J&M Group WordPress Blog

Sweet Plan for Inbound Marketing

marciacatlin · January 11, 2016 ·

While the shimmer of the latest gizmo that will catapult your website to the #1 ranking on Google is ever sensuous and tingly, the basics of marketing remain the same no matter the media.
They are: a quality product that meets a need and solves a problem that can be demonstrated or proven by third party verification in the marketplace. Meanwhile, here’s what you can do to get your marketing show on the road.
1. What are you trying to do?
Begin with your objectives in mind. Are you trying to raise awareness? Are you trying to launch a new product ? Are you trying to drive traffic to your website?
2. Focus on one specific target market.
Picking the right target market simplifies your marketing efforts.
3. Choose your tactics.
Twitter, Facebook , LinkedIn and YouTube are all basically free tools. You need to go where your consumer lives online. If your customers, prospects, and influencers are there, you should be there: listening, engaging, sharing, and helping them.
4. Simplify your message
Across all of your marketing platforms and based on your specific target audience , craft messages that are simple, compelling and focused on the problem you solve for your ideal client. Figure out what your ideal client wants and focus on the most important point that you want to communicate. Remember that your potential customer only cares about what you can do for them.
5. Create or gather content .
You need to have a blog and you must keep adding new, fresh content regularly. Blogs convert readers into buyers. According to Hubspot’s State of Inbound Marketing, almost 80% of marketers with a company blog have acquired new customers.
Here are some smart ways to go about it:

Whatever you’re doing, write about it. Report on your progress.
Come up with a daily question you’d want someone to ask and respond to it in a blog post or video.
Place your product or service in front of people willing to blog, make videos, and tell stories about it.
Conduct polls or ask questions about a related topic and turn these results into future posts as well as “news” you can release to both bloggers and press.

6. Decide when, what and where to outsource.
What can only you do best, and what is beyond your skill level and time constraints, but important enough to pay someone else to do?
Keep your marketing simple. Make your value clear, your purchase process simple and customer service awesome. Focus on creating websites and marketing materials with a clean design and a clear message to attract more people to your business.
– By Marcia Coffey
Find Marcia on Google+
Call Marcia, Genesis WordPress Web Designer, at 561.906.3436.
Follow @jmgroupdesign

New SMB Target Marketing Tool is a Feathered Friend

marciacatlin · January 11, 2016 ·

For the first time the world of target marketing is incredibly precise for the little guy. And budget friendly, too.
You will like this news. Keep reading.
A little history will shed light on the magnitude of this great discovery.
The first instance of target marketing has been traced to the General Motors Corporation in 1920, when they realized that Ford owners didn’t buy a second Ford. GMC started sending surveys to current Ford owners, asking them for feedback on GMC products. They never used the feedback, but found people were more likely to buy a GMC as their next car!
In the 1970’s, sales shifted from door-to-door to telemarketing . Direct mail marketing remained a constant annoyance, with only 2% of recipients expected to respond.
The use of census data, sold by the US government in the 1970s allowed marketers to add demographic data. A number of companies started to sell updated lists by taking the census data and using phone books and voter registration to add names back in. It would take 5 years to turn out a complete database.
In the 1980’s companies began collecting, and selling, psychographic data – what do people think, believe and how do they live. Direct mail in the 1990’s moved to a 10:1 ratio – $10 yield for every $1 spent.
Another Feather In Its Cap
This century’s ultra precise tool that does not require any of the above, i.e. hiring a mailing list company or a direct mail company or anybody for that matter is:
Twitter – the free, targeted treasure trove of all of your potential leads, customers and improved bottom line.
So here’s how to use Twitter as your own lead generation tool.
Step 1. Define Your Target Audience
You need to determine who your customers are by creating what’s called a buyer persona. To summarize, a buyer persona includes the following details as a starting point:
Are they male or female?
How old are they?
What is their level of education?
What is their occupation?
Are they married and do they have children?
What social media platforms do they prefer?
What are their life aspirations?
What are they afraid of?
How do they spend their leisure time?
What is their preferred method of communication?
Step 2. Search Your Niche
Then use Twitter’s Advanced Search tool where you can narrow your search and hone in on the people who are looking for your product, talking about a competitor or trying to get your attention?
Step 3. Follow people who are following others in your niche
This is the fastest way to grow your following with people who care about what you’re doing. In other words, you are selectively “lifting” your followers’ followers! It works.
Step 4. Post consistently
It’s called content marketing and you need to do this daily. Original blog posts, third party links and articles, with images that make you stand out .
“Tweets with images receive 18% more clicks, 89% more favorites and 150% more retweets.” – Hubspot
RESOURCES

Great article: “How To Draw Attention With Images”
A checklist of essential elements to make your life simple: “11 Essential Ingredients Every Post Needs” from Copyblogger
Post content with Buffer to share on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and more.

