It is getting more and more complicated and hard to get your prospect customers attention, trust and cash. According to Brian Halligan, the CEO of Hubspot and author of the book Inbound Marketing: Attract, Engage, and Delight Customers Online, the way modern consumers shop and make purchases has changed dramatically, and as such, businesses must adapt in order to survive. You can no longer rent your way to consumer attention, you need to earn it. Instead of dreaming up new ways to interrupt your way into your prospects’ lives, invest in ways to engage them meaningfully with an inbound experience.

www.entrepreneur.com   put together 8 absolutely crucial nbound marketing practices that are vital to the growth and success of your business. No matter how busy you are, you simply can’t ignore the importance of marketing your brand effectively. Take a look at the eight most important things every entrepreneur needs to know about inbound marketing.

1. The traditional marketing playbook is broken. Almost everyone – 91 percent, to be precise – has unsubscribed from email lists. Two-out-of-three people (68 percent) who record TV content do so to skip advertisements (Motorola, December 2012) and, according to DoubleClick, the average click-through rate on display ads is only 0.2 percent. “Dharmesh (Shah) and I wrote the inbound marketing book to give entrepreneurs actionable advice to attract, engage and delight their prospects, customers and leads,” Halligan explained. “Inbound marketing focuses on the width of your brain, not the width of your wallet, and entrepreneurs have more remarkable ideas than anyone I know.”

2. Your content must be remarkable enough to break through the clutter. Think about how many channels you have on your television, and how many websites and social media channels compete for your attention each day. The same is true for your customers. It’s not enough to just produce content. Your content must educate, inspire or entertain your audience.

Don’t talk about your brand non-stop or try to sell people too early or often in your content. Instead, try to spark interesting dialogue and discussion with your content. Doing so will pay off with attention and engagement.

3. Think of your website as a hub, not a megaphone. Far too many businesses think about their websites as broadcast channels for addressing a large group of people. Your website functions best when its content and design are built with a human touch. Instead of writing copy to impress your competitors, create copy and experiences an individual customer will love.

Don’t scream through a megaphone at your customers. Design the entire end-to-end experience with individual humans in mind. Conversation trumps a broadcast message every time. Design your web experience accordingly.

4. Inbound includes content and code. Many entrepreneurs mistake massive volumes of content for an inbound strategy, forgetting that shipping code is indispensable as well. Specifically, free tools are powerful in converting web traffic into highly engaged leads.

For example, InsightSquared created Sales Funnel, a free tool that allows Salesforce users to quickly and efficiently diagnose their sales funnel. Leads that try Sales Funnel convert at a rate almost twenty times higher than leads that don’t.

Free tools can transform your entire customer experience. Invest developer resources into your marketing efforts for the biggest impact possible.

Read the other 4 tips in the original article here

To see the full list Top 100 Digital Marketing Experts view the original article here Adspringr Blog 

Are you using the right media in your content marketing strategy?

“Creating content is only the beginning of your marketing efforts; distribution is where it really pays off. To successfully distribute content, you should integrate a healthy mix of owned, earned, and paid strategies, each of which complement each other to help extend your content’s reach.”

Columnfivemedia created a useful infographic to learn how different distribution channels can benefit your content and help reach your goals. Read the original article here

Nowadays everybody is an online-guru which makes it a bit harder to find informational sources to trust online. www.entrepreneur.com came up with a handy list of 50 Favorite Online-Marketing Influencers of 2014.

When it comes to determining the “top 50” of anything, there are any number of variables that can come into play. Some of the ones I considered for this list included:

• Usefulness and reliability of blog and social-media posts
• Advanced knowledge in one or more areas of online marketing
• Size of audience
• Level of engagement on their blog or social media
• Ability to create and sustain a sense of community with their audience
• Awards received
• Books written

he following are my 50 favorite online-marketing influencers of 2014:

1. Neil Patel is a web analytics and conversion expert, and founder of Crazy Egg, Kissmetrics and Quick Sprout.

2. Matt Cutts doesn’t normally make it onto these lists, but there’s no doubt he’s near the top in terms of online influence. He’s the star of Google’s Webmaster videos and current head of Google’s Webspam team.

