Moshe Pesach, Author at StepUp Marketing

How to use the new Facebook Messenger Ads to drive qualified leads to your business

Posted on March 20, 2017February 26, 2024 by Moshe Pesach

This past fall, Facebook decided that it was time to change the advertising game with the update of Facebook Messenger Ads. You might jump to the opinion that this ad type will only work best with the more ‘techy’ audiences, or larger companies with a big social media presence, etc. But let’s look at this single statistic:
There are over 1 billion Facebook Messenger users. One. Billion.
All of your potential leads? They’re all on Facebook.

This chart from Business Insider is mind-blowing. At the beginning of 2015, monthly usage of the top four messaging apps surpassed usage of the top four social networks.

Anyone Can Benefit From Facebook Messenger Ads

With the right resources, any business can benefit from Facebook Messenger Ads.

Here’s another quick stat for you: by the middle of 2015, the monthly usage of the top four messaging apps had surpassed the usage of the top four social media networks.

But let’s take a step back from the numbers. Instead, let’s look at the basic facts of business growth. When it comes to marketing, businesses should join the conversation as a possible resource as early in the game as possible.

Facebook Messenger allows us to enter that conversation much sooner. Your business can be present in the early stages when the customer is still forming opinions and educating themselves. It allows for the ability to be extremely reactive as a business, and hyper aware of the customer’s journey.

So how do Facebook Messenger ads even work? Great question. Let’s take a look.

Facebook Messenger as a Destination

Also known as Destination Ads, Messenger Ads hang out in your leads’ newsfeeds and are seen on both desktop and mobile views. One click and your potential consumers are then taken to a Facebook message to communicate directly with you/your bot.

The advertisement itself looks like any normal Facebook ad, but the exciting new advantage here is the option to start a conversation. Instead of a ‘call to action,’ consider it to be a “call to conversation.”

For many people, this may actually be very appealing. Often when people are searching for solutions or answers to questions, they would rather connect directly with you/your company. Otherwise they are clicking on a hyperlink and are taken away to another website, left searching for the answers to their questions.

The options are open when creating the ad, with the ability to select options like interests, behaviors, different custom audiences and so on.

Destination Ads: Audiences to Target

Facebook Messenger Destination Ads can be a great option when it comes to retargeting an audience. It gives the unique opportunity for people to ask the questions that may be holding them back from actually purchasing your product.

Yet another audience to consider are the potential customers that haven’t even heard of your company or solution. Overall, a Destination Ad can help to build awareness around what you have to offer. It allows for a sales conversation to be had at the choice of your potential lead. Running an ad with the right question could potentially prompt a quality conversation, leading to the gain of new customers more quickly.

Inbound Marketing – The Future of Marketing and Sales

Posted on March 13, 2017February 26, 2024 by Moshe Pesach

Marketing and sales: is one more important for business growth? It’s an ongoing discussion in the industry. For years sales people have argued they are the most important figures in the business and marketers have claimed that without them sales people are useless.

In 2017, marketing and sales are more competitive (and challenging) than ever. Prospects are tired of aggressive advertising and pushy sales pitches. Poeple are looking to find great products and services that are easy to consume and understand.

Cue: Inbound Marketing. The future of marketing and sales.

Why is Current-State Marketing Broken?

Current marketing, or outbound marketing, is the more common marketing approach of the past. Outbound marketing tends to be aggressive and interruptive, putting ads, billboards, and flyers in the faces of potential leads, and can often be irritating instead of attracting.

Digital marketing is already a very crowded space, and because of this consumers are more likely to get annoyed with ads instead of being drawn to them. Not only this, but they now have the ability to easily block ads, or the propensity to ignore them.

And the cherry on top? Data tells us that outbound marketing is actually less effective, yet more expensive.

Discover Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing focuses on drawing in customers organically – using content that has been designed to solve the needs and questions of your audience. The main principle of inbound marketing is to ‘get found’ by the customer, instead of having to seek them out. When done correctly, your leads will end up on your unique landing page, social media site, etc. – and discover exactly what they’ve been searching for. This method is particularly effective because it helps to quickly build credibility.

How Does Inbound Marketing Work?

The inbound methodology itself is often broken into four marketing actions. We’ll keep it simple:

1. Attract.

More traffic doesn’t necessarily mean good traffic; we are looking for the right traffic. The right traffic can be defined as our ‘buyer personas’ or, people who are already able to relate to your product or service. They may have similar challenges, needs, questions.

This timeframe is also considered the beginning of the Awareness stage, during which consumers first realize that they have a problem that needs to be solved. From there they move into the Consideration stage, which shifts potential personas towards defining and researching solutions to their problem.

The above stages are part of what we refer to as the “Buyer’s Journey”, and the inbound marketing strategy is built specifically around these, ensuring that the right message is being sent at exactly the right time.

2. Convert

Now let’s turn those personas into leads. How? Contact information! Methods such as simple forms, or a call to action on your website to get email addresses in exchange for something free – perhaps a helpful PDF, an ebook, etc. The options truly are endless.

3. Close

OK, so you’ve got your leads – now what? Using a variety of tools from Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems to a series of simple emails, there are plenty of methods to transform your leads into customers. With the inbound marketing methodology you will nurture the leads with more useful content and identify the exact moment they are ready to buy. Only then will you close them as customers without being pushy or aggressive.

4. Delight

In order to keep those happy customers delighted for life, you can’t just forget about them post-purchase. Keep in touch with your audiences through outlets such as surveys asking for feedback, and social media interactions.

Authentic Marketing That Actually Improves Sales

The key to the inbound marketing strategy is that it isn’t just ONE key – it’s a whole bunch that come together to create success. Options range from content marketing, blogs, all forms of social media, organized events, search engine optimization, emails, and so much more. It’s a methodology that earns the attention of potential customers and sets up your company to easily be found – with our help of course.

It’s because of this personalized approach that you then draw in the most likely leads. Odds are that your leads are discovering you because they are already clicking around with questions about your specific industry, or product. This circles back to the concept of ‘earning the attention’ of your customers, instead of screaming at them and begging for attention.

Because let’s be honest, no one likes to be cold-called or approached out of the blue when they’re simply trying to mind their own business. With only 19% of consumers now utilizing salespeople as a resource for their buying decisions, it’s simply an outdated method of the past.

Digital Marketing Is Changing…

And we have the stats to prove it:
– Two billion people are using Facebook to search for content, daily.
– Four billion people are using messenger apps to communicate and search.
– Two out of three adults use social media to keep up on world events.
– Mobile ad blocking has increased 90% year over year.

(Source)

Now, more than ever, the customers have the power over the ads, not the marketers.

Let Inbound Marketing Change The Way You Do Business

The good news is, we have inbound marketing, a more authentic method that addresses those problems and needs that your potential leads are searching for. And it’s not just about using the right data – it’s about pushing it out at the correct time, in the correct place – so that your leads are delighted instead of irritated

Inbound marketing sets up the relative searches to be lead to you – perhaps your blog, or a recent tweet – in a completely natural and less aggressive way, personalized for the consumer.

An added perk: inbound leads cost roughly 61% less than outbound leads gained through the “louder” methods such as mailings, radio/TV ads, etc.

How Does This Apply to Me?

Let’s run through a real life scenario.

You’re leaving your house in the morning, and decide that you want a coffee on your way to work. Coffee shops using traditional marketing (the outbound method) may still be doing things like mailing coupons to your mailbox, or posting an ad to promote their new coffee shop.

This may have worked years ago. However, in our ever-changing, nonstop digital age, people aren’t pausing to check their mailbox on the way to work, and aren’t reading ads in newspapers or magazines. Where are they looking instead? To search engines on their phones, and to social media for recommendations or interesting content on hot new coffee shops.

Consumers today are more empowered than ever. Essentially any need or question they may have can be found by a simple search on Google, Facebook, and other digital media channels.

Marketing That People Love

Need more reasons as to why inbound is the future of marketing? Check it out:

Sparks social media sharing
Empowers your customers while encouraging brand interaction
Generates brand awareness
Fosters more leads, for less money
Develops and grows your search engine optimization (SEO).

Don’t get left behind – get on the inbound marketing train. It truly is the future of marketing and sales.

Sources:
https://www.marketo.com/inbound-marketing/ (stats)
https://www.hubspot.com/inbound-marketing (4 actions)
https://blog.hubspot.com/insiders/11-facts-about-inbound-marketing

Content Marketing vs. Inbound Marketing – Can They Be Compared?

Posted on March 5, 2017June 27, 2026 by Moshe Pesach

Last updated: June 27, 2026

Most B2B companies — especially in industrial sectors like manufacturing, cleantech, and engineering services — still rely on cold outreach, trade show badge scans, and a sales team grinding through purchased contact lists. It works, until it doesn’t. Until your reps burn out, your cost per lead climbs quarter over quarter, and the buyers you actually want have already shortlisted a competitor before your SDR even picks up the phone.

That’s the shift inbound content marketing was built for.

At StepUp, we run full marketing departments for global B2B companies — often with a single person orchestrating AI-powered workflows that replace entire teams. We’ve watched industrial manufacturers go from zero organic pipeline to six-figure deals sourced entirely through content. Not because they wrote more blog posts, but because they built an inbound engine designed around how their buyers actually research, evaluate, and purchase.

This guide breaks down exactly how inbound content marketing works in B2B, why it matters more now than ever, and how to build a strategy that turns your expertise into a pipeline machine — with specific frameworks, real examples, and the AI-accelerated playbook we use with our own clients.

> Key Takeaways > > – Inbound content marketing combines content creation with a system — content is the fuel, the inbound methodology (Attract → Convert → Close → Delight) is the engine that turns it into pipeline. > – It compounds; outbound doesn’t. A well-optimized guide published today still generates leads 18 months from now. A cold email campaign doesn’t survive the week. > – B2B companies don’t need bigger teams — they need a smarter architecture. AI-accelerated workflows let one experienced marketer produce the output of an entire department, without sacrificing quality. > – The biggest gap isn’t content creation — it’s the system around it. Most B2B companies publish content with no conversion path, no lead scoring, and no sales alignment. That’s where the ROI leaks. > – First-mover advantage is real, especially in industrial verticals. Most competitors still rely on trade shows and cold calls. The company that builds an inbound engine now owns the digital landscape for years.

