Inbound Rocket

9 of the Best “Coming Soon” & Under Construction WordPress Themes and Plugins

So you figured out who your ideal customers are, you started talking with them, and you started to validate your assumptions. What can we do next? It’s time to let the world start knowing that you are out there. It’s time to start launching your website and try convincing people about what you are building is worth their time and money. The easiest way is to use a coming soon WordPress theme.

Having a coming soon page is really beneficial, you can easily collect email addresses and start building your online presence even before launching your entire site. These email addresses can be used to get even more validation for the problem you are trying to solve (more on how we use that process later on in a different post). Next to that these email addresses can be used to keep your visitors informed about the big moment you are ready to launch.

On our landing page, we use this same strategy to attract email subscribers. We have a landing page up and running and off course by now we have a blog attached to it, which helps us with generating traffic and more email subscribers. Some would say to get a bigger email list you should even offer some kind of freebie, but we are not really there yet since we are just starting out remember? Off course if you have the possibility you could always offer a freebie, or work with referrals to have those early subscribers get early access to the product you are building.

In today’s post, we will share 9 of the best WordPress Themes out there, for creating a coming soon page. We will present them in a random order so it all depends a bit on your own preference which one you should give a try.

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Posted in Inspiration, WordPress | no responses

9 Tips for Early Customer Development Conversations
9 Tips For Getting The Most Out Of Your Early Customer Development Conversations

In a time, where technological improvements have made is easier than ever before to start building your product idea straight away, the question is no longer if your product can be built, it’s whether or not anyone actually wants it. Customer Development is used to help you stop wasting time and money on products that people don’t want. Next to validating your startup idea it can, of course, be used to identify problems and to optimise ideas or existing products.

We touched on the subject of Customer Development before in our blog post from last week, this week we are going to dive a bit deeper into the subject on how to actually get the most out of these conversations.

Below are 9 key tips and principles for practicing Customer Development effectively.

#1 Don’t pitch your idea at first

One of the most natural things, when you start talking to people, is to go into an automatic pitch mode. However pitching an idea instead of trying to have a conversation where you try to find out about people’s problems will result in learning less about your potential customers. You will get biased answers that can lead you down the wrong path. The goal of Customer Development is not just to validate or invalidate your idea, but mostly it is to learn what is valuable for your customers and optimise whatever it is you are building. People are naturally inclined to agree with whatever you are telling and to compliment you, so when you are talking about this “brilliant” idea which you are putting blood and sweat in, of course, they will love it! Because of this you will miss out on learning key insights. Pitching and potentially even selling should only be used after you are confident that you’re solving a real problem. And even when you do that and people say the love it, let them get their wallet out straight away to prove they are not just trying to blow you off.

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Posted in Open | 4 responses

Stop Wasting Time: How to Prove You’re Building the Right Product
Stop Wasting Time: How to Prove You’re Building the Right Product

You know what the biggest reason companies fail? They are trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. People don’t care what you’re doing and they just don’t think the problem is big enough for them to start paying for your solution. In other words: Throughout the lifetime of any successful organisation, customer feedback is critical.

But how do you get customer feedback if you’re just starting out and you don’t have any customers yet? A lot of startups just start building and hope that whenever they build something beautiful the customers will come running, waving their credit cards and all will be well. The better way, of course, is to try to find validation for your idea before you start building, making sure you are not wasting your time.

So how did we get and how are we still getting more and more validation here at Inbound Rocket? How did we start from a blank canvas, and come to the conclusion this idea we were having might be more than just an idea? Time to talk to you about Customer Development.

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Posted in Inspiration, Open | 8 responses

How to Find Your Ideal Customers on Social Media
How to Find Your Ideal Customers on Social Media

Last week we wrote about setting up buyer personas using Google Analytics. By now you should be knowing that, when you know your target audience’s age, occupation, income, interests, pains, problems, obstacles, habits, likes, dislikes, motivations and objections, then it’s easier and cheaper to target them on social or any other media.
So how do we create an even better understanding of your ideal customer, how do you discover more about your customers using Social Media?

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Posted in Content Marketing, Social Media Marketing | 6 responses

How to Build Better Buyer Personas to Drive Killer Content (Bonustip: use Google Analytics)
How to Build Better Buyer Personas to Drive Killer Content

Just like starting your startup, with marketing you shouldn’t just dive straight into content marketing without a proper strategy. Without knowing who is the actual audience that you are writing for, you are sure to write content which is not engaging if targeted to the wrong buyer personas. You need to always understand your audience’s top concerns!

Creating buyer personas and journeys will help you determine what kind of content you need; set the tone, style, and delivery strategies for your content; target the topics you should be writing about, and understand where buyers find and consume information.

