Inspiration Archives - Inbound Rocket

7 Reasons Why Most Product Launches Fail And What To Do About It

There comes a moment in every startup’s life that you have to move it forward. Going from a side project, or side hustle to an actual product or service launch. When thinking about it, what are the first things that come to your mind?

Probably something like excitement, like a moment of victory. At the same time, you might also think that they are terrifying, what if everything fails? As long as you don’t launch, in your mind at least you’re successful right?

Part of the reason why product launches always seem so terrifying is that we’ve all heard the horror stories. They even made a special graveyard in San Francisco burying all the failed startups or an online version. Of course, we don’t want something like that to happen

We all know that there is risk running a business, and during the launch of your product or service, those risks seem to be at an all-time high. Of course, we don’t want something like that to happen.

So in this blog post, we’re going to look at all the potential pitfalls you might run into, and how to avoid them, so you have a higher chance of releasing a successful new product to the world and show them that you’re one of the exceptions.

Posted in Inspiration | one respons

Seven Tips For Creating The Optimal Cross-Channel User Experience

Nowadays users interact with your company through many different channels. What might start on the web, might go to mobile and tablet applications, emails, print, radio, social media, by talking to your employees on the phone for customer support, etc., etc.

When users engage with your company through a particular channel, they don’t consider it to be the “email channel” or the “mobile channel” (as you might describe the different touch points internally). They just see it as one of the many interactions that make up their entire user experience with your company.

Cross-channel marketing or multi-channel marketing or omnichannel marketing or whatever term you prefer internally is all about engaging with your customers or leads across every channel and any device you might think of.

The subject itself is something you might have heard about before somewhere. Although you might have thought about it before, or you might already have dipped your toes a bit in the water regarding cross-channel user experiences, a lot of companies are still missing out on a lot of opportunities to make it work for their business.

Having a consistent customer experience across different channels increases the brand awareness and helps deliver a higher conversion in the end. But what are the items that a good User Experience design needs to adhere to achieve this? Resmini and Rosati, authors of the book Pervasive Information Architecture, Designing Cross-Channel User Experiences defined seven items to keep in mind when designing a cross-channel experience:

Customer focused
Consistent
Recognisable
Channel Specific
Complementary
Measurable
Anchored within the organisation.

Let’s dive into all seven, so you too can deliver an optimal cross-channel customer experience for your clients!

Posted in Content Marketing, Inspiration | 2 responses

5 Ways to Convert More Customers with Context-Aware Emails

When was the last time you were excited to open up your email? If you’re a little bit like most people, you probably don’t look forward to opening your email inbox; it’s exploded with all the newsletters you at one point subscribed to, all the emails from the different social networks where you’re a part of, etc.

And let’s be honest with ourselves: most emails indeed are a bit annoying. According to research done by IDC in 2013 (full research available here), social media seems to evoke “excitement” as the prevailing sentiment.

Emails by XKCD

80% of the 18-44-year-olds check their smartphone straight after waking up, and that is not to check on email. The word that comes to mind when talking about email? Productivity. Emails are a chore.

Of course, using great subject lines, you might make people interested in opening up your emails, but the excitement mostly quickly gets away as soon as the email is opened.

Still, email marketing is still one of the most efficient ways of communicating with your customer, but email marketing campaigns have stayed mostly the same over the last couple of years. Many brands are simply not trying anything new.

In here, lies a significant opportunity for you and your brand.

What if you could make your emails more interesting? And what if, by making them more attractive, you could increase opens, click-throughs, and conversions?

In this article, we’re going to look into different tactics that can make that happen for you and your brand.

Posted in Email Marketing, Inspiration | 6 responses

SEO Strategies To Get Your Startup Off The Ground

Startups are very fragile. In fact, they are so fragile that the vast majority of them doesn’t make it past year 2 or 3. There are innumerable reasons as to why this happens and among those reasons is that they often simply do not find enough customers to become financially viable. And when a startup has difficulties doing this, the support of investors also tends to weaken.

In today’s world, startups are just as likely to find customers online as they are offline. In fact, for many of them, the customers will almost exclusively exist and do business online. Some of them will not even exist outside the web.

As a result, it becomes quite obvious that a startup needs to be as visible as possible online if it is to survive and as we all know it, no one (or at least almost no one) is visible online without a bit of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

In short, a startup simply has to do SEO if it is to survive.

Posted in Inspiration, Content Marketing | no responses

7 Industry Experts Share Their Best Kept Social Media Secrets

Every company is different; every social media network has its quirks.

If you’re a startup, it can be difficult to get started with your marketing efforts on social media. How did other companies deal with these struggles?

Are you looking to step up your social media marketing game?

Wondering what tools and tactics the pros are using?

We asked some top social media experts to share us their tools and tactics. The question we asked all of them was:

If you are starting out with your company, maybe you’re in the pre-launch phase or your just launched the first version of your product. How do you build your social media following when no-one ever heard about you yet?

How did you build engagement with your new followers and how did you attract them in the first place? What networks did you use?

Can you describe your ultimate growth technique for building and launching your company on social media and how can people implement that for their companies?

In this article, we’re going to look at their answers, and you’ll discover seven ways you can start and stay ahead of your competitors on the social media curve. This is who they are, from William Harris (Elumynt) to Sujan Patel (Web Profits) and all the brilliant minds in between.

Posted in Social Media Marketing, Content Marketing, Inspiration | 6 responses

Content Creation: How to Steal Your Way to Successful Content

Today, we will explore one of the seven deadly sins of marketing – stealing content. But, wait… isn’t that a black hat tactic? Why are we discussing theft in a place like this? Well, it is time for a revelation. In truth, there is one way to steal content in a purely white hat fashion: steal it from yourself.

