Just when you thought it was safe to close the door on your inbound and online marketing vocabulary-building efforts, there’s one more to add to the list — and in terms of bottom-line profitability, it’s among the most critical entries: context marketing.

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!”

As every sales rep knows, there is a categorical — actually, make that galactic — difference between non-nurtured leads and nurtured leads.

About BEE International & Their Challenges

Just one hour south of Hubspot, in South Easton, MA, lives BEE International, a worldwide supplier of high pressure homogenizers (specialized lab equipment for particle size reduction and cell lysis). When we first met BEE International in May 2015, they had been using the Hubspot platform for several years, but hadn’t seen much growth after implementation even though they had some inbound marketing best practices in place. Here are the specific challenges that BEE faced:

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.  

A long, long time ago, the digital property that would come to be known throughout the online marketing world as a B2B landing page came into being. And it was good. Well…kind of.

When it comes to measuring performance, the inbound marketing landscape is dominated by quantitative metrics such as website traffic (organic, affiliate, PPC, etc.), time on site, conversion rate for various digital properties and landing pages, lead generation, and the list goes on. Obviously, all of these metrics are vital for managing and optimizing various inbound marketing programs, campaigns, strategies and tactics. However, they do not tell the full story.

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?”

It’s a familiar scenario: a business invests significantly in its social media profile — which may include hiring a full-time social media maestro/maven and buying some advanced (and expensive) software — and instead of being overrun by enthusiastic customers who eagerly anticipate their next post, tweet, article, infographic or video, all they hear are virtual crickets. What’s the deal?

Many businesses want to change domain names, perhaps because a coveted domain is finally available, they want to consolidate multiple domains into a single digital property, or their current domain name is no longer (and may have never really been) aligned with your brand or offering.