What Is Inbound Content Marketing?
Inbound Marketing vs. Outbound Marketing
Content Marketing vs. Inbound Marketing: How They Work Together
The Inbound Content Marketing Framework: Attract → Convert → Close → Delight
Types of Content Used in Inbound Marketing
How to Build an Inbound Content Marketing Strategy: A Step-by-Step Playbook
Measuring Inbound Content Marketing: The Metrics That Actually Matter
The AI-Accelerated Inbound Playbook: How We Do It at StepUp
Common Inbound Content Marketing Mistakes in B2B (and How to Avoid Them)
Getting Started: The First 90 Days
The Bottom Line

What Is Inbound Content Marketing?

Inbound content marketing is the practice of creating and distributing valuable, relevant content that attracts your ideal buyers to you — rather than interrupting them with ads, cold calls, or unsolicited emails.

The concept merges two disciplines:

Inbound marketing — a methodology coined by HubSpot that centers on earning attention by being genuinely helpful at every stage of the buyer’s journey.
Content marketing — the strategic creation of content (articles, videos, guides, tools) that educates, informs, or solves problems for a defined audience, as defined by the Content Marketing Institute.

When you combine them, you get a system: content is the fuel, and the inbound methodology is the engine. Every piece of content serves a specific purpose — attracting strangers, converting visitors into leads, nurturing leads into customers, and turning customers into advocates.

For B2B companies, especially those selling complex, high-ticket products or services (industrial equipment, engineering solutions, enterprise software), inbound content marketing is particularly powerful because:

Sales cycles are long. Your buyers spend weeks or months researching before they talk to sales. According to Gartner research, B2B buyers spend only 17% of the total purchase journey meeting with potential suppliers — the rest is independent research and internal discussion. Content fills that window.
Buying committees are large. A single piece of content can influence the engineer, the procurement manager, and the VP simultaneously — each consuming different formats at different stages.
Trust is non-negotiable. In industrial B2B, you’re not selling a $29/month SaaS tool. You’re selling a six- or seven-figure commitment. Buyers need to trust your expertise before they’ll even take a call.

Inbound content marketing builds that trust at scale, 24/7, without adding headcount.

Inbound Marketing vs. Outbound Marketing

The distinction matters because most B2B companies don’t need to abandon outbound — they need to stop depending on it exclusively.

Here’s what we see with our industrial B2B clients: outbound still works for named-account plays and event-driven campaigns (a new product launch, a trade show follow-up). But the companies that build sustainable, scalable pipeline — the ones where marketing actually drives revenue — are the ones that layer inbound content on top.

The compounding effect is real. A well-optimized guide you publish today will still generate leads 18 months from now. A cold email campaign from 18 months ago? It’s in the trash. Research from the HubSpot State of Marketing Report consistently shows that inbound leads cost significantly less than outbound leads over time, precisely because of this compounding dynamic.

The smartest B2B teams don’t choose one or the other. They use inbound content to warm the market, then use outbound to accelerate deals with accounts that have already engaged with their content. That’s the hybrid model, and it outperforms either approach in isolation.

Content Marketing vs. Inbound Marketing: How They Work Together

This is a source of confusion that costs B2B companies real money.

Content marketing is a discipline — the practice of creating content to attract and retain an audience. You can do content marketing without an inbound strategy (plenty of companies publish blogs that go nowhere because there’s no conversion path, no nurture sequence, and no alignment with sales).

Inbound marketing is a methodology — a framework for how to attract, engage, and delight customers. You can do inbound marketing without content (technically), but you’d be trying to run an engine without fuel.

Here’s how they fit together:

Content marketing provides the assets. Blog posts, whitepapers, videos, case studies, calculators, comparison guides.
Inbound marketing provides the system. How those assets are mapped to buyer stages, how they capture leads, how leads are scored and routed to sales, how customers are retained and activated as advocates.

When a manufacturing company publishes a technical guide on “How to Evaluate Industrial Coating Systems” — that’s content marketing. When that guide is optimized for search, gated behind a form that triggers a lead score update in HubSpot, followed by a nurture sequence that delivers three more relevant pieces of content before alerting a sales rep — that’s inbound content marketing.

The gap we see most often: B2B companies invest in content creation but skip the system. They have great engineers who could write authoritative technical content, but no strategy connecting that content to pipeline. The 2024 B2B Content Marketing report by CMI and MarketingProfs found that only 29% of B2B marketers consider their organization’s content marketing to be very or extremely successful — often because content exists without an inbound system around it. Inbound content marketing closes that gap.

The Inbound Content Marketing Framework: Attract → Convert → Close → Delight

The inbound methodology breaks the buyer’s journey into four stages. Each stage requires different content types, different calls to action, and different success metrics.

Stage 1: Attract — Turn Strangers Into Visitors

Goal: Get your ideal buyers to find you when they’re researching problems you solve.

Key channels: SEO, social media (especially LinkedIn for B2B), industry publications, guest posts.

Content types that work in B2B:

Educational blog posts targeting informational keywords your buyers search. For an industrial manufacturer, this might be “challenges of marketing engineered products” or “how to generate leads for custom fabrication.”
Thought leadership on LinkedIn — not corporate announcements, but genuine perspectives from your subject matter experts on industry trends.
Video explainers breaking down complex technical concepts that your buyers need to understand before they can evaluate solutions.
Industry trend reports that position your company as the one tracking where the market is heading.

What most B2B companies get wrong at this stage: They write about themselves. “We’re excited to announce our new product line.” Nobody is searching for that. Attract-stage content answers the questions your buyers are already asking — before they know you exist.

AI acceleration: At StepUp, we use AI workflows to identify content gaps at scale — analyzing what your ideal buyers search for, what your competitors rank for, and where the whitespace is. What used to take a content strategist two weeks now takes two hours.

Stage 2: Convert — Turn Visitors Into Leads

Goal: Capture contact information from visitors who’ve engaged with your attract-stage content.

Key mechanisms: Landing pages, forms, calls to action (CTAs), gated content offers.

Content types that drive conversion in B2B:

Gated guides and whitepapers — in-depth resources that deliver enough value to justify an email address. “The Complete Guide to Selecting an Industrial Coating Vendor” is worth a form fill. “5 Marketing Tips” is not.
Assessment tools and calculators — interactive content that gives the buyer something personalized. “Calculate Your Cost Per Lead by Channel” or “Assess Your Manufacturing Marketing Maturity.”
Webinar recordings — live events that generate leads during promotion, then continue converting as on-demand content.
Case studies with specific results — “How [Company] Reduced Customer Acquisition Cost by 40% in 12 Months” earns a download because the buyer wants to see if the results are replicable.

The conversion mechanics that matter:

1. CTAs embedded in blog posts — not generic “Contact Us” buttons, but contextual offers. A post about industrial marketing challenges should offer a guide on solving those challenges. 2. Landing pages with a single focus — one offer, one form, no navigation distractions. 3. Progressive profiling — don’t ask for 12 fields on the first form. Ask for email and company. Next download, ask for role and company size. Build the profile over multiple interactions. 4. Lead scoring — not all leads are equal. A VP of Engineering who downloaded your pricing comparison guide is worth more than a student who downloaded your glossary. Score accordingly.

HubSpot tip: If you’re running HubSpot (and if you’re a B2B company in Israel or targeting global markets, you should be — it’s the backbone of most inbound operations we build), use smart CTAs that change based on what the visitor has already downloaded. Returning visitors see the next logical offer, not the same ebook they already have.

Stage 3: Close — Turn Leads Into Customers

Goal: Nurture qualified leads until they’re ready to buy, then hand them to sales at the right moment.

Key mechanisms: Email nurture workflows, lead scoring thresholds, sales enablement content, CRM integration.

Content types that close deals in B2B:

Email nurture sequences — automated workflows that deliver relevant content based on what the lead has engaged with. Not “checking in” emails. Value-delivery emails.
Comparison guides — “HubSpot vs. Salesforce for Industrial B2B” or “In-House Marketing Team vs. Outsourced Marketing Department.” Help buyers make the decision they’re already trying to make.
ROI calculators and business cases — give the internal champion the numbers they need to sell your solution to their CFO.
Customer case studies with hard metrics — at this stage, the buyer wants proof. Not testimonials. Results. “Increased qualified pipeline by 280% in 9 months” moves deals forward.
Sales enablement decks and one-pagers — content your sales team can use in conversations that reinforces the same messaging the buyer encountered in your content.

The handoff that most companies botch: Marketing generates a lead. Lead gets dumped into a CRM. Sales calls immediately. Lead isn’t ready. Sales marks it as “bad lead.” Marketing blames sales. Sales blames marketing.

Inbound content marketing fixes this with lead scoring and service-level agreements (SLAs). Marketing agrees to deliver leads that meet specific criteria (score threshold, company fit, engagement pattern). Sales agrees to follow up within a specific timeframe with a specific approach. The content strategy is designed to move leads toward that score threshold before the handoff.

Stage 4: Delight — Turn Customers Into Advocates

Goal: Deliver such a great experience that customers renew, expand, and refer.

This is the stage most B2B companies ignore entirely, and it’s a mistake — especially in industrial sectors where the buyer community is small and tightly networked.

Content types that delight:

Onboarding sequences — structured content that helps new customers get maximum value from your product or service in the first 90 days.
Customer-only resources — exclusive guides, templates, or tools that make their job easier.
Community and user groups — forums or events where customers connect with peers and your team.
Proactive check-in content — “Here’s what’s changed in your industry this quarter and what it means for your strategy.” Not a sales pitch. Genuine value.
Co-created case studies — featuring your customers’ success stories elevates them as thought leaders in their own right. They love it. Their network sees it. Referrals follow.