All of us have published interesting infographics, blog posts, videos, and emails that stand out from the rest and receive significant engagement (we secretly wish all of our content could bless us this way). If only we could reuse the content that shines a little brighter, without negatively affecting SEO… Well, we can, and here is how.

Why Wouldn’t We Want to Reuse Content?

Before we begin “repurposing” our online content, we need to understand what can go wrong. Duplicate content can have a detrimental effect on SEO. Even if we copy content from ourselves, this can appear deceptive in the eyes of search engines. Though it won’t get our content banned, having duplicate or very similar information at more than one URL will force Google to choose only one page to index. If the search engine happens to pick an externally-hosted piece, our websites can lose page rank. Losing our page rank position is what we want to avoid at all costs.

Posted in Content Marketing, Inspiration | 3 responses

Boost Customer Loyalty With These Five Email Marketing Tips

After some time and multiple visits to your website, you’ve finally managed to win the trust of your customers, and they ordered something in your webshop. As most of you might already know, it costs more time and money to get a new customer than to keeping him or her. So, now it’s important to make sure this new customer is happy about spending money with you and that he or she stays a happy customer.

By using marketing automation with your email campaigns, you could save yourself lots of time and money. But when done properly it might even make you more money when you start using loyalty campaigns. Let’s dive into five tips to keep your customers, the happiest customers in the world by using e-mail marketing.

Posted in Email Marketing, Inspiration | 4 responses

The 5 Best Conversion Rate Optimization Tips For 2016

Whenever there is a visitor in your site, you want him/her to perform a desired action like say signing up for a free account, becoming a member of the site, answering the poll, etc.

When a visitor acts on it, it is called a conversion which is critical for you if you want to achieve your business goals. But driving conversions is not that easy, and since the competition keeps on increasing every day, you have a difficulty in realizing your conversion dreams. Moreover, research has shown that only 22% of businesses are pleased with their present conversion rate. So the remaining 78% percent who are not achieving their targets must be going somewhere wrong.

There are numerous ways which have been overlooked, but if they are given a chance and implemented properly, you will see your business booming in a few months.

Posted in Content Marketing, Email Marketing, Inbound Marketing, Inspiration, Social Media Marketing | one respons

Branding Essentials: How To Come Up With The Best Name For Your Startup

In our series around the branding of your startup or small business, we already talked about how you can use lean startup principles for branding your company. We also talked about the 6 P’s of branding, which helps you make up your brand story (positioning, promise, personas, personality, product, and pricing).

Every brand story, however, needs a hero, somebody who people can relate too. Recognition will start with your brand name. The name appears on your website, your business cards, your social networks, your product, and everywhere else.

In both offline and online, to identify your company and your company’s products and services. Today we will be looking into one of the most frustrated items around branding: the naming of your startup.

Naming your newly founded company is often met with a lot of frustration. It’s hard enough to come up with a name that isn’t already in use, but in the end, your entire team has to agree on the name as well. At the end to only found out, you forgot to check if the Twitter, Facebook or any other social handle wasn’t already taken and you’ve got to start your searching from scratch again.

Not to put you under even more stress, but getting the right name for your new company can help make or break your branding.

For example, in 1997, athletic gear company, Reebok, launched a new women’s running shoe with the name Incubus. The big problem was, though that an incubus is a male demon who visits women in their sleep to rape them, as pointed out by a newspaper in Arizona. Reebok recalled 18,000 boxes of shoes and had to apologise for the mistake they made.

So how do you come up with a good and effective name? What things should you do (or do not do) when naming your company?

Posted in Inbound Marketing, Inspiration, Minimum Viable Brand, Social Media Marketing | 6 responses

How Startups Can Utilize Lean Principles For Branding

You’re 99% sure that whatever it is that you’re going to build will change the world forever. And the next days, weeks, months you start building on your steps to world domination.

Then all of a sudden, it hits you: how will the world know about your “thing” when it is ready to launch and go out there? What is the name of this “thing”? Okay, the naming might be something that you’ve already come up with after hours of brainstorming and checking that domains are available, but what about a logo? What will be your unique message to the world? Do you have a unique message to share with the world?

Having a logo, and maybe even a website are already some real steps to building your brand, but these alone don’t add up to having a brand.

Any damn fool can put on a deal, but it takes a genius, faith, and perseverance to create a brand.

—David Ogilvy

Your brand is everything. Your brand is how you present yourself every day to your existing and potential new customers, it’s what you have to offer, it’s who you are!

Your brand is the promise you make and keep every day.

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Branding is not something that just comes out of nowhere. However, it’s something you should think about and plan way before you’re even ready to start thinking about launching. Branding is an integral part of your overall marketing strategy.

Before we dive into building your brand, let’s first talk a bit about what “brands” and “branding” really mean.

Posted in Content Marketing, Inbound Marketing, Inspiration, Minimum Viable Brand | 7 responses

7 Reasons Why Most Product Launches Fail And What To Do About It

Seven Tips For Creating The Optimal Cross-Channel User Experience

5 Ways to Convert More Customers with Context-Aware Emails

SEO Strategies To Get Your Startup Off The Ground

Content Creation: How to Steal Your Way to Successful Content

Why Wouldn’t We Want to Reuse Content?

Boost Customer Loyalty With These Five Email Marketing Tips

How Startups Can Utilize Lean Principles For Branding

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