Inbound Marketing Blog | 3P Creative Group

Do you remember the times when you were able to do a simple keyword research to kick-start your content marketing efforts?

You would cherry-pick the most promising ranking opportunities by selecting a few low-competiton, but high-volume keywords among hundreds or even thousands of keywords. Then you strictly optimized your content with the goal to show up in search engines high for that single target keyword.  And unless you had delusions of grandeur to rank for the search terms like "table" or "technology", with enough elbow grease and enough high-quality content, it was achievable.

The European Union is known for its stricter-than-the-rest-of-the-world privacy laws, but the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has many marketers concerned as non-compliance can cost companies up to 4% of their last year's annual turnover! While this severe penalty is reserved for the most flagrant violators, as a marketer, even if you are not located in the European Union, you must know about these new guidelines as they will most likely affect you too.

You just finished the last quarter. You pushed really hard to finish all planned campaigns, you reached your Sales & Marketing service-level-agreement numbers and you were extra careful to send out that last promotional email before the month ended. Now your boss wants to sit down to review efforts and plan out his or her total budget and budget distribution.

There is no question: Marketers understand the importance of creating quality content in their lead generation: According to the Content Marketing Institute, the average B2B marketer allocates 28% of their total marketing budget for content marketing. 53% of marketers say blog content creation is their top inbound marketing priority. (Source) 

However, if you are spending so much energy, money, and time on creating quality content every month, shouldn't you make sure that your content actually converts into leads?

Today's marketers don't have a card blanche anymore. They are held accountable by their CMOs and CFOs to show a measurable return on investment! The sales teams are asking for a service level agreement between them and marketing to garantee a certain number of warm prospects for them to follow up with. 

Yet, the single biigest oversight that I see on company blogs today is the lack of a well-designed and optimized call to action - the very thing that allows visitors to take the next step, raise their hand to indicate interest, and download a resource.

A/B Testing Allows You To Quickly & Easily Optimize Your Call-To-Action Buttons

The simplest and most effective way to measure the performance of your CTA buttons is your Clicck-Through-Rate. Once you identify poor-performing ones, you can use A/B testing to test different variations and zoom into peak performaning ones.

Eventhough, creating an A/B test takes only a few minutes, only 44% of marketers employ A/B testing to measure the effectiveness of their work. Shouldn't be more 100%? Why wouldn't you check if a green button performs better then a red, yellow of blue button? The answer is simple: Many marketers think of A/B Testing of something highly technical.

Not only because of the technical sounding name that often scares off a lot of marketers — but also because of the results that you might find. They are afraid that they will have to fight an uphill battle to learn a new tool and methodology.  

So, instead of going into a whole technical how-to tutorial or a "why your really should use A/B Testing to find the most effective CTA buttons" rant, I thought I would share with you three real stories that CTA buttons would tell you if they could talk:

With Memorial Day just around the corner, July 9th is coming up awfully fast. Especially, f you are the person tasked with doing the marketing and organizing your team's attendance to Microsoft's annual worldwide partner conference 'Inspire'. 

By now, you have probably booked your flights and hotel rooms and submitted your booth designs for approval if you are exhibiting. 

But there is so much more you can do to get your website, blog, and social media ready for the conference. Most companies, that exhibit at a major tradeshow will spend around $25,000 including the cost of the booth, travel expenses, swag and other related costs. As a marketer, it is your job to ensure you get the most out of this important conference.

And if you are wondering what you need to do, don't worry. Here are the five must-do things before you head out:

If you have you ever spent seemingly endless hours writing, editing, and revising a single email, you probably have asked yourself if all the effort is really worth it. 

I am with you. I still get the jitters. Even after having sent more than a hundred thousand emails in the name of my clients in the past 5 years, I still triple-check everything and hold my breath as I click "Send".

Once the send button is hit, there is no turning back! And then I wonder: How many of these hundreds or even thousands of people I am sending this to will actually take the time to really read it? I give it a few minutes and then check the analytics. How many people opened the email? How many clicked the CTA? And how many will unsubscribe?

This question isn't rhetorical anymore, because now there are answers! With the new HubSpot Email Marketing Dashboard, you can not only see how many people have opened your email, but also dive deeper into who clicked on what link, how many recipients read the email versus only skimmed the text.

Today, I want to walk you through five email marketing statistics you should be tracking every month as part of your inbound marketing program using HubSpot.

(And if you are not yet using HubSpot, contact me, and I will set you up a trial and walk you trough it!)

I distinctly remember reading "War of the Worlds" in school.

I loved reading about how Martians invaded Earth and how people reacted to machines taking over the world.

However, I was even more fascinated to hear about the real mass panic that was caused on October 30th of 1938 after the radio play was performed by a theater group in the form of a news broadcast. Thousands fled their homes because they thought the world was coming to an end.

Now, there is a similar angst going around.

No, people are not actually fleeing their homes this time because, unlike in H.G. Wells' book, these machines came quietly into our homes. We've welcomed them as friendly helpers — washing machines, computers, and even self-driving cars. But it has gone far beyond that already.

When I started my internship at one of the largest software companies in the world back in 2000, my manager gave me a tour of the office facilities. As we passed through the floors with the salespeople's offices, you could feel the tension in the air.

May I ask you a direct question?

How do you feel about your content marketing efforts in 2016?

If you are like most B2B marketers, you probably feel a little better about it than the year before. 

According to the Content Marketing Institute/MarketingProfs’ B2B Content Marketing 2017: Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends Survey, 45% of North American B2B marketers felt somewhat more successful and 28% felt about the same regarding their content marketing efforts compared to a year ago.

However, only 17% of the respondents were confident that they were much more successful!

Now with Thanksgiving and all the Black Friday / Cyber Monday Week craziness behind us, the end of the year is fast approaching. Every year, when things calm down between Christmas and New Years, I like to take a step back and reflect upon the last year. What has worked and what hasn't? And as a result of that, I think about my priorities for the next year.

Whether you are similarly inclined or simply want to understand what has moved IT and tech companies in 2016, a great way to start is to take a closer look at the HubSpot State of Inbound Report of 2016 (you can download a full copy of the report here).

I pulled out some of the key stats around marketing and sales priorities in the tech industry.