The flywheel effect: Delighted customers create attract-stage content for you. Their testimonials become blog posts. Their success stories become case studies. Their referrals become warm leads that skip the top of funnel entirely. HubSpot’s shift from the traditional funnel to the flywheel model reflects exactly this dynamic — customers aren’t the end of the process; they’re the engine that accelerates it.

Types of Content Used in Inbound Marketing

Not all content is created equal, and not all content belongs at every stage. Here’s a practical breakdown of the content types that actually move the needle in B2B inbound, mapped to where they work best.

Blog Posts and Articles

Stage: Attract Purpose: SEO entry points that answer the questions your buyers are asking. B2B best practice: Write for specificity. “Digital Marketing for Manufacturers” outperforms “Digital Marketing Tips” because it speaks directly to your ICP. Technical depth beats generic advice every time.

Long-Form Guides and Whitepapers

Stage: Convert Purpose: Gated assets that deliver enough value to earn an email address. B2B best practice: Make them genuinely useful — not thinly disguised sales pitches. The best-performing whitepapers we’ve seen in industrial B2B are ones that the reader’s engineering team actually references in their work.

Video Content

Stage: Attract + Convert Purpose: Explainers, product demos, customer stories, thought leadership. B2B best practice: Short-form (under 3 minutes) for LinkedIn and attract. Long-form for deep dives that support conversion. In manufacturing, factory tours and process explainers perform exceptionally well because they showcase capability in a way text can’t.

Email Sequences

Stage: Convert + Close Purpose: Automated nurture that delivers the right content at the right time. B2B best practice: Segment by industry, role, and engagement level. A procurement manager at a manufacturing company needs different content than a CTO at a SaaS startup.

Case Studies

Stage: Close + Delight Purpose: Social proof with measurable results. B2B best practice: Structure as Problem → Approach → Results. Lead with the metric. “280% increase in qualified pipeline” in the headline, not buried on page three.

Interactive Tools

Stage: Convert Purpose: Assessments, calculators, configurators that deliver personalized value. B2B best practice: These are underused in industrial B2B and massively effective. A “Marketing Maturity Assessment” that scores a manufacturer on their digital presence and gives specific recommendations generates leads and qualifies them simultaneously.

Webinars and Live Events

Stage: Attract + Convert Purpose: Thought leadership delivered live, then repurposed as on-demand content. B2B best practice: Co-host with a complementary partner (your HubSpot agency + an industrial trade publication = audience overlap with your exact ICP).

Social Media Content (LinkedIn)

Stage: Attract Purpose: Distribution channel for your content + direct thought leadership. B2B best practice: In B2B, LinkedIn is the platform. Personal profiles outperform company pages by a wide margin in engagement. Equip your CEO and subject matter experts with content to share — not corporate press releases, but genuine perspectives.

How to Build an Inbound Content Marketing Strategy: A Step-by-Step Playbook

Here’s the exact framework we use at StepUp to build inbound content engines for B2B companies — from zero to pipeline-generating machine.

Step 1: Define Your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) With Painful Specificity

Generic personas don’t work. “Marketing managers at mid-size companies” is useless. You need:

Industry: Manufacturing, industrial equipment, cleantech, engineering services — be specific.
Company size: Revenue range, employee count, number of locations.
Decision-maker profile: Title, reporting structure, KPIs they’re measured on, tools they use.
Pain points: Not “wants to grow revenue.” What specific friction do they experience? “Can’t generate qualified leads because their technical content doesn’t rank, and their sales team wastes 60% of their time on unqualified prospects from trade shows.”
Buying triggers: What events cause them to search for a solution? New product launch, competitor pressure, leadership change, failed internal initiative.

Why this matters for content: Every piece of content you create should speak to a specific ICP. If you sell to both manufacturing companies and SaaS startups, they need separate content tracks.

Step 2: Map the Buyer’s Journey for Your Specific Market

For every ICP, document:

Awareness stage: What problems are they searching for? What questions do they ask colleagues? What industry publications do they read?
Consideration stage: What solutions are they evaluating? What criteria do they use? Who else is involved in the decision?
Decision stage: What final objections do they have? What proof do they need? What does their internal approval process look like?

In industrial B2B, this journey is often 6-12 months. Your content strategy needs to sustain engagement across that entire timeline — not just spike at the top of funnel.

Step 3: Conduct a Content Gap Analysis

Before creating anything new, audit what you have and what’s missing:

1. Inventory existing content. Blog posts, case studies, datasheets, videos, presentations that live on your website or in sales folders. 2. Map existing content to journey stages. You’ll almost certainly find you have plenty of bottom-funnel content (product pages, datasheets) and almost nothing at the top (educational content that attracts new visitors). 3. Analyze competitor content. What are they ranking for? What topics do they cover? Where are the gaps they haven’t filled? 4. Identify keyword opportunities. Use tools like Semrush to find the exact terms your buyers search for — and how difficult they’ll be to rank for.

AI acceleration: We use AI-driven analysis to process competitor content, identify semantic gaps, and generate topic clusters in hours instead of weeks. The goal isn’t to create AI-generated content (more on that below) — it’s to use AI to do the strategic analysis faster and smarter so humans can focus on creating genuinely valuable content.

