Demand Generation Blog

As the new year begins it’s time to take stock of your marketing plan and determine where to focus your time and money in the coming year.  2016 brought about many changes in the way marketers approach content marketing, social media and SEO.  Here we’ve identified some key areas to dedicate resources to in 2017.  A conscious effort towards developing and implementing the marketing strategies outlined in each of the areas below will help you stay ahead of the curve and will heavily influence the success of your inbound marketing campaigns.

While current statistics of the top performing blog posts will show otherwise the rise of the micro blog is beginning to take hold.  In 2015 HubSpot determined that blog posts between 2,250-2,500 words most frequently occupied the top 10 in search results.  Blogs found just outside of the top 10 is where we are seeing a change taking place.  While longer posts create more of an opportunity to influence SEO and Google rankings, shorter more concise content is becoming more attractive to consumers especially through social channels and mobile outlets. 

According to Hubspot’s State of Inbound 2016 report marketers rank their top three priorities as growing SEO, creating blog content and amplifying content distribution. While generating leads and increasing traffic rank as the top challenges.  With so many different factors affecting the success of an inbound marketing campaign mastering the intricacies of these three disciplines will greatly improve your team’s ability to reach lead and traffic goals. 

Email newsletters have long been a great way to communicate with clients and prospects on a consistent basis.  While the main purpose has been spreading information and keeping your company in front of your target audience, they are being uses more and more as a lead generation tool.  With a diverse selection of content they can reach a wide range of decision makers as well as prospects at different stages of the sales funnel.  Here we’ve outlined some essential elements to include in your newsletter to optimize them for lead generation.

The number of companies employing a content marketing strategy continues to grow and with so much competition the art is constantly evolving.  There are certain constants such as written blogs, whitepapers and ebooks that will remain as the foundation of any well thought out program but there are additional building blocks that will become standard in the near future.  Adapting your campaigns to provide the flexibility to keep up with the times is essential to remain competitive.  Improved technology and automation are at the core of these changes and incorporating them into your marketing budget is more important than ever.  Innovative solutions to grab reader’s attention are needed as the amount of content available online continues to increase.  Here we’ve outlined some likely trends to keep an eye on in 2017.