Let’s start this off with some (blatantly obvious) full disclosure: we’re a leading agile inbound marketing agency, and so the question “should you outsource your inbound marketing” may seem a little self-serving. Or maybe a lot.

There’s probably no better example of the difference in perception between businesses and website visitors than contact forms.

By now, most people have come across “Smart Goals,” which is a mnemonic acronym (say that three times fast!) for objectives that are:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Relevant
• Time-bound 

And it’s not just that the building blocks of smart goals are easy to remember (or that it’s likely to come up at least once if you’re playing corporate buzzword bingo). Smart goals make sense and actually work.

Are you facing the challenging — and perhaps daunting — task of launching (or re-launching) a new website for your business? Don’t sweat it. We have you covered. Here are the three most important things you need to know if your web design knowledge is limited or non-existent:

Let’s start with this: persona-based marketing is a subset of inbound marketing that is creative, fun, and the kind of thing that people look forward to developing at work vs. dread dealing with. Just like kids celebrate when the teacher rolls in the TV and says, "Who’s up for some Star Wars?”, grown-ups get all happy inside when their boss says, "Let’s do some brainstorming about persona-based marketing!”

The best thing about the digital marketing vs. interrupt marketing is that digital marketing is a data-driven approach, rather than one largely driven by guess-timates and gut feels. However, this can also be the worst thing. Why? Because many businesses aren’t getting enough data, or they’re just tracking the strong outcomes.  

One of the most common — and also among the most important — questions that prospective customers ask us is: “How do we get more traffic to our website?” Now, we know that we’d get kicked out of finishing school for answering a question with a question. But nevertheless, our response to this is: “What is your blogging strategy?”

While some lead nurturing configurations — such as those in B2B contexts — are as complex and intricate as air traffic control tower flight paths, essentially lead nurturing is the process of identifying, qualifying and then ushering prospects forward on the buyer’s journey towards a purchase. There’s nothing mysterious or controversial about this, and the costly mistake that many businesses are making here isn’t about concepts. Rather, it’s about prospects.

The statistics are in, and they confirm that we’ve moved past the Information Age, and entered the glorious Age of Content: 

In the old days when servers needed an entire climate-controlled room and people younger than 70 knew what the “Yellow Pages” were, marketing was a very lopsided contest between the haves and the have-nots.