Welcome back everyone. If you missed part 1 of this interview you can view it here. Every time we speak with Nick Salvatoriello, our Inbound Marketing Consultant at Hubspot, we learn so much it leaves our heads spinning! Seems he has a never ending pool of knowledge. How'd we get so lucky as to have him as our on-boarding trainer?... Well, I'm not going to look a gift horse...
Anyway, here's the rest of the interview. Enjoy!
I love content marketplaces like Zerys. They got voted app of the year in Hubspot's App Marketplace last year. The big plus is they serve as "the Wallmart of content creation" in that they basically cut out the middle-man and the frills and bring the buyer as close as possible to the manufacturer (the writer) which reduces costs. I've had clients who got got posts written for startingly low prices ($7-$20 a post, depending on the complexity of the subject matter you want written about). They have writers for every subject and they match you with the top-rated writers possible based on your budget. You also don't have to pay for any content until you review and approve the drafts submitted to you.
The minuses of this services are it sometimes takes a few bids before you find a great writer. Zerys does their best to "smart match" you with a highly rated writer, but they may not have the expertise or quality that you originally are looking for, so the minus here is the investment of time it could take to go back and forth to find a writer who produces content you really like. However, like I said you don't pay for any drafts you don't like so really you just have to be patient and stick with the system.
Yes I think there's some proven musts:
Blogging & content creation. You should have a quarterly publishing calendar / editorial timeline that will dictate publishing posts every week, and the keywords to optimize them for. This is a must for driving targeted traffic to your site and keeping it fresh.
Lead Generation / Lead Management. A mature inbound marketing program should be producing several leads for your company weekly, someone needs to be reviewing these leads, make sure they're being followed up with, and analyzing the sources of these new leads to make sure your pipeline is full every week.
Promotion of content to your growing community. As you create more content like blog articles, eBooks and webinars designed to educate and empower people in your target audience, there needs to be someone wearing the hat of the promoter or publicist. For 10-15 minutes a day, your publicist should be reviewing the top content available on your site and promoting it to external social media websites to make sure your content gets in front of the right people.
Reporting and iterating. This can be done more on a monthly basis, but it must be done. Reporting on your progress (or lack thereof) along your key metrics and goals on a weekly and monthly basis is super important for keeping everybody in the company on track (yes I said EVERYBODY - this is a team effort) towards the goals of more traffic, leads and customers via inbound marketing.
I hope you found these answers helpful and again thanks for inviting me in!
We can't thank Nick enough for being our first guest blogger! What a privilege for us. Please feel free to share your thoughts with us on which parts of his interview you found most helpful. Simply add your comments below.
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