There is a lot that goes into effective content marketing. You need a lot of different kinds of content, you have to figure out how it all fits into your buying cycle, and your content has to adjust to the different media through which you share it.

So how do you do all that effectively? You start by creating buyer personas.

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Posted in Content Marketing | 7 responses

Why Use WordPress For Building Your (Inbound) Marketing Platform?

With the rise of Inbound Marketing and Email Marketing, your company website is quickly becoming an essential part of doing your business online. WordPress might have started as a blogging platform when it got first released, but it’s become much, much more. Over the years, it’s evolved into an easy-to-use and popular content management system that allows business owners to market their products and services online.

Inbound Marketing

Inbound Marketing is vital to the success of a business online. It used to be that companies could market their products through outbound marketing tactics like advertising and buying email lists. With 86% of the people skipping TV ads and 44% of direct mail never being opened, these methods are now viewed as non-authentic. Outbound Marketing is, therefore, unlikely to attract large numbers of customers or help you increase your conversion rates.

Instead, the most successful companies rely on inbound marketing and focus on creating content to attract users. Companies who use WordPress are better equipped to promote their products and products and services through the usage of blog posts, landing pages and email marketing. By using WordPress, you can make your website the platform for all your marketing efforts by taking advantage of the large community, well-designed themes and the valuable plugins.
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Posted in Content Marketing, Email Marketing, Inspiration, Social Media Marketing | no responses

How to Build a Content Calendar (Includes a Free Template)
How to Build a Content Calendar (Includes a Free Template)

A new year has just kicked in, out of all the New Years resolution that you might have created for yourself, which is the one that is going to help (you kickstart) your business in 2015? Over at Inbound Rocket, we want 2015 make the year where we will start helping you by attracting more leads, letting you focus on what you do best and not having to worry about that lead generation.

Of course, we know as developers ourselves that you’ll likely spend hours upon hours perfecting your products. You take great pride in them want them to succeed. But what if you spend all that time and you don’t see the results you were hoping for? What if no one buys your product?

It can be a real letdown, that’s for sure. But before you toss your development dreams by the wayside, consider this for a moment: have you done everything within your power to market your product effectively? If you’re looking at your screen right now with a puzzled expression, I’ll take that as a “no.”
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Posted in Content Marketing, Inspiration | one respons

Inbound Marketing for Beginners

What is Inbound Marketing

Trying to get customers?

Frustrated trying to get new customers?

 

Whether you’re ready or not, marketing has been disrupted. People’s behaviours have changed. They’re turning out traditional marketing tactics. The old marketing playbook is broken. Did you know for example that:

  • 86% skip TV ads?
  • 91% unsubscribe from email?
  • 44% of direct mail is never opened

In order to keep on attracting customers, marketers have to provide them with something they will love. This is where Inbound Marketing comes in.

Inbound Marketing is a holistic, data-driven approach to marketing that attracts individuals to your brand and converts them into lasting customer.

What makes Inbound Marketing different?

Traditional “outbound” marketing pushes messages to prospects via billboards, television, direct mail, telemarketing, and trade shows, which disrupt your prospects daily schedule. While Inbound Marketing on the other hand primarily uses the Internet to distribute compelling content that attracts prospects and builds trust with clients within your sales funnel. In other words, when you use inbound marketing, customers come to you! Read more…

Posted in Content Marketing, Email Marketing, Social Media Marketing | 2 responses

Want to focus on your business, not on generating leads?

”If you have more money than brains, do outbound marketing. If you have more brains than money, do inbound marketing.” – Rand Fishkin, CEO, SEOmoz

Do you want to have the power to turn your website visitors into subscribers and customers? Today, we are extremely pleased to announce the birth of Inbound Rocket, a robust customer acquisition and lead generation plugin for WordPress that allows you to grow you business and maximize your growth.

It used to be that the size of your wallet determined the scope of your success. But no more. Now even the smallest of companies can attract the best-qualified leads, simply by offering the right content, to the right people, at the right time. And you don’t need a big wallet. You just need the right tools.

How Inbound Rocket works

Most marketing software platforms are too costly and unmanageable for small businesses. Smaller teams don’t have the time to manage these big software installations, never mind the time required to use them properly. Sure, there are some free tools. But they’re often too different from each other to work well together, creating confusion and complications due to duplicated work and inefficiencies of scale.

So hello world, we are Inbound Rocket!

In short Inbound Rocket can be very helpful for anyone wanting to do lead generation using WordPress. We are about to start launching our very first version and we are really looking forward to your thoughts and feedback on our product. So sign-up now and give it a try!

Posted in Open | no responses
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