign. Charity: Water does a great job at inspiring action.
 


 
Ignoring high production costs, people will buy into your organization if what you’re sharing is honest, unique, and not forced.




25 Tactics Great Websites Use



Your Homepage Copy Should Draw People In

homepage copy

If a user doesn’t relate to your web copy, they tune it out. Plain and simple. They’ll easily ignore your homepage copy and just look around for what they need. Or worse, they’ll hit the back button and find something they can relate with.

 
The best thing you can do when writing for your website is to stop thinking about yourself and what you need to say. Start thinking about your potential buyers and what they need to hear in order to make a decision to connect with you.
 
Too many companies think that using big words and corporate speak will make them look more important, and really it just confuses people.
 

Avoid this:

Company ABC is the leading interactive implementors of B2C infrastructures. They enthusiastically enable value-added outsourcing and dramatically utilize value-added functionalities.
 

Keep it simple

One of the biggest challenges I find my clients have with writing is that they struggle to keep it brief. They are so afraid of leaving something out. You need to understand that the buyer’s journey will take more than a visit to your home page, and too much info will end their journey right then and there. Find the text that connects with your user and prompts them to learn more.
 
Here are some great examples of writing for web:
 

Flyingcarpettheatre.com

home page copy
 
Here’s a subject that seems like it would be complicated to put into words. With the help of some awesome imagery they have managed to keep it in two lines. They even go further and use icons and a “formula” to dive even deeper into the value that they are offering.
 

Woodpecker.co

writing for web
 
A great example of a website that speaks directly to the user, one on one. They have really recognized the main problem that their target personas have, and they are letting them know that they had that problem too. Oh, and they created a solution for it.
 

Headsupguys.ca

writing for home page
 
Another complicated topic that can get clouded with too much verbiage very easily. I’m sure there could be a wealth of information once you dig deeper into this website, but the home page tells you what it is without scaring you off.
 

Something to try

When you’re writing copy your homepage copy and having trouble coming up with a description of your company, try asking your clients for help. Pick up the phone and ask your favorite customer what you do for them. Then, ask them why that helps them in their business or life. What is the problem that you solve for them? How do they talk about you in their own words? Use their feedback as a starting point to getting to the copy that your target personas can really relate with.
 



25 Tactics Great Websites Use