Step 4: Build Topic Clusters Around Pillar Themes

Random blog posts don’t build authority. Clusters do.

A topic cluster is a pillar page (comprehensive guide on a broad topic) surrounded by cluster content (focused articles on subtopics) that all interlink. This approach, originally popularized by HubSpot’s research team, has become the standard for building topical authority in search.

Example for a manufacturing marketing cluster:

Pillar: “The Complete Guide to Digital Marketing for Manufacturers”
Cluster content:

– “How to Generate Qualified Leads for Custom Fabrication” – “Content Marketing for Engineers: What Actually Works” – “Industrial Trade Show Marketing: Before, During, and After” – “SEO for Manufacturing Companies: A Technical Guide” – “Case Study: How [Company] Built a $2M Pipeline Through Content”

Each cluster piece ranks for its own long-tail keywords and passes authority to the pillar. The pillar ranks for the broader term. Together, they establish your site as the definitive resource on that topic.

Step 5: Create a Content Calendar With Conversion Paths

For each piece of content, define:

Target keyword(s)
Buyer journey stage
ICP segment
Content format (blog, video, guide, etc.)
CTA / conversion path — what’s the next step for the reader? Download a guide? Book a consultation? Watch a demo?
Distribution plan — how will this content reach its audience? SEO alone? LinkedIn? Email to existing contacts? Paid promotion?

Publish consistently. For most B2B companies, 2-4 high-quality pieces per month beats 12 mediocre ones. Quality compounds. Quantity without quality creates noise.

Step 6: Set Up the Technology Stack

Inbound content marketing requires infrastructure:

CMS: Where content lives (WordPress, HubSpot CMS).
Marketing automation: Email workflows, lead scoring, form management (HubSpot is the standard for mid-market B2B — it’s what we deploy for most clients).
CRM: Where leads are tracked and handed to sales (HubSpot CRM, Salesforce).
Analytics: Google Analytics 4, Google Search Console, Semrush for keyword tracking.
AI tools: For content research, brief generation, repurposing, and analysis — not for writing finished content, but for accelerating every step around the writing.

The integration point that matters most: Your CMS, marketing automation, and CRM must be connected. When a visitor reads a blog post, downloads a guide, and then visits your pricing page — that behavior sequence should be visible to your sales team in real time. That’s the difference between a content program and an inbound engine.

Step 7: Launch, Measure, Iterate

No inbound strategy survives first contact with reality unchanged. Launch with your best hypothesis, then let data refine it.

Measuring Inbound Content Marketing: The Metrics That Actually Matter

Vanity metrics — page views, social shares, subscriber counts — feel good but don’t pay the bills. Here are the metrics that connect inbound content to revenue:

Traffic Metrics (Leading Indicators)

Organic traffic growth — month over month, tracked at the cluster level, not just total site traffic.
Keyword rankings — are you moving up for your target terms? Track positions weekly.
New vs. returning visitors — healthy inbound programs show a strong mix. New visitors mean your attract content is working. Returning visitors mean your nurture content is engaging.

Conversion Metrics (Pipeline Indicators)

Visitor-to-lead conversion rate — what percentage of visitors become known contacts? B2B benchmark: 1-3%. Top performers: 5%+.
Landing page conversion rates — by offer. Which gated assets actually earn form fills?
Lead-to-MQL conversion rate — what percentage of leads meet your qualification criteria?
MQL-to-SQL conversion rate — of qualified leads, how many does sales accept?

Revenue Metrics (Business Outcomes)

Pipeline sourced by content — total opportunity value where first touch or last touch was inbound content.
Revenue attributed to inbound — closed-won deals traced back to content interactions.
Customer acquisition cost (CAC) by channel — how does inbound compare to outbound, paid, events?
Time to close — leads nurtured through content typically close faster because they arrive educated and pre-sold.

The Reporting Cadence That Works

Weekly: Keyword rankings, traffic trends, content published vs. planned.
Monthly: Conversion rates, lead volume, MQL/SQL handoff metrics.
Quarterly: Pipeline attribution, CAC by channel, content ROI, strategy adjustments.

HubSpot reporting advantage: If your CMS, marketing automation, and CRM all live in HubSpot, attribution reporting is built in. You can trace a closed deal back to the blog post that first brought the contact to your site 8 months ago. That visibility is what makes inbound content marketing defensible to your CFO.

The AI-Accelerated Inbound Playbook: How We Do It at StepUp

Here’s what’s changed in the last two years, and why it matters for B2B companies evaluating inbound content marketing in 2026.

AI hasn’t replaced the need for inbound content marketing. It’s amplified the advantage for companies that do it well — and widened the gap for those that don’t.

What AI accelerates:

Research and analysis. Competitive gap analysis, keyword clustering, buyer persona development — tasks that used to take weeks now take hours.
Content brief generation. AI can analyze top-ranking content, identify structural gaps, and generate detailed briefs that human writers use as a starting point.
Content repurposing. One long-form guide becomes 10 LinkedIn posts, 5 email snippets, a video script, and a slide deck — with AI handling the first-draft transformation.
Personalization at scale. Dynamic email content, smart CTAs, and segment-specific messaging that would have required a team of five.
Reporting and optimization. Pattern recognition across thousands of data points to identify what’s working and what’s not.

