Digital Strategy Blog

Starting an inbound marketing campaign for your business is a great way to grow your company whether you're a mom-and-pop shop or an international enterprise business. For many business owners and marketers, however, getting started can be daunting. Are you ready to dive in with your inbound marketing plan? These key tips can help you get started. 

Tip #1: Know Your Buyers

How well do you know the people who are buying your product or service? Have you taken the time to carefully put together buyer personas? When you have solid buyer personas, you don't just know the basic demographics for your customers. You have a better idea of what makes them tick: what they really need from your products and from your company. If you're struggling to put together effective buyer personas for your marketing campaigns, try our buyer persona worksheet. This simple worksheet will help you answer key questions about your customers that will, in turn, shape your future marketing efforts.

Updated for 2019.

The best marketing campaigns of the past year all have one thing in common - they all did much more than just promote their brand.

Inbound marketing can dramatically impact your company's business. In addition to driving traffic to your website, a well-orchestrated inbound marketing campaign will help your business rise above your competitors. However, inbound marketing is not without its problems and challenges. Knowing these challenges can help you develop realistic expectations and increase your odds of success for your campaign. Below is a look at the top five challenges with inbound marketing and some strategies to help you address those challenges. 

While it would be easy to focus all on HIVE in this article (I mean, our team is pretty amazing!) and toot our own horn, instead we've decided that we'd share some of our other favorite inbound marketing agencies throughout Colorado. Colorado has a TON of skilled marketers and we're proud to be part of it!

As with anything, there are distinct pros and cons to working with any kind of business. While we would love to work with everyone, the fact is, not every company needs or should work with a marketing agency. Let's look at situations where you should consider hiring an agency as well as reasons to avoid it.

When it comes to working with a marketing agency, it can be scary, especially if this is your first experience with an agency relationship or if you've been burned in the past.

As a business, your Instagram following is an amazing marketing tool: a group of prospects and customers that you have the potential to connect with, interact with, and show your stuff. Whether you're in the early days of your Instagram account and are struggling to grow your following or you've had an Instagram account for a long time, but need to see significant expansion, there are several things you can do to help grow your following and improve your reach. Some strategies require you to have a reasonable budget to help expand your reach; others, however, you can do with just a little time and effort. 

As a business owner or marketing director, you likely know that an effective email marketing campaign can bolster your conversions and increase your sales. However, not all email marketing campaigns are created equal. If you are underwhelmed with the results of your email campaigns, then it is time to evaluate your email activity to find out why your efforts have not been productive. Below are eight mistakes you're likely making with your email marketing along with strategies to avoid those mistakes.

Search engine algorithms are constantly changing, and that means that your content creation strategy has to change along with them. The latest news: keywords are quickly becoming a less effective way to improve your search engine ranking and make sure you have the right traffic to your website. Instead, managing search engine optimization for your website means starting to transition to topics. 

The education industry has fallen fallen behind in the marketing world and they don't even realize it. Go to any school or university website -- what are the ONLY calls-to-action that you're guaranteed to see? Apply Now or Register Now.