Inbound Marketing

November 26, 2014 By Carrie Gallagher

How My Company Outranks Competitors on Google With No Budget

I’d like to share a little story about how my “day job” went from page 13 to page 1 on Google for our market three years ago, and how we continue to outrank competitors with no advertising budget. I’m not an SEO expert, but I’ve learned a few things along the way.

In late 2011 I stumbled upon HubSpot, because I needed to know how to create a Facebook business page. I went to Google with my problem, and HubSpot had a great blog post on how to get it done. I didn’t even need to talk to a sales person … it was fast and perfect.

I started devouring HubSpot’s ebooks, and they emailed me helpful information (as if they could read my mind about what was going on with my job at the time) about business blogging and making sense of B2B social media. In February 2012 they called and asked if I wanted to know what our “marketing grade” was. My heart started pounding because I wasn’t sure I wanted to know — I hate being graded!

It was 23 out of 100.

Clearly this wasn’t acceptable, but I explained that I had no marketing budget — our trading software division had been sold to Thomson Reuters two years earlier, and I was left with nothing. I’m not even allowed to expense my Adobe Creative Suite.

But I was determined to fix that grade, so I scheduled a meeting with our CEO, downloaded HubSpot’s “how to convince your boss” PowerPoint template, and spent the weekend customizing it (making it a LOT shorter). He was indeed convinced that we needed to transform our marketing, and I couldn’t wait to get started.

The HubSpot CMS & Keyword Tool

Our old website was a piece of crap built in Dreamweaver. It was ugly, and I’m sure the source code was giving Google a headache. Not that Google ever had a reason to come back and index our site, since nothing was happening and there were so few pages to crawl.

Once our contract was signed, HubSpot’s migration team moved us to their content management system (CMS). The look didn’t change much, but it was a lot easier to change page layouts and add a variety of “modules” to sidebars and footers.

When we went live on the HubSpot CMS, I went straight to the Keywords tool and entered the phrases we wanted to be found for in search engines. With this done, the software was able to point out “low hanging fruit” SEO fixes to help improve our rankings: page titles, URLs, meta descriptions, heading tags, image ALT text, and body content.

Evergreen Blog Posts

Anyone who uses HubSpot knows their training is outstanding. For me the most valuable section was on blogging, because I learned that when done right, business blogs are the most cost-effective and best sales person you’ll ever have. They educate website visitors 24/7, never take a sick day, and they’ll never ask you for a raise (I hope it goes without saying, please pay your content creators well!).

Blogging also has a huge effect on search rankings, because the more often you post, the more content you give Google to index. The more pages Google can index, the more they think you’ve got going on. The more they think you have going on, the more often they’re going to come back to your site.

As a one-person marketing department, I knew we needed as much “evergreen” blog content as possible — content that would keep working for us during the weeks and months that I was pulled away for other projects.

So we started an “Ask the Super Recruiter” campaign. It was a simple call to action (CTA) with a masked/caped recruiter that when clicked, job candidates were directed to a form where they could ask for advice on anything.

We made up our own questions for the most part (always related to our target keyword phrases), but we did get a few good ones from real job seekers. The point is that every blog post was posed in the form of a question, which is how people search online.

The Results

My boss didn’t think we would generate revenue from HubSpot or blogging. After all, candidates don’t pay the bills, so how could blogging about them help generate client traffic to our site?

We did reach the clients. When we started out with that embarrassing 23/100 grade from HubSpot, we were on page 13 of Google for IT staffing firms in NYC. Within six months we moved to page 1, and we’re still there today. Oh, and in the same amount of time our marketing grade went from 23 to 85.

I haven’t had time to blog lately, but our posts are so evergreen — how to write an IT resume summary is one that’s viewed every day around the world — that I can be pulled away for a project and know that our search ranking is safe.

We regularly get cold calls from hiring managers who say they found us on Google, and we’re outranking some of the biggest staffing firms in New York City, all of whom have marketing budgets that I can only dream of. But that’s not all …

Within 6 months of using HubSpot, we generated enough new business from organic search traffic to pay my full time salary for the year.

HubSpot is the gift that keeps on giving.

October 30, 2014 By Carrie Gallagher

Be the Wikipedia of Your Industry

In May 2013 I attended a HubSpot webinar hosted by Marcus Sheridan, the former owner of a Virginia-based in-ground pool company and now a TED speaker and content marketing specialist. The webinar, titled “The Honest Economy & Instructional Selling,” centered on Mr. Sheridan’s story about how trying to make payroll when the economy tanked in 2008 shifted his marketing strategy forever.

With homeowners suddenly upside down on their mortgages and skittish about luxury purchases, he had to do something drastic to see his pool company through the recession. He and his partners started a blog full of honest answers to every question they’d ever received from prospects — even laying bare the negative aspects of their products.

By adding this educational value to their website, they were able to cut their annual $250,000 marketing budget by 90% and generate over $2,000,000 in sales. The idea that transparent, educational content could yield results like that fundamentally changed my view of marketing, and the line that pulled it all together was “be the Wikipedia of your industry.”

marcus-and-me

October 23, 2014 By Carrie Gallagher

Is Your Marketing the Definition of Insanity?

This week I “kind of” fired a freelance client I’ve worked with for 12 years. Not because I don’t like him — he’s quite likable — but because he’s stuck in a mindset of outbound marketing and afraid to embrace change, even if it would be easier on his budget.

He’s mentioned the challenges of his evolving industry many times over the years, and I’ve offered inbound suggestions that he was excited about, but there’s never been any movement.

The work I’ve been doing for him over the years has mostly included designing email invitations and blasting them out a few times each month via MailChimp. They’re pretty much the same formula each time, with little variation. The information in the emails is also added to his website, but there’s nothing else to it — no blog, no expert advice, nothing interesting to offer the hundreds of people that click through to his site when they purchase tickets to the events advertised in his emails.

His list has declined steadily with each mailing, and what my (former) client has always said he wants to be known for is not what he’s being found for on Google — something that could be easily corrected through blogging and social media. He also has people lined up on LinkedIn wanting to connect, but doesn’t see the value in the platform or accepting their invitations.

I say I “kind of” fired him because I offered two options to give a final nudge toward Inbound:

a modest retainer which includes the usual email campaigns plus a simple blogging strategy — which I explained in detail with a current Google Webmaster Tools keyword report, and a snapshot of his website against his main competitors using the HubSpot competitor report
or the status quo at a much higher premium starting in January

He said he was sorry, but he was electing to go with a local company that actually uses the term “saturation mailings” on their home page.

So his marketing insanity — the act of doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result — will continue, but I feel relieved because my insanity is ending. Doing those repetitive emails the last year or so, I felt like I was betraying the Inbound movement. I think a small part of me thought I’d eventually convince him to come along for the ride and see how transformative it could be for his business.

The funny thing is, not an hour after he let me know his decision to go with the “saturation” people, another opportunity landed in my lap that looks like a really good fit.

July 9, 2014 By Carrie Gallagher

5 Website Marketing Ideas for Real Estate Agents

If ever there were a field where marketing was vital — both for yourself and your clients — it’s real estate. With sites like Trulia, Zillow and Realtor.com attracting the lion’s share of online real estate search traffic, it’s more important than ever to make yourself visible, find your own voice, and put a personal touch to your services. Today I want to tell you about a residential realtor doing just that.

September 25, 2013 By Carrie Gallagher

20 Reasons to Try Inbound Marketing for Your Small Business

These 20 stats are from HubSpot’s 2013 State of Inbound Marketing report (I cherry picked from a list of 150 the ones I thought most relevant to small business owners). Enjoy, and feel free to send me questions about anything related to Inbound. If I don’t know the answer, I will research and get back to you pronto! [Read more…] about 20 Reasons to Try Inbound Marketing for Your Small Business