We here at Precision Pages offer a variety of services that range from Inbound Marketing to website design, development, and hosting. We like to think of ourselves as marketers who also speak geek as we are professional marketers who, over the years, have learned web design and development, the science behind search algorithms, and the intricacies of web hosting.
We are sharing some of our most frequently asked questions in this post, tell us what else you would like to know!
Do I need a CRM?
If your company has never used a Customer Relationship Management System (CRM) you may be wondering if it would be beneficial for you. When evaluating the need for a CRM, we recommend you ask yourself, and your team, the following questions:
- Are we using several different third-party tools to manage our sales and marketing activities?
- Is the team less efficient because they have to go between different tools and software to find customer/prospect data and/or metrics reporting?
- Do we have the need to keep records of information about prospects and customers?
- Is it becoming difficult to manage our reporting and metrics?
- Do our customers regularly interact with multiple people on the team?
- Do we need a better way to measure the productivity of our sales team?
- Would it be helpful to tie our sales and marketing department activities together?
- Do we need more visibility into how our leads move through the pipeline?
- Could we use professional templates for emails, website landing pages, web buttons, and web forms?
If you answered yes to the majority of the above questions, your company could definitely realize value from a CRM.
How often should I post on social media?
We are asked this question often and it’s just not a straightforward answer! It really depends on your type and size of business and the bandwidth of your team. A large company with multiple products and a sizable marketing department is going to be posting on social media daily, if not multiple times a day.
Conversely, a small business focused on one niche with just a few staff may be stretched thin as it is and if they can post a few times a week that is definitely okay.
The main thing is to be strategic, and consistent. Most consumers check out a brand via their social media channels before they even think of purchasing from them. Think about what they will see when they go to your channels. Will they see a stagnant channel whose last post is dated months ago? Or will they see consistent posts, with a consistent tone, and a good mix of different types of content? Create your social media strategy, including a content calendar, and identify your brand image and voice. Set your schedule for how often you will post, stick to it, and post more often when you are able.
Related: Achieving the Right Balance of Content in Your Social Media Feed
Why is your website hosting more expensive than others I see advertised?
When it comes to your website, you may be tempted to cut corners and pay for the most inexpensive hosting service that you can find. This type of hosting is frequently called shared hosting. You know the companies that offer this. They first came busting out of the gate years ago during Superbowl halftime commercials to market their cheap hosting services. And cheap, can really mean cheap, in a lot of important ways.
Do you have an uptime guarantee with your shared host? Is it sufficient for your business? If you actually started monitoring your site’s uptime you would see how often your site is unavailable. The reality is that what they charge per month isn’t enough for shared hosting companies to communicate with you every time your site goes down. And for sites with e-commerce, it’s a big deal when the site is offline even for a short time. They may state that your site will experience 99% uptime. This seems pretty great, right? Well when you look at that over a year, it actually means that your site has the potential to be offline for 3 days, 15 hours and 36 minutes. Business class hosting provides you with excellent uptime–99.99% of the time. That extra .99% means your site only has the possibility of being down 52 minutes and 34 seconds of the year.
Other benefits include a development environment for your site, reliable backups, personalized customer service, a better search ranking, a Content Delivery Network (CDN), and site performance and security.
Read More about the Difference Between Shared Hosting and Business Hosting
What would the HubSpot software do for my business?
Precision Pages is a HubSpot partner and believes in the Hubspot Inbound Marketing approach. HubSpot is industry-leading software for marketing, sales, and customer service, with a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system at its core. The tools are robust on their own, but are even more powerful when used together. The HubSpot platform allows for seamless integration between your marketing and sales teams, while giving you full visibility into the effectiveness of your campaigns, content, and customer journey. Using HubSpot helps you streamline your marketing efforts by having all of your tools in one place, including in-depth reporting.
When would I choose Drupal CMS over WordPress?
