Sales Renewal’s insight:

Sales Renewal recently relaunched its website, complete with a “customer journey” home page.
At first glance, our two service options are similar in many ways, so conveying the differences in an easy-to-understand manner was an important part of our redesign.
By using the storyboarding technique described in this article, we were able to set up a home page walks visitors through the variables that help determine which service is best for them, encouraging them to explore more in depth at different points along the “journey” and helping them in their decision-making process.

Sales Renewal’s insight:

From spreadsheets to contact databases to CRMs – the sophistication of lead management tools has improved by leaps and bounds in the last decade. And now we’re seeing an emergence of a new category of lead management: sales acceleration tools. (See Entrepreneur‘s The New Wave of Sales Acceleration Technology.)
This software bridges the gap between CRM and marketing automation and can be used for sales people with varying levels of experience, as it typically feeds information about the contact to allow for a more personalized interaction. It goes beyond email opens and clicks and provides insights into what messages are working for which prospects.
According to the article, $1.2 billion has already been invested in this category and billions more are expected to flood in over the next few years.

Sales Renewal’s insight:

Does “republishing” an older blog post somehow feel like cheating?

When I coach clients about republishing their evergreen blog content, I find they are quite often hesitant to push the button. After all, shouldn’t a blogger be able to turn out fresh, interesting content every week?

This article from uberflip provides some good reasons for reviving your older content as a regular part of your content marketing strategy:

• Having fresh, up-to-date content helps you demonstrate your brand’s reliability.
• Keeping popular posts up to date helps you continue to build on their good ranking to bring visitors to your site.
• Updating gives you the opportunity to improve poorer-quality posts, which will help you address Google’s Panda update targeting low-quality content.
• Updating, like curating, is a lot easier than writing a brand-new post. You can give yourself a break once in a while!
• Updating is an opportunity to give the old content a new SEO pass. You probably know more about optimization and good-performing keywords now than you did when you wrote the post.

Sales Renewal’s insight:

One of the clearest explanations of “cookies” that we’ve read, from where they got their roots, to how marketers figured out how to use them, to their role in providing accurate website visitor counts a difficult task.

Sales Renewal’s insight:

Whether you have separate teams for search, social and content, individual employees who handle the different areas, or you’re doing all the tasks yourself, the sooner you can coordinate the activities the sooner you can maximize your efforts, those of your staff, or your teams.

Sales Renewal’s insight:

Have you tried G+ Collections yet? If not, it’s a feature that allows you to group your updates on Google+ by topic that we think is a really great idea.

Sales Renewal’s insight:

As Marketing Profs notes in this article about content curation, and Sales Renewal agrees, creating fresh, engaging original content on a consistent basis is a tall order for most smaller businesses. It takes an understanding of what is “engaging” to your readers, plus time and talent to plan, write and distribute.
We believe smaller businesses can differentiate themselves in the realm of content marketing by using a combination of original content and “curated content” – seeking out and sharing content that others have created (giving them credit, of course).
If you are considering or have ventured into the realm of curated content, this article offers some good guidance:

• Select quality content – content should come from trustworthy sources, be relevant to your readers, can take multiple forms (video, articles, Infographics)
• Add value – don’t just re-post, but provide your insights or commentary
• Distribute the content – as you do with your original content, use your digital channels (newsletters, social media, website) to share the content

Sales Renewal’s insight:

On April 21, Google released an algorithm update which brought potential changes to how sites rank based on mobile-friendliness. Fearing what some called “Mobilegeddon, ” companies scrambled to make their sites comply with the changes to prevent ranking drops following the implementation of the update. The thinking behind this was that if a site was not optimized for mobile, then the site would no longer show up in search results. Luckily, the changes came and rankings seem to have not been altered on a large scale. Early reports indicate that 45% of businesses did see ranking changes following Google’s update, but perhaps not in the disastrous scale anticipated. Some businesses have claimed to notice their sites drop a few spots in ranking, while others have claimed lower traffic.
Though the changes are not as crippling as expected, some have seen a decrease in rank even after optimizing for mobile. According to Ben Norman, CEO of Koozai, the hype surrounding the update caused businesses to miss the larger picture. He says that “exaggerating the impact meant that businesses didn’t anticipate that even small changes in their ranking can have a big impact on their organic mobile search results, ” and now, some have seen negative impacts even after optimizing. Norman claims that while optimizing for mobile, competitors may have increased rank simply because they are better optimized for some of the other 200+ Google ranking factors that exist today. Increasing rank may take reevaluating some of these other factors, rather than focusing on mobile optimization.
Overall, the changes do not appear to be widespread, or nearly as destructive as some expected, but small ranking drops have occurred. You can read this article in it’s entirety here.
Has your site seen any ranking changes since the algorithm update went into effect? Let us know.

Sales Renewal’s insight:

Examples of successful B2C digital marketing campaigns are a dime a dozen. But it can be a harder case to prove effectiveness in B2B marketing. This article highlights successes in a wide range of industries – shipping to manufacturing to content marketing itself. Encouraging examples, for sure!