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The Small Business Summary from INBOUND 2018
Wow, what a whirlwind start to this month! Our social media expert, Christina, and I just got back from HubSpot’s INBOUND 2018 and our brains are packed with incredible info that we can’t wait to share with you. There are a whole slew of new marketing tools, effective strategies and exciting new trends that are reshaping the marketing landscape for small businesses. We’re excited to be at the forefront of this change by helping to educate entrepreneurs about what’s available and implementing new initiatives based on these best practices for our clients.
Lifelong learning is one of our core values, and part of our mission to best serve our audience and clients is to share those ‘learnings’ with you! Not only do we LOVE this stuff, it frees you up from having to spend your time, dollars and resources to stay on top of the trillions of shifting elements that make up digital marketing today.
So let’s get down to it!
We’ve highlighted our key takeaways below from INBOUND for entrepreneurs and small businesses, and broken them into actionable, bitesize pieces. We’ve focused each section on your marketing goals – so jump to your top priority and skip the rest if you prefer!
Our goal is for you to read this article and identify at least ONE simple step you could take this week to make significant shifts in your business!
On to the takeaways…
SEM Rush delivered a great presentation on how to dominate search. In order for you to improve your search rankings for targeted terms, you must ensure two things –
For the backend optimization, ask yourself:
>> To put load time into perspective – every 0.1 seconds increased load time on Amazon decreased sales by 1% – resulting in $1.3 BILLION in lost revenue. <<
Pro Tip: Consider using Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) to speed things up by 85% on average. There’s even a free WordPress plugin you can use to make it simple! AMP pages have a little lightning rod next to the result like the image below.
For the front-end visitor experience, ask yourself:
Rand Fishkin created Moz in 2007 and recently went on to found SparkToro. Here is a snapshot view of four of the key lessons he’s learned that I felt could help you in your entrepreneurial journey.
Lesson One: When it comes to selling a product, service or idea…emotion is greater than benefits is greater than features. In every area possible, try to lead with emotion to engage your audience and drive them to take action – starting with the most emotionally resonant problem that you solve.
Content evaluation question: Is the story you’re creating/telling triggering your own emotions? If not, fix it.
Lesson Two: Focus on ONE thing that you do incredibly well. A simpler product is easier to bring to market, and drives a deeper engagement with a more loyal segment of your audience.
Lesson Three: A smaller, more engaged audience that truly cares about your mission, vision and solution is MUCH better than a large, disconnected audience.
Lesson Four: Long hours are NOT better than fewer, high quality hours. Establish your focus and limit your time in order to get more done. You become less productive the more hours you work (after 35 hours) – yikes! Lots of research is available to back this up. So take a break – or a nap – now!
Great presentation by Bradley Friedman from Lucky Orange. Key points are very briefly summarized below. Any questions about these tactics, shoot us an email!
Whether it’s your product pages or blog content, in order for your content to rank in this day and age, you need high quality inbound links. HubSpot Senior Content Strategist, Irina Nica, shared these four techniques (among others) to help you do this.
Ryan Deiss with DigitalMarketer.com flipped one of our common beliefs as entrepreneurs on it’s head: not everything has to be about scalability. What if instead we focused on making human face-to-face sales more efficient?
The best way to do this? Through chat. People want help when they want it. Which means, you need to have that option available, via:
You get the idea. Use Facebook chat as a powerful option for engaging with prospects. Use m.me/yourcompanyusername (i.e. m.me/radiantmarketing) to take someone directly to a conversation with you.
Carmen Simon successfully implemented her recommended strategies for engagement by making this one of the most interesting and engaging presentations of the week.
As Carmen discussed in her presentation, our brains haven’t changed in thousands of years – so when people say our ‘attention span’ has decreased that’s actually not accurate. Rather, our ‘threshold for stimulation’ has changed. What does this mean for marketers? It means your readers want variety! While short shots are typically increasing viewer engagement and response, it’s not always the case.
A few things to keep in mind as you dive into creating your next blog post, social gif or video –
This was such a great presentation, packed with valuable insights (and case studies to back the tactics) from Ben Kaplan with PR Hacker. First, here are the three principles to apply to your content ideation to build the possibility of your content going viral:
And, five strategies to build the online conversation fast –
Gail Axelrod, Director of Marketing for OpenView, confirms the same strategy still holds true:
You must understand your audience in order to create powerful, engaging content that drives people to take action.
And of course, this update wouldn’t be complete if I didn’t share the keynote presentation from Scott Harrison, Founder charity:water, my all-time favorite charity because of how transparent, communicative and impactful they are.
We’d love to hear from you! Share what your ONE step will be after reading this article! Email the RAD team at glowing@radiantmarketingaz.com.