Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising can be a highly successful and cost-effective way to attract qualified leads and guide them through the buyer's journey.

According to SearchEngineLand.com, the top 3 PPC ad spots receive more than 40% of clicks on the page which obviously translates to a massive advantage as well as a prime opportunity for businesses facing heavy competition to rank high for popular keyword search terms.

While there are many strategies and tools that support marketing success, one of the most important is buyer personas. After all, what's the point in throwing a bunch of people and money at a marketing project if you haven't even optimized who it's going to target?

The phrase “customer journey” has a nice, pleasant sound to it – it’s almost fairy-tale like. For example, we can imagine Little Red Riding Hood trotting through the woods on a happy journey to visit her grandmother. 

It’s almost impossible to imagine, but there was a time not too long ago when email marketing was viewed within the conventional marketing world as a fad that would evaporate from the landscape since people would grow weary of reading and clicking. 

While sales professionals in various industries, sectors and marketplaces have different approaches and strategies, there is one unifying and universal theme that ties all of them together, whether they sell business moving solutions, VoIP phone systems, ultra high pressure homogenizers, and the list goes on: THEY LOVE TOOLS!

Your mission - should you choose to accept it - is to outperfom your competitors.

When Alec Baldwin commanded the staggered real estate sales team at Glengarry Glen Ross to ALWAYS BE CLOSING, the last thing on his mind was posts and tweets – how could they know how much the sales process would transform in a film that came out 12 years before Facebook and 14 years before Twitter.

A buyer persona is a fictional representation of an ideal customer type or group that captures key aspects such as: demographics, motivations, pain points, behavior patterns, alternatives, obstacles and goals. It’s usually necessary (and wise) for a business to develop more than one buyer persona, even if it only has a single product or offering.

Let’s start with this: inbound marketing really works.