3. John Rampton is president at Adogy, editor at large of Search Engine Journal and a frequent contributor to Entrepreneur.com and Huffington Post.

4. Tim Ferris, a productivity expert, wrote the must-read 4-Hour Workweek.

5. Rand Fishkin is the founder of Moz.com (formerly SEOMoz), speaker and expert on search-engine optimization, marketing and entrepreneurship.

6. Danny Sullivan, an SEO expert, is founding editor of Search Engine Land.

7. Larry Kim is a pay-per click and SEO expert, and founder and CTO of WordStream, an industry leader in keyword research and PPC tools.

8. Seth Godin wrote many bestselling marketing books, including Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers into Friends and Friends into Customers.  He also founded squidoo.com and was an inductee into the Direct Marketing Hall of Fame.

9. Drew Hendricks is a social-media strategist and freelance writer published on Huffington Post and Entrepreneur.com, among others.

10. Sean Gardner, ranked as number one on Forbes’ Top 50 Social Media Power Influencers in 2013, is a social-media consultant and regular contributor to Huffington Post and Social Media Week.

Read full article and get the full list of 50 in the original article here

Three Things Consumers Want From Brands Today: Responsiveness, Involvement and Conviction

A great website design is so much more than just delivering content and making it look good. When visitors come to your site, they produce a set of feelings about your website and your organization. The type of feelings they produce – positive or negative – are entirely in your hands and should not be overlooked when designing content.

Over the years, there has been a body of knowledge produced to help designers create effective visuals that play into the psychology of their viewers. In order to achieve this, one must understand how different design elements and how we use them affect the mood, attitude and experience the visitor will have while browsing our website.

Below are four major areas of website design and development that have the biggest impacts on the psychology of website visitors. These are the tools you’ll need to create a visually-engaging site that encourages visitors to return.

thenextweb.com put together the most important advice on what type of content, typefaces, colours and spacing makes your site or landing page more engaging.

Content

For websites, content drives the design you see on screen. Visitors come to a website to access information they need. Design helps them find the information they need quickly and with ease.

In the early days of the Web, it was common to see pages and pages slammed with content, often pages with 10,000 words or more (as a comparison, this article is about 1,600 words). With pages loaded down with content, it made it extremely difficult to find content, let alone read through to get the information needed. This often invoked stress, anxiety and overall unpleasant feelings for visitors.

With today’s Web, content should be edited and organized so that there is a happy medium between providing adequate and needed information while not overwhelming visitors. When content is in that happy place, visitors are able to find the information quickly and they feel good afterwards.

Hiding content, presenting too much content or otherwise mudding up your website makes visitors irritable, leading to possible loss in potential business.

In addition, the type of content you present sets a tone for you and your organization. If your content doesn’t present the right information in a logical place, is hard to follow or tends to beat around the bush on important information, then visitors will feel this way about you.

Learn more form the original article here

Festive season is approaching quickly and in a few weeks people will start desperately shopping for present for the loved ones.

www.sociallystacked.com put together a handy holiday stats guide to help all marketers to figure out customers behaviour, expectations and trends.

Take a look at them below!  

Shopping Behavior and Spending Stats 

• 28% of consumers plan to spend more than 50% of their total holiday shopping budgets November 28 – December 1 (aka Black Friday weekend).

• Consumers will spend an average of $459.87 on gifts for their family, up 6.5% from $432.00 last year, and $80.00 on gifts for friends, up from $75.00 last year.

• A typical person celebrating Christmas, Kwanzaa or Hanukkah will spend $804.42, up nearly 5% over last year’s actual $767.27.• Those celebrating the holidays will spend more on gifts for their co-workers ($26.23 vs. $24.52 in 2013), and others such as their babysitter and even their pets ($30.43 vs. $26.65).

• 40.9% of shoppers will begin spending in November, up slightly from 38.8% last year; 15.5% will begin in the first two weeks of December.

• 42.3% of those polled say free shipping/shipping promotions are important factors.

• Consumers say that helpful, knowledgeable customer service (30.3%), convenient locations (47.9%), low prices (41.2%) and sales or price discounts (74.7%) also play a role in their decision to shop at a particular retailer.

Leran more about holiday spending trends on www.sociallystacked.com

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