Step 5. Use 1-2 hashtags for each tweet
They are more effective than you thought. Using hashtags exposes you to an entirely new group of people that don’t follow you, but are interested in what you’re saying. Find, analyze and amplify the best hashtags with Hashtagify. Great and surprising tool!
Step 6. Spiff up your Twitter Bio
Your Twitter bio is a powerful representation of you and your company, and it should be handled with care.
Be razor sharp when you’re communicating your value proposition on your company’s Twitter bio. Your bio will get lots of attention and you want it to convert with your followers, i.e. get them to your website.
Don’t have the time to run your own Twitter lead generation campaign? Hire me!
– By Marcia Coffey
Find Marcia on Google+
Call Marcia at 561.906.3436

The Salesman & Inbound Marketing

marciacatlin · January 11, 2016 ·

death-of-a-salesman and inbound marketing
In preparation for my Hubspot Inbound Marketing Certification, I discovered an obvious but mostly forgotten fact of the new digital marketing age in which we live.
This is NOT good news for those of you who prefer the hard sell and printed media.
By the time your potential customer arrives at your showroom, enters your store or rummages through your many, exciting wares, 60% of the selling process has already been done. But not by YOU!
Likewise NOT by ads in newspapers or on TV, not by outdoor advertising, direct mail flyers, brochures, postcards, stickers or even car wraps!
The message or CONTENT is still critical. But the Messenger has changed platforms. It is now the Internet.
And, it is the Web in all of its colorful clothing, constantly changing locations, on all of its devices … iPhones, iPads, Androids, tablets, desktops, laptops … on different size monitors and used for different purposes.
Now the Messenger is under your complete control as buyer or consumer. You make the decisions, not the salesman.
“The Message” or Content now is multi-tasking. It can be a website, a blog post, a Facebook page, a newsletter, a tweet, a podcast, a YouTube video, a slideshow, a Pinterest page, an e-book , a Google hangout, and so it goes. Digital content has no size or time boundaries, unlike a 2 column newspaper ad.
Two More Advantages of Inbound Marketing:

Much cheaper – by a factor of 61% – to get leads on the net than to purchase sales leads by zipcode.
You can actually target cost-effectively and measure your audience, then edit/revise your content as needed.

– By Marcia Coffey
Find Marcia on Google+
Call Marcia, Genesis WordPress Web Designer, at 561.906.3436.
Follow @jmgroupdesign

Train, Learn & Sell with This Incredible Genesis Theme

marciacatlin · January 11, 2016 ·

Interested in setting up online courses? Are you a school or in need of a learning management system?
The Caroline Theme is a just released WordPress university theme that makes a perfect marketing solution for academic websites for universities, colleges, and k-12 schools. It is also ideal for non-profits in need of robust learning platforms.
The website template comes with great options for alumni/member profiles, forums, an online store, a learning management system for selling online courses, an event calendar, and options for building an email list.
Caroline is integrated with the LearnDash training system. Robust learning platforms and professional advice don’t have to be expensive. LearnDash is priced right for the price conscientious.
The theme also includes the WooCommerce eCommerce plugin, bbPress for forums, and the BuddyPress social network plugin. It also comes pre-styled for The Events Calendar, Gravity Forms, and Soliloquy.
The Caroline template is a mobile responsive child theme that overlays on the Genesis Framework. The Genesis Framework is required, but not included in the purchase price of this theme. It must be purchased separately if a license is not already owned.
Caroline can really be used for any website that would include forums, a social network, a learning management system, or an eCommerce storefront!
– By Marcia Coffey
Find Marcia on Google+
Call Marcia at 561.906.3436

Simple Trick for Click-Throughs: The Title Tag

marciacatlin · January 10, 2016 ·

computer-SEO

“Meta tags are a great way for webmasters to provide search engines with information about their sites. They can be used to provide information to all sorts of clients, and each system processes only the meta tags they understand and ignores the rest. They are added to the <head> section of your HTML page. “ – GOOGLE

SEO jargon and search terminology can be very overwhelming, particularly when you start talking to an “expert” in the field! So it’s important that business owners know the basics of on-page SEO so they can do some of it themselves.
Start with the single most important on-page SEO element: the <title> tag.
The <title> tag defines the title of the document and is required in all HTML/XHTML documents. SEOmoz, the largest SEO community in the world, believes that it is the single most important on-page SEO element (behind overall content). The title tag appears on the results pages just above the URL and also appears at the top of a browser.
Title Description for On-Page SEO Titles give users a quick insight into the content of the web page and how it might be relevant to their query. It is often the primary piece of information with the meta description that is used by potential visitors to decide which search result to click on, so it’s important to use high-quality and meaningful titles when you optimise your web pages.
Title tags generally should be less than 70 characters long so the whole tag fits on results pages when it is displayed and people can read it at a quick glance.
Every title tag on your website should be unique with distinct, descriptive titles for every page on your site.
Use keywords in title tags and place important keywords close to the front of the title tag. Search Engines will “bold” (or highlight) those terms in the search results when a user has performed a query with those terms.
Avoid keyword spamming. There is no reason to have the same words or phrases appear multiple times.
Google recommends titles include your brand so include your site name at the beginning or end of each page title, separated from the rest of the title with a delimiter such as a hyphen, colon, or pipe.
What is a meta description tag?
Title tags and meta descriptions are important elements of your website’s content. Like the title tag, meta description tags should include keywords relevant to the content of the web page they describe. This helps Search Engines understand what the page is about and index your web pages accordingly for relevant keywords or keyword phrases.
Matt Cutts, Google’s head of Webspam announced in 2009 that neither meta descriptions nor meta keywords factor into Google’s ranking algorithms for web search. However, he stresses that it is still important to write a meta description as Google will sometimes use the summary in search results snippets (located below the URL) if the Search Engine believes it is an accurate synopsis of the page.
– By Marcia Coffey
Find Marcia on Google+
Call Marcia at 561.906.3436