Blog - Page 10 of 13 - Inbound Rocket

The Ultimate Guide to Marketing Your Startup Online Without a Big Budget

Startup marketing is a whole different science.

“Build and they will come” doesn’t work.

Those overnight success stories are often the result of years of hard work. Startup marketing is challenging because of limited resources (time, money, or even talent). Every effort, no matter how small, must be flawlessly executed. Traditional strategies don’t always work. So what can you do when you just don’t have the budget for a big marketing campaign?

Let’s go over six things that can get your marketing moving in the right direction, without having to spend much besides sweat equity.

The 4 Rules for Converting Online Leads into Sales

One of the biggest challenges for a lot of B2B companies is generating leads. That’s why we started with Inbound Rocket in the first place, to help you as a business owner get more qualified leads from your website. But if your sales team struggles to follow-up on the leads you create as a marketer, then you’re effort are wasted.

When it comes to leads, traditional marketers would often wait for an optimum response time. However for online leads, this is a complete different story. When you get a new lead that comes from filling out a form after different page visits, those leads are still on your website and ready to start engaging. This means that these type of leads require a faster, more engaged response than a traditional lead which comes to you via offline conversions. You can easily compare these types of leads to incoming phone calls, for example, you would not let them wait for hours, would you?

In 2011, Dr. James Oldroyd performed a study called “The Short Life of Online Sales Leads”. In this study, he found that most companies are not fast enough in the way they follow-up leads. From the 2,240 companies examined, only 46% followed-up with a lead within 24 hours.

The speed in which your sales team follows up on the marketing lead is essential. A slow follow-up means losing business to a competitor whereas a quick follow up is more than likely to lead to a sale.

We’ve put together 4 easy tips to help you turn more website leads into paying customers.

Posted in Lead Conversion | 2 responses

5 Ways To Get More Conversions With Irresistible Offers

Yes. It’s one of the most powerful words in the human language. And if you think about all the things we do as marketers, the ultimate goal is to get people to say “yes” to what we have to offer!

Yes to opening your email. Yes to clicking on a link. Yes to downloading, signing up, donating, or buying. And your job’s not over after just one yes — it takes several progressive “yeses” in order to move someone down your sales and marketing funnel, deeper into the buyers journey.

So how do you persuade more people to say “yes”?

When an offer is exclusive, scarce or in high demand, it becomes more desirable. Today we will look into creating irresistible elements for your offers, which can help overcome a leads’ typical doubt or concern. Why do these elements work? Because they all trigger a physiological reaction that makes the offer more valuable. If someone thinks the value of your offer is bigger than what you’re asking them for in return they are more likely to accept the offer. The higher this perceived value, the more irresistible the offer becomes!

So how do you create one of these irresistible offers? Let’s look into five different elements you can use..

Posted in Inbound Marketing, Lead Conversion | no responses

Inbound Marketing Is About Much More Than Getting Found Online

You’ve read all the blogs, all the books and you’ve got this amazing blog. Your blog is Search Engine Optimised, you even got a very active social media community. The top of your Inbound Marketing funnel is overflowing, and while this is amazing, you’re only half way there.

When Inbound Marketing started, it started as a response to the negativity that was surrounding getting prospects via traditional “outbound marketing” methods. Things like advertising and direct mail were costing a lot of money and were not getting the results on prospective clients or leads as they used to do. People were getting tired of being interrupted by irrelevant marketing messages all the time. Customers were starting to perform their own research, they started using search engines and social media sites to get the information they needed to make their buying decisions.

By prioritising relevant and very useful content, companies were starting to attract customers to their website on the terms of the customer. Inbound Marketing was forming a valued and welcome alternative for the buyers.

Posted in Content Marketing, Inbound Marketing, Lead Conversion, Social Media Marketing | no responses

Inbound Rocket version 1.0 is live

We’ve spent the last seven months building Inbound Rocket to help scale and automate lead generation for you. Today, we’re excited to announce that we’re live and ready for prime time!

What our beta users are saying

“Been testing this plugin for the last couple of weeks as a beta-tester and I must say it is an excellent plugin for Inbound Marketing. I’m using it with email marketing and contact form 7 and we are able to refine our targets beyond the normal analytics.” – Will Martin founder at LiveDuel

“Less than five minutes to install and start using! This plugin has so much value, you’d be insane not to install it. It’s a must-have for any business owner, or someone concerned with lead generation. I love it. Built to solve real problems. Like the kind I use to have!” – Jeff SKI Kinsey, founder or co-founder of numerous tech start-ups, publisher, and investor.

How we use Inbound Rocket

We’ve been using Inbound Rocket for the last few months on our website to learn more about you and all the other visitors into what was important to you. This information helped us fine-tune all the little bits that make this plugin tick.

But enough about us, don’t wait any longer—download and install the plugin now!

If you need any help or ideas on how to best leverage Inbound Rocket, please don’t hesitate to reach out at any time. We want to ensure personally you get results like we have. And of course, if you’re running into any problems after or during the installation, let us know below in the comments as well, We’re here to help.

