Meet Bob. Bob lives in Toronto, has a girlfriend whose birthday is coming up soon, but the catch is he’s too busy to go out and find her the perfect gift. This is where local inbound marketing saves Bob’s day.While on a break from work he can easily research what he needs to buy. For such a personal gift, however, he’ll need to really handpick the item. Luckily, using just his smartphone, he can search for local stores and shops throughout Toronto so he can drop by one on his way home. Any businesses or establishments that can offer Bob the best gift for his girlfriend BUT don’t implement good local inbound marketing for Toronto will miss out – they’ll never even reach their ideal target market.Local inbound marketing is huge for small to mid-sized businesses, as Bob’s story shows. It’s common sense to focus on your local market, but in the global, digital environment sometimes business owners fail to do so.You see, local inbound marketing leverages proximity, scale, and user experience to business owners’ advantage. [Read more…]
4 Steps to Get Your Offerings Back on Track
Inbound marketing is about making your business the most appealing to potential customers. By understanding your customer you can develop an inbound marketing strategy that will draw-in your consumer, build a relationship of trust with them so they will examine what you have to offer.
But what happens when your offerings are falling flat? It’s easy to blame the consumer, but in all likelihood it’s because of the offer. Here are four steps, to get your offerings back on track and moving forward.
Step 1: Set a Goal
Set specific and attainable goals. Goals can take many forms but, in the end, it boils down to generating more revenue. Examine your existing goals and consider:
- Refining your list – either expanding or reducing the people that you are reaching
- Limiting its restrictions,
- Opening up new sales channels,
- Or creating new partnerships to rehash your existing goal.
5 Ways to Revive Your Old Content
Content is king, but what if the king is aged? Fresh, high quality content is always a must, but should your old content never see the light of day again when their time in the spotlight is over?
From the ashes of old content can rise fresh, relevant, high quality, and even timely new content for your inbound marketing – you just have to know how:
Re-link for Relevant Link Juice
Internal cross-linking is a plus (well, unless you do it too much), so always keep an eye out for ways to link to your old, relevant, high quality content from new ones. This way, you help boost your own Pagerank by lending the old piece of content part of the link juice the new content will develop, which is a snowball process that helps bolster overall website visibility.
Repurpose for a Different Use
Old content can be recycled through repurposing: simply take the thesis message of an old piece of content and use it with a different marketing message, or in conjunction with a new, relevant subject matter. For instance, you have a blog post that talks about old events in inbound marketing Toronto conventions, you may want to repurpose them for new events. If you’ve covered Panda 3.0 before, you have a lot of chances to repurpose content for the Panda 4.0 update that’s currently trending, hitching on keyword ranking with comparatively little effort.
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5 Dos and Don’ts of Effective A/B Testing
Ready to perform some A/B testing on your website?
The concept may be simple, but A/B testing’s role in inbound marketing is so significant that you should always know what you’re doing. Here’s a cheat sheet of “dos and don’ts” pointers:
- Image Courtesy: Small Business Database Marketing
Do: Start with the Goals, then Test
This might seem like trivial common sense, but it’s in fact a frequent mistake that derails the entire effort. Without direction, your A/B testing is meaningless; and your goals dictate your direction.
Don’t: Set Goals Not Aligned to Current Needs
Always align testing goals with inbound marketing improvement. Even if you have set goals, but they’re not aligned to desired improvements in your inbound marketing, then the results of your A/B testing efforts won’t be useful until such time as it can be employed to improve one facet of your marketing or design.
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Responsive vs. Mobile Websites: Which is Best for Your Business?
Just walking around Toronto, how many people can you see using some kind of mobile device?
It’s no secret that mobile use is becoming increasingly widespread. This also means that if you want your entire inbound marketing strategy to work, you need to ensure that your target market’s experience is not hampered by your website being incompatible to mobile devices.
In this arena, two competing formats can be considered: mobile versions or responsive design.
Image Courtesy: Tecture
Mobile Vs. Responsive Design
Essentially, a mobile version of your website is a version specifically suited to mobile devices. When users access your website through desktop PCs, they’ll get the usual design. When they access it through mobile devices, they’ll get the mobile version.
That’s simple enough, but what about responsive design?
[Read more…]
The CTA Conundrum: Naturally Including Them in Your Blog Posts
As one of the biggest (if not THE biggest) content repositories of your website, your business blog should be rife with posts that help you lead your readers to wherever you want them to be. Let’s say you’re calling readers to action to check out the many events in SEO and content marketing Toronto has to offer.
Using calls to action, one of the most effective tools in your marketing repertoire, you can do just that. But there’s a catch.
Awkward CTAs don’t work – they can even backfire.
You need to naturally and seamlessly weave the CTA into your blog post. Many business owners and webmasters, however, aren’t exactly artfully skilled writers or marketers. Luckily, there are ways to circumvent the dreaded awkward CTA and make everything sound (or in this case, read) natural.
First, let’s break your blog posts into two types.
[Read more…]
5 Reasons For Inbound Marketing To Your Current Customers
Inbound marketing isn’t just a great tool for closing new leads into actual conversions, it’s also perfect for maintaining a relationship with your current customer base with the aim of eventually getting them back into your sales cycle.
If you’ve never considered that before, you might want to ensure it now. After all, inbound marketing to your current customers will help in the following ways: Repeat Business, Continuous Lead Nurturing, Brand Positioning, Monitoring Sentiment and Edge over the Competition.
Repeat Business
It’s called a sales cycle. To maximize the return on the investment of setting up the infrastructure that makes it possible, it should be a recursive cycle of repeat business. It’s the most fundamental reason why you should perform inbound marketing on current customers, and it’s also the most practical.
Just because your customers have finished one cycle doesn’t mean you can’t invest resources on increasing their customer lifetime value. In fact, you’ll find that it’s easier and more affordable to increase CLV through inbound marketing to encourage repeat business than it is to close a new lead.
[Read more…]
4-Ways-To-Optimize-URLS-For-SEO-And-Readers
If you want to cover your bases and make sure that you are seriously promoting your online content, then pull all out of your SEO (search engine optimization) stops. From meta tags to alt tags; from H1 tags to H3 tags or just tags in general there are about a dozen key items to focus on to drive your copy from page 3 to page 1.
One key but often overlooked SEO tactics is to optimize your content URLs for your readership and the search engines. There are some content creators (including some in Toronto) that miss this important SEO opportunity so, here are a few tips and why they are important.
Key-SEO-for-URLs
- Include a keyword related to your content.
- Separate-words-with-hyphens.
- Keep URLs short and relevant by removing unnecessary words
- Structure to get the click
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Toronto: A Hotbed for Internet Marketing
We’ve known for along time that Toronto is truly a hotbed for internet marketing activity. What’s our social proof? The numerous internet marketing related conferences that are showcased in the city annually. From hardware to software; digital graphics to analytics; social to online marketing - there’s a conference for cover every aspect of digital marketing. In May alone, there are three important conferences. We’ve checked out the websites and decided to share some of the highlights. Is one in particular our favourite? We recommend them all - because there’s something for everyone.
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Be Prepared For Any Google Update: SMART SEO Actions
You might think that it’s impossible to successfully prepare for the next Google algorithm update that could impact SEO (search engine optimization) the way Panda and Penguin did. But, in reality, there are some actions you can take to ensure you minimize potential damage for any update.
Let’s start with what everyone should know:
