5 Sure-fire Ways to Get More Inbound Leads for Your Agency

Getting qualified leads – the bread and butter of every business. However, after spending countless hours on different strategies, many companies find that the amount of leads collected and the subsequent conversions is lesser than expected or desired.

Unlike the outbound lead generation tactics that involve actively getting in touch with your target prospects, inbound tactics seek to attract leads through useful content and take some time to work. Let us see how you can fine tune your inbound strategy to generate more leads -

 

Polish your lead generation forms

Often, marketers channel all their efforts into the content and design of a website or landing page, but overlook the final step of the lead generation process – the lead form. Even if they are interested in your content, most prospects are reluctant to give up their contact information. A plain, dull form can quickly turn them away.

 

To prevent this, you need to make your lead forms as interactive as possible. You can even use online tools for this purpose. Also, offering a useful resource such as a whitepaper, ebook or a free trial in exchange for sign up will encourage more subscriptions on your audience's part.

Optimize your email list

Growing your email list will ensure that you are sending emails to those people who have volunteered to hear from you, and are more inclined to have a need of or be interested in your offering. You can use the above mentioned tip to get more subscriptions and opt-ins for your emails. 

Leverage the outreach of webinars

Webinars are a great way to expand your digital outreach and invite just the audience you have in mind. They give you an opportunity to add to your credibility and be known as an industry expert. Provided you add to their knowledge through a valuable topic, you will be able to tap into a large pool of leads through webinars.

Start your own business blog

Blogging is another great way to showcase your industry expertise and establish yourself as a thought leader. Take time to research the type of content consumed by your target audience, and to identify common business challenges faced by them. An SEO-optimized blog that provides valuable content and shows a way to overcome these challenges will help attract more leads.

Post engaging videos on YouTube

With video marketing on the rise, the largest video platform and the second-largest search engine after Google is a great way to increase your online awareness and generate leads. Here are some options of valuable content you could provide through videos -

• Product demos

•  Product tutorials

•   Interviews with industry experts

•   Customer testimonials and case studies

If you need help to boost your inbound marketing efforts, you can engage the services of a digital marketing company.

TSL Consulting Pvt Ltd is an integrated marketing company based in India. We offer customized outbound marketing, inbound marketing, digital marketing and data profiling services to a wide spectrum of small and mid-sized organizations.

4 Effective Ways to Engage Organic Traffic on Social Media

Painstakingly optimizing your website for search engine optimization to increase ranking and organic traffic is a rewarding, but slow, process. Rather than waiting for your target audience to search for a relevant query to land on your website, you can actively engage your organic traffic on social media platforms.

                                                

Let us have a look at some of the most effective ways for B2B marketing companies to increase their organic reach on social media -

Create and share content that matters

When you perform keyword research for creating content, do not only select keywords that you want to rank for. They would not help you much if your audience is not searching for them. Sharing content created around keywords that are more preferred by your audience will help increase engagement on their part.

Employ social listening

Knowing what your target audience or even existing customers are saying about industry-relevant challenges or their business requirements will give you an idea about the kind of posts you need to publish to catch their attention.

Actively engage your audience through messages

Publishing relevant content is not the only activity you can perform on social media platforms. They are essentially avenues of meaningful communication. Join forums or discussion threads that deal with a topic relevant to your brand or the solution you are offering. You can even directly send messages to a highly relevant prospects and strike up a conversation to understand their pain points before introducing your solution.

Use Facebook lookalike audiences

Facebook allows you to create lookalike audience, i.e., create a set of people that have very similar business interests to your existing customer base. You can serve this lookalike audiene relevant paid advertisements, to that you have a greater chance of engagement and subsequent conversion.

TSL Consulting Pvt Ltd is an integrated marketing company based in India. We offer customized outbound marketing, inbound marketing, digital marketing and data profiling services to a wide spectrum of small and mid-sized organizations.

Content marketing myths that are holding you back

Content marketing is by no means an easy discipline, and with the constantly evolving trends, it is easy for myths and misconceptions to slip by and be considered as a common practice or understanding. 

Let us have a look at some common myths that need to be dispelled for your content marketing success -

The content should promote your business or product

Not all type of content should focus on your business. Rather than pushing for a sale right away, your content should focus on engaging and educating your target audience.

You do not to pay much attention to social efforts

If you do not actively promote your content on social media, how will your target audience know that it exists?

Only long-form content is important for ranking

Long-form content has its uses, but the length of the content should depend upon its purpose. Write for your audience, and not for the search engines.

Anybody can create content

Creating content requires a unique skill set. A combination of professional writers and subject matter experts is important for creating content that is truly engaging, useful and relevant.

A digital marketing can help you both devise an effective content marketing strategy and create content that will put forth the business value of your solution in front of your target audience.

How can Business Owners Manage their Online Reputation

Maintaining a positive digital footprint is important for the success of every online business. In fact, a study has shown that 97% of business owners have stated that online reputation management is important for their business.

Why is online reputattion management so important for B2B marketing companies?

Today, customers trust the word of their peers more than any advertisement or marketing material you might provide them with. Customer reviews, or what other people are saying about your brand, play an important role in the buyer's purchase decision.

Armed with smartphones, it does not take more than an instant for the millennial generation to express their opinion or experience on social media. This opinion, whether good or bad, spreads like wildfire all over the Internet. Thus, if you have not yet paid much attention to what your customers or target audience is saying about you in the online world, it is high time to start doing so.

Steps you can take to manage your business' online reputation

Maintain an authentic online presence

The first vital step is to claim your business across all social networks and even local map applications.This is essential to deter any deceitful parties that can set up fake profiles in your name.

Use social media wisely

Social media platforms is a great way for B2B marketing companies to interact with their customers and even attract qualified leads. However, while posting, keep the following points in mind -

•                     Do not share any controversial news

•                     Do not attempt any humor that might be taken the wrong way

•                     Do not ignore or delete negative reviews, or respond angrily to them

Encourage reviews from customers

You do not have to wait until your users post a review. Actively request feedback from them through a online forms or an email marketing service. You can encourage positive feedback by asking questions about the quality of your services and their own experience.

Publish quality content regularly

Quality content that engages and educates the target audiences contributes a great deal towards a positive online impression. Value-added, SEO-optimized content will help you boost your brand authority and help your customers quickly reach an informed business decision.

TSL Consulting Pvt Ltd is an integrated marketing company based in India. We offer customized outbound marketing, inbound marketing, digital marketing and data profiling services to a wide spectrum of small and mid-sized organizations.

Short form vs long form content: Which one should you choose?

Many times, more than the actual subject matter and frequency of publishing the content, the question of its longevity troubles a content marketer. You might have found the web articles divided between short form and long form content. 

While some say the former is better suited to the short attention span of today's readers, others say that long form content is more important for higher ranking and increased traffic.

However, these notions should not affect your decision of creating a long or short post. The longevity completely depends upon the topic you have selected and the message you want to convey. 

Rather than restricting your content to a certain length, focus on providing value to your users through the subject matter. When you do so, the length of the content hardly matters.

You can get in touch with a digital marketingcompany to help you create content that is not only engaging, but also conveys the business value of your solution to the right target audience.

Best practices for B2B digital marketing during Covid-19

As the pandemic has wrought a huge impact on the economic and social conditions of the entire world, B2B marketing companies have to alter their previous strategy accordingly.

Let us have a look at some of the best practices for B2B digital marketing in the Covid-19 world -

Focus on strengthening customer relationships

Now more than ever, it is time to show your customers that you care about them and are ready to help them maintain their business continuity.

Use data wisely

Marketing budget will be one of the topmost concerns during this time. Use data to determine the strategy that is best working out for you and adjust your budget accordingly.

Review your website

If you haven't done so already, it is high time to review your website and update your message to suit the current situation. Make sure that your site visitors understand what you plan to do to make their business process easier.

Benefits of Referral Marketing

Referral marketing essentially turns your customers into marketers for your brand. As it involves providing incentives and rewards to customers to encourage more referrals, marketers can tend to shy away from this tactic. 

However, the following benefits will convince you to seriously consider referral marketing in your digital marketing strategy -

Generates trust

Customers tend to trust their peer reviews and testimonials more than any advertisements. It has been shown that people are four times more likely to purchase something when a friend refers it to them.

Increases outreach

When you turn your customers into an advocate for your brand, you are naturally expanding your outreach to the customers' own networks, giving you an opportunity to tap into a completely new customer base.

Increases social engagement

As your customers start referring your products, they are more likely to keep returning to your website and social media accounts, thus generating more engagement and solidifying your online presence.

How to overcome banner blindness

Can you remember the last ad you saw on a web page, or any ad at all for that matter?

As consumers started getting bombarded with similar, intrusive and sometimes even boring ads, they started ignoring the areas where banner or display ads are typically present on a web page – leading to banner blindness, and a low CTR. Let us have a look at some ways we can avoid this problem -

•Design your ad such that it stands out from the web page and catches the eye of the site visitor

•Ask yourself if the ad is providing value to the user and whether it is relevant to the target audience

•Experiment with different ad formats and placements, as users know where ads can be found on a web page, and will actively ignore these areas

• Use rich media such as animation or videos to easily catch and retain user attention

A digital marketing company can help you create such attractive and immersive ads that will help you fight banner blindness and improve your click-through rates.

How much content does a B2B buyer consume before making a purchase decision

It has long been established that the greater part of the buyer's journey takes place online. Majority of buyers turn to Internet searches when they find themselves in the need of a product or service. Obviously, this process does not go on indefinitely. There has to be a certain limit to the amount of content consumed by the buyers, before they settle on a vendor.

A recent study from Forrester has shown that this limit is 13 content pieces for the average B2B buyer. These pieces are further broken down into 8 pieces from the vendor and the remaining 5 from third-party sources. The type of content covers a wide range from blog posts and whitepapers to videos and customer testimonials.

The study also revealed that the vendor website remains the topmost source of information for the buyers and is consulted throughout all the stages of buyer's journey. Along with internet search, social media and emails, peer reviews also play an important role in the purchase decision.

The results have once again highlighted the importance of quality content. With just around 8 content pieces to sway the buyer to your side, you need to make every one count.

Digital marketing tips for beginners

Stepping out in the already crowded and fiercely competitive world of digital marketing can prove to be daunting. 

Let us have a look at some simple tips to ease your journey -

Understand your marketing goals

Without a clear goal, your campaigns will not be effective. Before starting any campaign, make sure that you decide whether you want to generate leads, build brand awareness or simply increase audience engagement.

Optimize your website

Your website is one of the most important digital marketing channels, as well as the first impression of your brand for your audience. Start optimizing it early for SEO, content and user experience for best results.

Be active on social media

Social media platforms are the best way to connect with your audience and industry peers, and increase brand awareness when you are just starting out. Posting interactive and user-oriented content will help you drive more traffic to your website.

Start creating an email database

Email marketing is one of the most effective and cost-efficient digital markeitng channels. Writing short, personalized emails with compelling CTAs can greatly increase your traffic and conversion rates.

Why should you optimize for visual search?

Visual search is all the rage today, and the trend will only continue to rise. A recent study has shown that more than 60% of millennial's were comfortable with the inclusion of visual search into their digital shopping experiences.

The reason for this preference is simple. Not every person knows exactly what they are looking for, or can articulate the appropriate search query with ease. If they simply have the image of the product they are looking for, the results will show it along with similar products.

Thus, brands who are dealing in products will benefit from optimizing their digital marketing strategy for visual search in the long run. For this, the most important part is to make sure that you name your images precisely, with target keywords included in title and alt-tags.

5 black hat SEO techniques to avoid at all costs

Black hat SEO is a set of practices that go against Google guidelines. They might help you increase your ranking in a short time, but will prove harmful in the long run. Those who are new to SEO may have trouble recognizing black hat practices, and can inadvertently fall under Google's axe. 

Here are the most prominent black hat SEO techniques you should steer clear from -

Keyword stuffing

Repeating the same keyword over and over in the same sentence or paragraph, rather than strategically placing it across your content.

Cloaking

Creating two separate versions of a web page, one for human visitors and one for search engine bots.

Duplicate content

Copying content from another website and posting it as it is (or just paraphrasing it a little) on your page.

Clickbait

Using clickbait titles to generate curiosity among users and directing them to an irrelevant page.

Link buying or link farming

Paying another website for obtaining backlinks, or using invisible text or links to hide it from human visitors, but visible to search engine bots.

How to deal with duplicate content issues

Duplicate content can seriously harm your SEO, and can even cause your website to be penalized by Google. Even if you remove the possibility of duplicacy through manual actions, there are certain technical issues that can lead to duplicate content.

These technical causes involve URL issues (www, http, https etc are considered different even if they are point towards the same page), different session Ids stored in the same URL, etc.

Here is how you can avoid duplicate content through such issues -

301 redirect

Informs search engine which URL is the original one, and links duplicate versions to it.

Domain

Set a preferred domain to avoid URL issues.

Rel=canonical

Informs the search engine that the URL in question is the copy of original

Benefits of affiliate marketing for B2B

Word of mouth has always been one of the most powerful influencers for a purchase decision. B2B marketers can further leverage this influence with affiliate marketing. In this approach, another business or person will place an ad, or promote your product on their website, blogs or social media. 

Whenever their link sends over a revenue generating lead to your business, you will give them a commission based upon the leads, traffic and sales. Thus, both you and the affiliate will benefit from the arrangement.

                                          

Not only will affiliate marketing increase your lead flow and traffic, but also let you tap into a new customer base if you have entered into an arrangement with another business. Provided you nurture and engage them consistently, they can turn into regular customers for your brand as well.

Embracing empathy marketing in B2B

The B2C space has excelled in the area of evoking empathy in their target audience, the B2B market has been lagging behind. Considered to be a logical and a more professional process, empathy has little space in the B2B buyer journey. However, studies have shown that it plays an important role in influencing the buyers' purchase decision.

Customers are constantly bombarded by marketing content, so much so that it can become difficult to even distinguish content from each brand. In such a scenario, they will search for a brand that they can personally connect to. By adopting an empathetic approach, you are essentially putting yourself in the shoes of your customers and understanding business problems from their point of view. Doing so will enable you design a strategy that appeals to their emotions and lets them see a personal value in your solution.

For truly effective empathy marketing, engage in open-ended conversations with your target personas and provide content based on their problems, rather than pushing them towards content which you think they should read.

3 Effective Ways to Increase Your SEO Traffic in 30 Days

SEO is a game of patience. It takes anywhere between three to six months to truly see yourself ranking higher for relevant search results. Until you achieve your final goal, following the given practices will help increase your organic SEO traffic within a month's time -

Publish content regularly

Quality content, whether it is in the form of blog posts, infographics, ebooks or videos is one of the best ways to draw traffic. Once you have published it, make sure that you actively promote it on all the social media channels relevant to your audience.

If your content strikes the right chord with your audience, they will happily share it with their own network and drive more traffic towards you.

Even guest blogging on high-authority websites in your niche will greatly help increase brand awareness and increase traffic through quality backlinks.

When you are creating content, prefer targeting long-tail keywords as they are less competitive to rank for.

Practice email marketing

Targeted and personalized emails are a great way to drive traffic towards both your website and social media channels. Keep them engaged through the kind of content they are interested in. For example, some subscribers will prefer reading blogs, some will prefer downloadable content, while others will be interested in any new offers or deals from your side.

Improve the user experience of your website

User experience is one of the key factors of good SEO. Optimize the loading speed of your web pages, find and fix any broken links and make sure that your visitors can easily find the information they need.

TSL Consulting Pvt Ltd is an integrated marketing company based in India. We offer customized outbound marketing, inbound marketing, digital marketing and data profiling services to a wide spectrum of small and mid-sized organizations.

Why is data profiling so important in B2B?

The success of any digital marketing campaign largely depends upon the quality of data you have collected. Inaccurate or obsolete data can seriously hamper your lead generation and nurturing efforts.

Suppose you are using a 2 year old database. You call a principal prospect, only to find out that the person is no longer associated with the same job title, or even the company! Or, the email address you had been using has been changed, and your emails aren't even reaching the right person!

It is also possible that you have multiple entries for the same person in your database. As a result, if you end up sending the same message multiple times to the prospect, you can land up in their spam list.

Thus, the necessity of maintaining an updated and error-free database cannot be overlooked. Here is where the systematic process of data profiling can help you. It helps you remove any inaccurate or outdated data, and get rid of duplicate entries. Data profiling also allows you to segment your data into various categories like geographical location, job role, company size, etc., for more accurate prospect targeting.

