Sales Renewal’s insight:

A typical, simplified view of the customer journey (buyer’s funnel” shows three stages – Awareness (of a need or an issue that needs solving); Consideration (of the alternatives); and Purchase (of the best solution for the need).
But rarely is the customer journey a straight path from Awareness to Purchase, as so aptly demonstrated in this graphic from Forrester Research via Percolate.com. There are twists and turns throughout the journey which present both obstacles – and opportunities.
Understanding this non-linear path to purchasing further reinforces the importance of key concepts and creating relevant content for different stages of the customer journey.

Sales Renewal’s insight:

Thanks to analytics, trackable phone numbers, trackable emails and marketing automation software you can now know which half of your marketing budget is working and which half is not … and adjust your marketing activities and budget accordingly. The author provides a few interesting examples of the old and new ways of marketing.

Sales Renewal’s insight:

As Neil Patel explains, backlinks are still important for SEO. And if you’re investing in creating content for your website, you might as well consider focusing on creating content that can help you generate links.
To summarize, here are the 5 types of content that are valuable for attracting backlinks:

1. List Posts
2. How To Guides
3. Infographics
4. Take the Advice of Influencers
5. Provide Something of Value for Your Community

What do you think? Have you tried any of these approaches? Any results? The list is organizes from easiest to most time and labor intensive, so if you’re looking for somewhere to start, I’d say begin with a list post and take it from there.

Sales Renewal’s insight:

Many new marketers make mistakes with social media. Some try to take on too much too soon, while others do not promote adequate content. This infographic from Digital Marketing Philippines shares the top 8 social media marketing mistakes and how to avoid them. Some takeaways from this infographic include:

• Not having a social media marketing strategy – Failing to have a strategy can mean posting blindly, which in turn will fail to engage your audience. Having distinct goals and using a social media calendar can help you become more organized and increase your success.
• Creating too many social accounts too soon – You should focus on only a couple of social media platforms at first, then grow when you have successfully engaged your followers. This can prevent you from abandoning your social media accounts altogether.
• Using irrelevant hashtags – Using hashtags is important for increasing visibility, but overuse can be displeasing to your followers. Try to limit hashtags by using sensible ones that are directly related to your post.
• Forgetting to proofread your posts – This is a big one. Nothing looks more unprofessional than typos due to a lack of proofreading. Take a moment to read over your posts before posting. This way you will gain the respect of your followers.

It is easy to make mistakes, especially when you are just starting out. But following these suggestions can help you to reduce your risk of social media meltdown and improve your online presence.

Sales Renewal’s insight:

We agree, this is the best way to think of your marketing budget if you’re a small business:
“Allocating a specified percentage of sales revenue is one of the most popular methods for developing a marketing budget. The average allocation usually ranges between 9-12% of the annual budget, while the smallest businesses may go as low as 2%. … The main advantage to using a percentage of sales is that the marketing budget will increase, or decrease, with the sales revenue of the company. The marketing budget will never spin out of control and deplete sales revenue.”

Sales Renewal’s insight:

Some good, concrete tips that you can use to improve your email click through rates.

Sales Renewal’s insight:

While we disagree with Ms. Patterson that a website is a shiny marketing object, we couldn’t agree with her more that too many small businesses get hoodwinked by the marketing fad du jour.
A consideration and analysis of your business’s strengths and weaknesses and its competitive position and financial resources should determine your marketing game plan, not a blog post you read, trending marketing topics on Twitter or the advice a random cocktail party guest assures you is just what your business needs (plastics anyone?).
The rest of the article makes that point as Ms Patterson discusses why she was successful without a site. What’s left unsaid, and we’re curious about, is how well her new website fit into her marketing plan and how successful it was a driving additional business for her.

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.