WordPress is the Content Management System (CMS) of choice for the majority of websites today due to its ease-of-use and plentiful theme choices. Many companies prefer WordPress because it offers customizable themes and plugins, is Search Engine Optimization friendly, and is safe and secure provided it is kept up to date. Since WordPress has such a large portion of the market share and many people are aware of its capabilities, we’ll go into more detail about when a company would benefit from using Drupal instead.
Drupal is an excellent platform for robust business sites, providing flexibility and security. In general, a company could get more out of Drupal if they:
- Require robust e-commerce
- Have complex content
- Have a lot of workflows and rules
- Require custom content types
- Have a need for a community site, or different levels of access
- Will have paid access to content on their site
- Have complex integrations
- Core support for multilingual sites
To break it down further between the two:
- Drupal is harder for novices to set up, but once it’s ready, it’s easy to use. Drupal is more flexible and capable of handling enterprise level performance. There is however greater variation from Drupal site to Drupal site.
- WordPress is easy for most anyone to set up, is more consistent from WordPress site to WordPress site, but does have more limitations for complex sites.
What is Inbound Marketing?
Not surprisingly, Inbound Marketing is the opposite of outbound marketing. Outbound, or traditional marketing is expensive and becoming less effective every year. With the inbound approach, the right prospects are drawn to your website, of their own volition, when they are shopping in your industry. Inbound Marketing centers on getting your company found by prospects when they’re ready for your products and services.
The Inbound Marketing Process consists of: Attract, Convert, Close, Retain.
Attract: Bring your customers to you through compelling content and thought leadership.
Convert: Drive lead conversion with relevant and timely calls to action and offers.
Close: Gain customers who know your company is the right fit for their needs.
Retain: Continue to satisfy your customers with shareable content and a helpful CRM.
Does SEO really work?
Search Engine Optimization absolutely works to drive traffic to a website, when executed strategically and properly.
However, be aware that SEO is not a quick fix. Often results take weeks or months of work. However, it is an approach with lasting results. Improvements in your website’s SEO configuration benefit all future content. There is also a snowball effect, where small successes begin to add up and improve the site’s domain authority as a whole. And unlike paid advertising, you don’t have to pay Google for these results.
Why is adding new content to my website, such as blog posts, so important?
You are competing for attention in the vast sea of the internet. Search engines like Google need to be fed in order for them to serve you. Let’s say you launch your website and it’s all shiny and new to the internet and you worked really hard on writing the content for the pages. Then you sit back, relax, watch the business roll in, and don’t add anything new to your site for a year, right? Wrong. If you let your website go stale, never adding new content, your search rank will drop because it’s not being updated.
A great way to keep adding fresh content to your website is to write regular blog posts. It not only keeps the attention of Google, who refers more visitors to you, but also establishes your brand as a thought leader.
New content isn’t solely to feed search engines, it also serves the important purpose of being helpful to your visitors. Good content answers your readers’ questions and addresses topics they care about (if you have taken the time to know and understand your buyer personas). This makes them happy, which makes Google happy because it sees your visitors are commenting on or sharing the content and it’s all about relevance and delivering the right content to those who are looking for it.
Lastly, consistent content helps to reveal your brand image to your prospects. Blog posts helps people get to know your company and the people behind it. If they like what they are reading, they will share it with their friends, family and/or coworkers. The more they hear from you and begin to value and trust your company, the easier their decision when it comes time to choose a company to help them with their challenges.
How are SEO, content writing, and lead generation related to each other?
These three areas are a beautiful trifecta that, when executed properly, will bring traffic to your website, build trust with your prospects, and convert leads to customers. The SEO and the content writing, as discussed above, will bring traffic to your site, and then the lead generation activities come in. Effective landing pages, calls to action, web forms, and just an overall pleasant experience for the visitor will help your lead conversion. And the process you put in place is important. Make sure you are putting valuable content behind forms and building your prospect list, testing out different campaigns and messaging to see what works, and executing follow up that’s helpful instead of annoying.
Done properly and in conjunction with each other, SEO, content writing and lead generation are the solid foundation for Inbound Marketing and your company will realize the benefits.
