Google’s made thousands of changes to its algorithm over the years, making it difficult for marketers to keep up with exactly how to optimize their content for search in this day and age. Old tried-and-true SEO tactics suddenly don’t work anymore and there are tons of new ranking factors we need to consider.
What’s a marketer to do?
If you’re a sports fan (well, more like a sports geek), you know about a trend toward advanced analytics (the book Moneyball presents this concept about baseball). Sports founders set a few statistics as the end-all, be-all numbers for the games they created over a hundred years ago—but, for example, do we actually know if batting average is the best measurement of a hitter?
Or, if a basketball team scores the most points per game on average, does it mean they have the best offense? Sometimes we try to measure success in a certain way simply because that’s how we’ve always done it.
This concept absolutely applies to inbound marketing. You see a lot of inbound and content marketing case studies that measure growth through visits by month. But do we actually know if that’s the correct way to analyze results? What if Company A devotes 20 hours and $200 to inbound each month, but Company B devotes 200 hours and $20,000? It could be that Company B has better growth, but maybe Company A gets a better return on its time and money.
With this in mind, I wanted to figure out how much of a return you’d receive if you put one hour of work into inbound marketing. That way, you could apply the results to your company and scale them no matter what size team or budget you have. And I came up with some pretty interesting stuff.
Being able to consistently hit your website’s traffic goal and provide the right number of quality leads to your sales team are two of the most crucial responsibilities of a marketing team.
But without the right tools in place, you could have wild variations in the number of visits or leads you actually generate. At the end of a month or quarter, you could end up way ahead or (more likely) way behind your goal.
For digital publishers, there is no shortage of data you can glean from your website. Rather than waste efforts trying to drink from this fire hose of information, you should instead determine which metrics are worth paying close attention to—and when.
Whether you are currently working at a higher education institution and are delving into the world of inbound marketing or you are a job-seeker looking for a position in higher education marketing at a university or marketing agency, there are skill sets that can help you succeed. Sure, there are the usual tactics that anyone in the field of inbound marketing needs to know, but before you even get to that point, there are some broader skills and knowledge that are specific in the higher education industry.
How would you feel if you knew that all your favorite brands and industry thought leaders stole content everyday?
Well, they do. And I think you should too.
Now, before you panic, I’m not suggesting that you go out and plagiarize everyone else.
Some people don’t need the spotlight to shine. But sometimes, even the quietest of our peers can be coaxed into sharing their expertise and positive energy — leaving us, the audience, the better for it.
This is what happened to my colleague Beth Dunn when a fun flowchart she created about exclamation points turned, months later, into an interview with National Public Radio (NPR).
When I was a freshman in college, one of my very first professors gave our class a piece of advice that I’ll never forget:
“Begin emails with ‘Hi,’ not ‘Hey.'”
If you were expecting some awe-inspiring, TED-talk-worthy words of wisdom, it might’ve surprised you that this is what’s stuck with me over the years.
We all know that personalization and customization can go a long way toward building a relationship with potential buyers. The thing is, personalization is so much more than just greeting the customer by name when they visit your website. That’s a great first step, but it’s not the only benefit you can get out of gathering information about your customers. Want to know what else you can do? Here are some tips.
Did you know the average person sends 41 emails per day at work?
Normally, when you’re doing something that often, you try to make sure that you’re actually doing it right. But when it comes to emails, many people are forgetting to optimize one crucial thing: their email signatures.