What AI doesn’t replace:

Subject matter expertise. Your engineers, your founders, your customer-facing team — they have knowledge that no AI model possesses. The best inbound content in industrial B2B comes from extracting that expertise and packaging it for your buyers.
Strategic judgment. Which topics to prioritize, how to position against competitors, when to gate vs. ungate — these decisions require human understanding of your market.
Relationship building. Content earns trust, but humans close deals.

The StepUp model: We run full marketing departments for global B2B companies using AI-powered workflows orchestrated by a single experienced marketer. This isn’t about replacing people with bots — it’s about giving one exceptional person the leverage of an entire team. The output quality stays high because the human drives strategy and quality control. The speed and volume increase because AI handles the operational heavy lifting.

For industrial B2B companies, this model is particularly powerful. You likely don’t need (and can’t afford) a 10-person marketing team. But you absolutely need the output of one — consistent content, running campaigns, nurturing leads, reporting on results. AI-accelerated inbound makes that possible.

Common Inbound Content Marketing Mistakes in B2B (and How to Avoid Them)

After building inbound programs for dozens of B2B companies across industrial, tech, and professional services sectors, here are the failure patterns we see most often:

Mistake 1: Writing for search engines instead of buyers. SEO matters, but if your content reads like it was written to satisfy an algorithm, your buyers will bounce. Google’s own helpful content guidelines emphasize creating people-first content. Write for the human first. Optimize for search second.

Mistake 2: No conversion path. A blog post without a CTA is a dead end. Every piece of content should have a logical next step for the reader.

Mistake 3: Skipping the middle of the funnel. Most companies have top-of-funnel blog posts and bottom-of-funnel product pages. The middle — comparison guides, case studies, assessment tools — is where leads actually convert.

Mistake 4: Treating all leads equally. A student downloading your guide is not the same as a VP of Operations at a target account downloading your guide. Without lead scoring and segmentation, your sales team wastes time on unqualified leads and loses faith in marketing.

Mistake 5: Giving up too early. Inbound content marketing is not a 90-day experiment. It takes 6-12 months to build meaningful organic traction. Companies that quit at month four miss the compounding curve that makes the whole model work.

Mistake 6: No sales alignment. If marketing and sales aren’t aligned on what constitutes a qualified lead, what the handoff process looks like, and what content sales needs to close deals — the entire system breaks down.

Getting Started: The First 90 Days

If you’re a B2B company considering inbound content marketing — especially if you’re in manufacturing, industrial, or engineered products — here’s what the first 90 days should look like:

Days 1-30: Foundation

Define your ICP with specificity
Audit existing content
Set up (or configure) HubSpot for marketing automation, lead scoring, and CRM
Conduct keyword research and competitive analysis
Build your first topic cluster map

Days 31-60: Launch

Publish your first pillar page
Create 2-3 cluster blog posts
Build your first gated offer (guide, assessment, or template)
Set up your first email nurture workflow
Begin LinkedIn distribution

Days 61-90: Optimize

Analyze early traffic and conversion data
Refine CTAs based on click-through rates
Publish 4-6 more cluster pieces
Launch a second nurture workflow for a different segment
Align with sales on lead scoring thresholds and handoff SLA

By day 90, you won’t have a fully mature inbound engine — but you’ll have the infrastructure in place, your first content compounding in search, and early data to refine your strategy.

The Bottom Line

Inbound content marketing isn’t a tactic. It’s a fundamental shift in how B2B companies build pipeline — from chasing buyers to attracting them. From renting attention through ads and cold outreach to owning attention through content that compounds over time.

For industrial and manufacturing B2B companies, the opportunity is enormous — and largely untapped. Your competitors are still relying on trade shows and cold calls. The companies that invest in inbound content marketing now will own the digital landscape in their verticals for years to come.

The question isn’t whether inbound content marketing works for B2B. The data on that is settled. The question is whether you’ll build the engine before your competitors do.

If you’re ready to explore what an AI-accelerated inbound content marketing program looks like for your business — one person, full marketing department output, pipeline results in months instead of years — let’s talk.

The Best B2B Lead Generation Strategy To Use In 2017

Posted on February 23, 2017February 26, 2024 by Moshe Pesach

Business owners have become an attractive target audience in the advertising world. Many startup companies create new tools and products for businesses and we are seeing an increase in marketing campaigns.
If you ever tried a B2B lead generation campaign, you probably already know that it can be very expensive to generate traffic and leads to that market, and in most cases the campaign results are non-effective and non-profitable.