What is the need of marketing automation?

To truly succeed at digital marketing in the present day, you need to consistently nurture your prospects and customers with a highly personalized approach. However, when you have a large number of leads pouring in, and have existing customers waiting in the wings, paying equal attention to everyone will no doubt put a lot of pressure on your sales and marketing teams.

Thus, marketing automation tools can help you optimize the time and efforts of your team by automating tasks that are periodically repeated, such as email marketing, and publishing social media posts. Not only this, but these tools can also provide useful insights and quantifiable metrics that will help you improve your marketing campaigns and customer service.

Plus, they can reduce the possibility of human error. For instance, you might be sending messages to an invalid email id. Email automation tools automatically validates the email ids in your subscriber list and removes the invalid ones, so that your list remains clean and updated.

Thus, with the reduction of manual efforts and the advantage of useful insights, marketing automation tools can greatly help you reduce sales cycle times and increase ROI.

7 SEO Tricks to Improve Your Google Ranking

No matter how much efforts you put into the design, user experience and content of your website, they would not yield results unless you are showing up higher in Google search results.

                       

Let us have a look at some tried and tested SEO tricks to help you increase your ranking -

Introduce you main keyword as early as possible in the content

Not only the number of times you use a keyword, but its position also makes a difference when it comes to ranking. Google gives priority to relevant keywords that can be seen at the top of the results. However, take care that you weave the keyword naturally through the content.

Increase the loading speed of your website

Slow loading pages put off website visitors and increase your bounce rate. Moreover, page speed is an important Google ranking factor. Removing any unnecessary design elements, enabling browser caching and reducing the number of unused or unnecessary plugins are some quick ways of increasing your loading speed.

Optimize your website for mobile experience

Google has long since started prioritizing mobile versions of websites over the desktop ones. Proving a great mobile experience will definitely help you boost your position in related searches.

Search for and fix any broken links

A sufficient number of quality backlinks is great for SEO, but some of these links might be broken and escaped your notice. Multiple 404 errors greatly harm both user experience and website ranking.

Optimize for local SEO

People are increasingly using their smartphones to search for businesses near their location. Thus, optimizing for local SEO, coupled with customer reviews and testimonials will greatly increase your chances of ranking high in local searches.

TSL Consulting Pvt Ltd is an integrated marketing company based in India. We offer customized outbound marketing, inbound marketing, digital marketing and data profiling services to a wide spectrum of small and mid-sized organizations.

What to Do if Your Social Media Efforts are not Paying Off?

You might have observed that while one social media platform is driving expected results, you are not getting enough engagement on another platform.

There can be a number of reasons for this disparity in social media marketing. Before taking measures to rectify the situation, it is necessary that you find out the cause behind it.

To start with, understand that the problem might not lie in your campaign execution or the content you are posting, but simply the platform itself. Not every social media platform is right for your business.

Check whether or not your target audience is using the platform you have chosen. If not, all your time and efforts will go in vain. Even if you are targeting the right audience, you need to pay attention to the demographics. If the platform is dominated by the older generation, they will prefer long form content like articles, blogs and guides. On the other hand, if majority of them come from the millennial and Gen Z club, you will have to reel them in with short, engaging and most importantly, visual content like videos and infographics.

Of course, the most major cause of concern is you are treating all the social media platforms in the same way. Duplicating your posts on every platform will not work for all of them. Each platform has its own unique characteristics, and you need to adhere to them if you want the expected results.

For example, Instagram is a visual platform ruled by short videos and high-quality images. Only sharing your blog links will not take you very far here. On the other hand, posting product demos, showing off your company culture and sharing user-generated content will help you increase engagement rates.

Thus, it is the combination of the right target audience and playing by a particular platform's rules, along with providing value with your content, that will decide how you will fare on it. If you are having problems with a particular platform, analyze your audience data and experiment with different kinds of posts to see whether it can work out for you in the long run.

TSL Consulting Pvt Ltd is an integrated marketing company based in India. We offer customized outbound marketing, inbound marketing, digital marketing and data profiling services to a wide spectrum of small and mid-sized organizations.