Myth busters that’s us. At Fruition Interactive, we squash rumors and keep to the facts, particularly when there is constant, and, at times, dramatic, changes to SEO in Toronto.
When discussing best practices, it can be difficult to know what is good advice and what is pure myth. And the absolute last thing you want to do is follow a course of action that could be detrimental to your SEO strategy in Toronto.
We already tackled 5 myths in 5 SEO Myths De-bunked, here are 5 more. [Read more…]
Inbound marketing requires that you wear a myriad of hats and have many different skills. While you can’t be an expert at everything and it’s probably not a good idea anyway, keeping your inbound marketing tool box filled with new skills just makes sense. What better way to keep on your inbound marketing knowledge fresh than by attending a course/workshop or conference.
Here’s our course/workshops/conference that fall under the umbrella of basic inbound marketing knowledge.
WHEN: February 3 & 4th
WHERE: 3300 Bloor St W. Centre Tower, 2nd Floor Room 2220
WHO: ClickInsight
COST: Starting at $824 (Early Bird Savings of $75 before January 28th)
SPACE: Is limited. And it’s BYOL (laptop)
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Influencers isn’t even an actual word that’s included in dictionaries yet (unlike rather unsavory ones like “Twerk” — yes, that twerk), but it’s gaining a lot of attention. Specifically, a segment of inbound marketing called influencer marketing.
They’re hubs. They’re steering wheels. They’re gear shifts. To put it simply: they are the individual locuses of control that you can leverage to achieve maximum inbound marketing impact.
Within any network (like the network of your target market), there are specific hubs that influence all the other individual members of network. Engaging these hubs has more impact on the entire network than when you engage with ten thousand other individual members that aren’t hubs.
Basic example: your car. Your car is a network of parts, but even if you touch, tap, and tweak a hundred screws, bolts, and nuts in it, it won’t get you where you want to go. You need to engage with the steering wheel, the pedals, and the gear shift. These are your car’s (network) hubs (influencers) that dictate where it goes.
Do you feel that some days your marketing department is speaking in a different language? Are they swapping terms that you’ve heard before but can’t remember what the heck they mean? We’re here to help, with our list of 10 inbound marketing terms and definitions to keep you in the conversation. Getting the lingo right is critical to making sure your marketing team are in-tune with your business objectives.
Above all, you need to understand what the term inbound marketing itself means. Those who are identifying themselves an inbound marketers are seeking or earning the attention of their customers. They are making the online business easy to find with engaging content that will draw their customer into the site. In contrast, outbound marketing is about pushing the message to the consumer out through traditional advertising, trade shows, commercials, cold calls and even email blasts.
Search engine optimization, normally called SEO, is one of the most common terms you can expect to come across in inbound marketing. SEO is the practice of making changes or optimizing of your website or blog to improve rankings in search engines.
Agencies aren’t turnkey solutions — they need your input and cooperation. You’d be crazy to set and forget everything anyway: inbound marketing is all about increasing your bottom line. So, what do you need to get the ball rolling?
In any organization, the communication between management and employees, between departments, and between companies and their hired agencies and firms is critical. Nothing happens without clear communications; in fact, things backfire without it.
Everyone needs to lay all their cards down on the table. The key is honest, transparent, and complete communication. You need a trifecta; nothing less.
Okay, so communication is an encompassing facet in your relationship with your inbound marketing agency. But what particular factors of your partnership should be established from the get-go?
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Playing parlor games, like pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey can be fun, but trying to track internet marketing performance based on analytic KPIs without clear examination could lead to errors. Gaining a solid perspective on internet marketing performance isn’t a pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey game.
Let’s start with the basics: the usual of internet marketing performance metrics that businesses should monitor, and the associated KPIs.
Measuring Brand Awareness
Brand awareness is a combination of online presence, visibility, and authority, and as such is an integral facet of internet marketing and branding. If you want to track how your brand is doing, you can start with these KPI:
Photo courtesy of Daa Nell(CC No Derivatives)
New visits – The most obvious metric to keep an eye on when it comes to brand awareness is the number of new visits. The week-to-week or month-to-month increase or decrease of new visits is an established indicator of how effective your search engine optimization practices are, among other things. Sometimes, some many businesses get stuck on new visits, giving it more importance than is due.
