Inbound marketing is a marketing strategy that focuses on having customers and potential customers find you. This approach is a sharp departure from traditional marketing strategy which focuses on finding customers by building brand awareness through advertising, promotion and contacting prospects (that you have identified) directly.
When inbound marketing is effective, it is a fantastic way of harnessing the reach of the internet; it is the dream of your ideal customer seeking you out and your team working to convert the ideal lead into a sale. However, like all marketing strategies, to be successful inbound marketing requires careful planning, sufficient resources and persistence.
Favourite Inbound Marketing Tools
At Distility, we believe in inbound marketing and we practice what we preach. The following is a list of our favourite inbound marketing tools which we use to support our inbound marketing efforts. None of the inbound marketing tool vendors listed are giving us free or discounted subscriptions, services or stuff in exchange for being listed; our love was earned by the usefulness of their tools.
1. Distility 1Page Brand Strategy
Every tool you use, every idea put through the tool, needs to be based on your brand strategy. We use our own 1Page Brand Strategy as our brand strategy plan which allows us to to keep our team “on brand”.
2. HubSpot – All-in-One Marketing Software
We are in our third year with HubSpot. Their software allows our team to run a big marketing machine with the least effort. Their tools and training are what allow us to get more traffic and web leads then many of our larger competitors.
3. WordPress – Website and Blogging Platform
WordPress is easy to use. Easy to set-up. Our WordPress site is loved by the search engines and built to optimize speed and avoid security holes.
4. Mailchimp – Email Marketing
We use Hubspot for our lead nurturing, but no one beats MailChimp when it comes to email. They have fantastic branding too!
5. HootSuite – Social Media Dashboard
Every day Distility President Margaret Sims, uses HootSuite as our Social Media hub. Setting up tweets and engaging with our audience.
6. Rapportive – Rich profiles in gmail
A plug in for our Google Apps Premium accounts, Rapportive, allows us to instantly get a social media snapshot of people we are emailing. A great way to see the latest from team members, partners and prospects.
7. Batchbooks – Social CRM
Batchblue’s Batchbooks helps us track contacts and deals in our pipeline. Social Media is baked into the product giving the sense you are looking at people, not just data. Batchbooks is intuitive, flexible, and powerful, with an iPhone App to boot! What more could you ask from your CRM.
8. Zippykid.com – managed WordPress hosting
Site speed is a critical ingredient for ranking high in search and giving our audience instant satisfaction. Zippy Kid is optimized just for WordPress sites like distility.com and uses a Content Distribution Network to ensure our content is blazingly fast. Since moving to Zippy Kid distility.com has a Google Page Speed score of 94. What’s your score?
Do you have favourite tools that help you do more with less? Let us know.