Inbound Web Design

Nurturing leads might not be as glamorous as social media, or as thrilling as writing an eBook, but it’s dang important, and it works. Nurtured leads produce, on average, 20% more sales opportunities than non-nurtured opportunities. 35-50% of sales opportunities go to the vendor who responds first. Honestly, you can’t expect to keep your company afloat on revenue from the 4% of your first-time website visitors who are ready to buy. You need a strategy in place to draw the other 96% through your sales funnel.

If you’re over 30, you probably remember the film Back to the Future, starring Michael J. Fox. For the rest of you who have not yet had the privilege, Fox’s character, Marty McFly, gets sent back in time to the 1950’s in order to change the course of history and save his friend Doc. While there, Marty interacts with the younger version of his parents and experiences the differences between how 1950’s America worked compared to 1985 (the 80’s probably seem like the 1950’s to some of you…yikes, I’m getting old).

Who am I kidding…you’ve seen Back to the Future, right?

If not, do yourself a favor and pick it up tonight. Not because it is a pretty enjoyable way to spend 90-minutes or so…but for market research, I swear.

Whether we like it or not, we are all headed to a place that looks a whole lot more like the 1930’s, 40’s and 50’s then it does the 80’s, 90’s or today. Some of the smartest social media marketers have already left in their flux capacitor powered Deloreans without you.

Let’s debunk this one once and for all, shall we.

Google [Search] is in the business of doing one thing, and doing it better than anyone else on the planet: Providing people with search results that are relevant to them for given keywords and/or phrases [whether they are succeeding at this is another question all together]. That’s it. If Google fails to deliver on this one simple objective, people will leave en masse, and so they are constantly fighting the battle to provide these ultra-relevant results.

Google has the search “thing” under control [for now]. At least in terms of owning the lion’s share of eyeballs, which is what should matter to most businesses. It’s less important, as businesses, that we spend the bulk of our time chasing after the details, and more important that we first wrap our heads around the sweeping changes that are underway on the web.

We’ve outlined a handful of things you should have your eye on when creating content moving into the future:

Rapid-Fire TOFU Creation

If there is any single factor that unites small business owners worldwide, it’s that they want scaleable growth, profit and more leads from their website. While fabulous web design and easy navigation can keep your future clients from hitting the dreaded “back” button and heading to a competitor’s website, you’ve got to capture their interest while it’s still fresh. Your website needs TOFU, which is a silly acronym used by marketers to refer to “Top of the Funnel Offers.” We’re talking free eBooks, eCourses, checklists and templates. You need to trade something of value for your website visitors’ phone number and email address.

But really, who has the time?

This Week on the Magnetic MarCom Weekly Web Roll Call…

• Be Careful What You Click on Facebook – It May Ruin Your Online Reputation
• 10 Old SEO Methods You Need to Stop
• Email Marketing Tip: Write Like You’re Speaking…On Stage.
• 54 Quotes from Startup Leaders on How to Improve Conversions
• Google Buys Newspaper Ad to Show Why Newspaper Ads Don’t Work
• What the Highest Converting Websites Do Differently
• 10 Reasons Why Your Content Doesn’t Attract Links

If you would like to grab even more Inbound Marketing and #HubSpot links that we find useful ourselves during our web travels, join @MagneticMarCom on Twitter.

Enter at your own risk…

Join our rapidly growing community of other inbound marketers who have taken this 30-day challenge.

I feel your pain.

You probably began with lofty goals and grand expectations for your website and/or blog. But inevitably, your to-do list for making improvements pile up as you fight fires and (gasp) work on the paying projects necessary for keeping your business afloat. Maybe your visitor numbers are beginning to frustrate you.

You are not alone.

30 Days to Better Inbound Marketing is an email course designed to help you revitalize your traffic, build your blog subscribers, and reach more of the people who need what you offer. One manageable step at a time, it will transform and rejuvenate your inbound marketing.

A rag-tag group of inbound and content marketers team up for the heist to end all heists (OK, there’s really no heist just a few blog posts) in our spin on the 1960 Rat Pack favorite. 

Every other Tuesday (beginning on9/4/12) we will be serving up the “rap sheet” on one of our favorite inbound marketers. Complete with links to some of our favorite things they have written over the years, excerpts from interviews, and more…oh, so much more.

We realize that we had to leave some important and influential people off of our list, and if you would like, please share who you would have liked to see in the comments below…maybe we can talk sequel.

What you can expect in your inbox over the upcoming weeks:

Finally.

Someone has created a simple way to create basic infographics for free. That “someone” is Piktochart.com, our favorite tool (from a rather short list) for building super-simple, pseudo-custom infographics in a matter of minutes.

The piktochart site offers both a free and paid option, with the paid version ($14.99 a month) offering a greater number of templates, tools and images. But, we were very impressed with what we were able to churn-out using the free version in a mere 5-minute trial run.

A suitable number of pre-loaded graphics are ready to use out of “the box,” along with the ability to upload items from your own stash of images. What’s more, the free option also offered up a tool for creating custom charts by entering your metrics manually or from a CSVfile…pretty slick.

C.O.P. C.A.R. Content Marketing is a little acronym that we have been tossing around the Magnetic MarCom office for awhile now.

It spells out (pun intended) a framework of steps that clients must wrap their heads around, and universally adopt throughout their respective organizations, in order for their newly devised inbound/content marketing plan to be given the necessary time and attention for it to begin showing results.

Let’s take a closer look into what exactly makes up the C.O.P. C.A.R. acronym and a solid starting point for any content marketing strategy…