Social media is inexorably tied to your inbound marketing efforts, whether locally in Toronto or even in a global scale. It’s virtually inescapable that you harness the potential of leading networking sites Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus for your business. After all, you go where your customers are, and between just those three, they have about 1.6 billion users.
Sharing on social media for you inbound marketing efforts, however, shouldn’t be taken lightly. You probably know some of the basic best practices, but if you want to go deeper – as you should – what else should you know?
Using images, posting links, even scheduling your updates and tracking your metrics – everyone knows that these are absolutely essential. Behind the scenes, however, the technical mechanics that make social sharing work can be pretty tricky – and if you know what you’re doing, you can make the most out of it.
Let’s run through a few of the advanced sharing tips you can use in your inbound marketing campaigns incorporating social media (using the top three social networks):
How does Google AdWords help build your business?
1. Connects you with your customers - Your ad will appear as a sponsored link on Google search pages and other related websites including YouTube and Gmail. Most important, you’ll connect with your customer at the exact moment they are looking for your service.
2. Takes the guessing out of advertising - With Google AdWords, you’re in control from start to finish. And you can monitor your campaigns 24/7, to determine how well they are generating new leads.
3. Lets you advertise globally or right in your neighbourhood! - Google AdWords allows you to localize your advertising so you know that you’re reaching the people right in your neighbourhood.
4. Creates targeted mobile campaigns - Google AdWords will adapt your ads across all different types of online devices, or you can focus on just one type of advertising, such as mobile.
…..And you pay ONLY when someone clicks on your ad.
To qualify for a $300 Google AdWords coupon you must:
As soon as you receive your $300 Google AdWords coupon, you can start collecting new leads! Click here to complete our contact form and we’ll begin the process today
A contact form is a useful web tool because it allows current and potential customers to easily communicate with you. However, as any specialists dealing with inbound marketing in Toronto can tell you, it might be one of the worst ways to generate new leads.
When potential customers are in the research phase of their buying proposition, it doesn’t necessarily mean they are also interested in speaking with you. They know that your goal is to sell them something, but they need to be able to find information without a sales pitch. In this case, your contact form is really secondary. Even if it’s the flashiest, most spectacular contact page, if your customer really don’t want to talk with you, they won’t. But don’t let the thought of an under-performing contact page weigh you down, instead focus on the really important inbound marketing issue - nurturing a buying mentality in the lead.
Photo courtesy of JQueryScript
Across the board, most contact forms are pretty basic. If you ask someone who specializes in inbound marketing in Toronto, they would tell you that providing real value will get contact information faster, while qualifying a lead.
You know that joke about beer expiration dates? Beer always gets consumed so time-stamping them with expiration dates is useless. But is it the same for content marketing?
At the core of any successful inbound strategy is content. Your content is indispensable, be it local Toronto content marketing or country-wide, every detail of your content marketing counts. Even something as seemingly trivial as timestamping.
While timestamps aren’t quite the same expiry dates, they do share similar nuances.
Photo courtesy of jot.punkt(CC Attribution)
Timestamps are the dates indicated in published content. It’s actually optional but most websites and company blogs add it as a default. The argument for timestamps on websites with breaking news is obvious, but what about other sites and blog posts that are using a different approach to content marketing.
One of the hallmarks of great content is timeliness. However, while ‘timely’ news and content needs to be recent, evergreen content, on other hand, probably doesn’t.
Fruition Interactive helps you get in front of your target audience, so you can start generating results from your online marketing. Fruition's Organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Pay Per Click and online display advertising services are designed to maximize your ROI.
Your Web site is a key business tool. It needs to engage people to take the next step towards becoming your loyal and valued customer. Fruition helps you get the right content to the right people at the right time to influence their decisions and turn awareness into demand.
Call it engagement. Call it retention. Call it what you want, but the fact is increasing lifetime client value is the most cost-effective way to grow your business. Fruition helps you grow lifetime value from your base with highly targeted email marketing, social media marketing and more.
