According to HubSpot, lead generation continues to be the number one challenge for marketers at B2B businesses of all sizes.  It's understandable that B2B marketing teams are so focused on generating new leads—leads are, after all, as necessary to your business as gasoline is to your car—said differently, without enough leads at the top of your sales funnel, your business could stall.

Why a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Platform Is a Necessity for Small Business (SMB) Growth

As a marketing veteran, I sometimes shudder at the jargon and buzzwords that permeate our industry. As technology advances and marketing evolves, new “types” of marketing appear. (Here’s forty that are current considerations).

One of the biggest quality of life improvements to come to content marketing has to be the pillar page. In many ways, it’s the natural evolution of inbound marketing, where information availability and content organization pay dividends. Let’s discuss the concept in more detail and how to put it into practice.

It is estimated that 89% of customers begin their buying journey with a search engine. Think about that. Think how consumer behavior has changed over the years. And more specifically, think about how consumers in your industry/category/niche (your prospects) have changed their buying habits over time. Have you adjusted accordingly?

While we don’t necessarily recommend the 1976 psychological thriller Taxi Driver starring Robert De Niro unless you enjoy films about scary, messed-up, violent psychopaths, it’s interesting to note that there’s a one-minute and 20-second scene in the movie that nearly everyone old enough to remember will remember. It’s the oft-repeated line, “You talkin’ to me?” According to IGN, a leading movie review site, this scene is the 4th top moment in movie history. In fact, even those unfamiliar with the film are likely familiar with this small bit of dialogue.

As a young child, you likely played the drawing game connect the dots, or dot-to-dot, which probably helped you learn about counting, practice drawing straight lines and improve your hand/eye coordination. In the world of inbound marketing, we find that left-brain thinkers who excelled at connecting the dots as children and later grew up to be engineers or architects have an affinity for understanding the detailed processes required for developing great inbound marketing programs.

If you’re a small business owner and don’t have a strong online presence, you are not keeping up with the times. Whether you are a professional like a doctor or lawyer, run a swanky downtown spa or sell used car parts from a dusty garage, people are online looking for what you sell. If you aren’t there at the right time to meet them, you’re losing sales to the competition.

You've got your website up and now the world can come flooding in your doors, right? Everyone told you to get it on the internet so people could find you, so why aren't people finding you?

Among marketing and sales management, the analogy of a funnel has been around for a long time. Essentially, it tracks the progression of a prospect as they move through each phase of the buying process, from awareness to satisfied customer. Each company will have its own variation, depending on its unique situation, target audience, product/service offerings, buying process, etc. And with today's digital marketing strategies, the analogy has never been more accurate. With digital marketing efforts, there's no shortage of data. In fact, the difficulty can be too much information. Using a simple, three-part structure like a funnel helps you target specific areas of your strategies to determine what is working and what needs to be improved.