Now it’s time for us to head pop a small glass of champagne 😉 and then head back to working on making the plugin even better!

Posted in Open, Releases | no responses

The Most Common Marketing Mistakes Made By Startups

As a startup founder, you have to wear many different hats within your organisation. Most times the teams are still very small so everyone needs to wear different hats in to get the company of the ground.

Startups face a number of unique challenges when it comes to marketing. With restricted budgets, limited resources, and a desperate need to get their name visible to the public, it puts entrepreneurs in a tight spot. Nine times out of ten, marketing is not even the founder’s speciality! And that’s why we tend to see the majority of startups making the same avoidable mistakes.

After working with startup founding teams for the last couple of years, we found the evidence is clear: You can have the best product or service in the world but if you don’t have a solid go-to-market plan, your business will fail. (assuming, of course, your startup is fixing a real problem).

In addition to laying out the vision, establishing a growth strategy, and building and supporting their team – in most cases they’re also doing (or managing) all of the marketing efforts. Nine times out of ten, marketing is not the founder’s specialty. As the founder of your company, knowing when and how to invest in marketing your business may just be the key ingredient to success.

Posted in Content Marketing, Email Marketing, Inspiration, Lead Conversion, Social Media Marketing | 5 responses

Reducing Your Bounce Rate To Help Boost Your Conversion Rate

You’ve got your website up and running, you have your products on display, you started blogging and before you know it you have visitors ending up on your website. However as soon as they arrive, without any explanation they’re leaving again.

You have visitors coming and going, maybe after a couple of minutes, maybe even less. All the hours of work you’ve put into creating all that beautiful content seems a waste, the majority of your visitors aren’t staying around long enough to get past your landing page. Many of them visits once and may never return.

You could sit behind your computer staring at your screen, asking yourself why your visitors are not staying longer, or you can take some action.

This blog post is all about the latter, time to take some action!

We talked about Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) before, giving you some intro into CRO and giving you the basics of CRO in three simple steps. Today we will dive a little deeper and we will be looking at the Bounce and Exit Rates of your website.

But before we start, let’s first understand what Bounce and Exit Rates are and what the difference between them is.

Bounce Rate: the % of visitors, who having entered on a particular page, go no further than that page during their session.

Posted in Lead Conversion | 6 responses

13 Tips For Successful Email Marketing Campaigns

We already wrote about the importance of Email Marketing for your business in the past and have given you “6 Reasons Why Email Marketing Is Important For Your Internet Marketing”. Emails can help and build relationships with your leads, it can help you gather important data and help boost your marketing Return On Investment (ROI). While these reasons should already convince you enough about the importance of running email campaigns, many marketers end up falling short and missing their goals on the campaign’s returns in the end.

As a marketer, you need to pay close attention to your audience and your message to be able to build, execute and maintain a continuous effective email marketing campaign. You need to avoid the most common mistake of all: just simply blast your self-promotional message out there in the world. Continuing blasting that self-promotional message to your audience will only end up with your recipients hitting that delete button more than opening your message, or even worse unsubscribing from your mailing list.

Posted in Content Marketing, Email Marketing | 7 responses

12 Growth Experts Share Their Best Lead Generation Tips

The world is full of millions or make that even billions, of potential customers for your product and services. But how do you find and reach your target audience, without spending (or wasting) too much time, money and resources? And how can you help ensure that the people who visit your website or social media profiles are really interested in what you have to offer?

Two weeks we wrote an article with “9 Lead Generation Ideas to Boost Sales Now”, this week we put those questions to sales and marketing experts. These people do this day in and day out for their own startups and for their customers. So we asked them to share their top suggestions on how to find and connect with qualified sales leads.

The question we asked them all was:

If you are starting out with your company, just launching your product into the world or even wanting to generate sales for your (freelance) work, how do you generate good qualified leads.
Potential customers have not yet heard of your company, how do you attract those leads? Can you describe to us what is your ultimate growth technique and how can we implement that for our own companies?

Posted in Inspiration, Lead Conversion | 6 responses

Content Promotion Strategies: 33 Ways to Get Traffic

“If you write great content, people will find it.” While that’s certainly a nice dream of a world in which marketers can just focus on creating outstanding content, it’s just not accurate anymore.

Over 2 million blog posts are published to the web each day. Making it much harder than ever to build an audience and get people to notice you. According to an older blog post by Neil Patel, content creation is only half the battle – the rest is gaining notice.

no traffic = no conversions
So while it’s tempting to celebrate after you finished publishing your newly created content for lead generation, you’re not done just yet. You can’t just put a piece of content up on your website and hope that people will find it, you’ve got to actively promote it to your audience.

no traffic = no conversions

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But that’s where a lot of us get stuck. What else can we do to get people to notice, and hopefully convert on, that new piece of content you created?

Posted in Content Marketing, Email Marketing, Social Media Marketing | 9 responses