There are three main reasons for this:

1. Highly Competitive Market
  Google Adwords platform is one of the best sources in analyzing the competitiveness of the market. In the B2B market, big brands can spend a lot of money and choose to bid very high on the most targeted keywords. As a result, it will be very expensive to advertise and compete against those brands.Because the B2B market has proven to be so profitable, it is also crowded.Many companies are competing in it and therefore paying dearly to be seen first in Google Ads or on other ad platforms. It then ends up being a very expensive market that only companies with big advertising budgets can contend in.
2. A Specific and Narrow Audience
  The B2B audience is more complex to target. Not only because it’s only for business owners, but in most cases you want to target businesses in a specific niche. On top of that, you might also want to zone in on a specific size or type of business, or even a specific person within the business. This makes targeting challenging.
3. More Difficult to Convert and Close
  As described previously, the B2B market is a very competitive, offering high-ticket products and services, therefore also making it more challenging to convert to sales.
  Bridging the gap from generating the lead (the first step in the sales funnel) to then closing the sale can become even more difficult when the the product is expensive, and the consumer has several (sometimes less expensive) options to choose from.

Targeting Tactics For B2B Campaigns:

1) Direct Offer Targeting
(A direct campaign for b2b service or product through all ads platforms.)

You can create a very direct campaign in Google Adwords using “Buying Keywords” – the exact keywords people use to search your products and services. In other platforms such as Facebook Ads you can target your audience by demographics, characteristics and even usability such as “page admins” by incorporating direct offer ads added right on their timelines.

Google Adwords Direct Targeting:

When To Use Direct Offer Targeting?
Google Adwords often sees great results, as the person who is searching the product or service has a better chance of being interested in the direct offer and converting into a lead. It can be tested immediately and shows results in no time. In Facebook ads, it might be more difficult as people are utilizing the site for more social reasons, and not necessarily searching for solutions as they scroll through their newsfeed.

When Not To Use Direct Offer Targeting?
Within the many niches of Google Adwords, you’ll find out the competition to be fierce and expensive, not always giving a positive ROI for the campaign. It can sometimes cost much to drive traffic to the offer that a large budget is needed to win the game.

Facebook Ads Direct B2B Targeting:

2) Wide and Indirect Targeting

When attempting to target the B2B audience indirectly, it may mean reaching them when they are not even fully sure what exact solution they are seeking. For example: If I’m selling a Task Manager Tool, the business owner might be searching in Google for “business growth strategies” or “business growth plan” (see pic.) Therefore my product may be very relevant for him.
With Facebook Ads you can reach people that have an interest in “similar products”, or have already bought tools to help business productivity.

Google Indirect Keywords:

Why Use Indirect Targeting?

This method of targeting can drive cheaper traffic with much less competition. Furthermore, it reaches a very a large audience and provides many ideas for SEO and organic traffic.

Facebook Ads Indirect Targeting Options:

When Not to Use Indirect Targeting?

When you need fast conversions and have no patience or time, this method won’t work for you. You probably won’t see high conversion rate from that traffic at the very beginning, and may even attract some non-relevant traffic as well.

What Is The Best Tactic?

The idea is to combine both tactics and use the advantages of each tactic.
As we described in the beginning, it is expensive to generate leads and sales in the B2B market, therefore it is extremely important to create a great sales funnel that will have a higher probability of closing the deal at the end of the day.

In order to do that, you should know a fundamental concept of the Inbound Marketing Methodology – The Buyer’s Journey! The Buyer’s Journey is the process each person goes through from the moment there is an interest in finding a solution to the problem, up to the moment they decide to buy.

> Download our free guide for more tips on lead generation for your company.”/>

The Three Stages of the Buyer’s Journey:

Awareness: The moment the person realizes the problem exists, and is strategizing around what to do.
Consideration: This stage prompts the evaluation of different solutions for the problem. The buyer is trying to understand what is the best fix from all the options there are in the market.
Decision: This is when the buyer wants to decide which brand will deliver the best results for him. There is now consideration between several companies that offer the same solution.

With the buyer’s journey, we understand that we can now prepare our sales funnel and create the best campaign for the B2B audience.

The sales funnel also divides into three parts:

TOFU – Top Of The Funnel:
At the top of the funnel we normally try to give our audience great content that will help them find different solutions for their problem, and show them that they have a fix for their situation.

Blogging, social media, articles, videos or any other content are used to raise their awareness about the solutions.

MOFU – Middle Of The Funnel:
In the middle of the funnel, we first want to convert cold traffic into a MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead). This is done by downloading a simple guide, reading a blog post or commenting on a relevant Facebook post. During this stage, content focus more on benefits of our product or service, and how it can help them in the future. Also at this stage the user is more qualified to consider using our solution, so direct offers may be in play as well.

BOFU – Bottom Of The Funnel:
The last stage is the closing deal. Here you should handle any objections the user may have before buying. The most effective content include successful case studies, testimonials, guarantees or smart pricing.

Most marketers and advertisers tend to compete for the attention of the B2B audience when they are at the second stage of the funnel, which is mostly expensive and highly competitive. There is no need to give up on it completely, but it is very important to give more attention to TOFU, where we can get much cheaper traffic and a bigger audience with less competition. After capturing their attention, we can then follow them up to the other stages of the funnel.

Here’s a simple explanation on how to do it:

Long tail Keyword Research: You should look for long tail keywords that have high search volume and little competition. From here, think about content with real value that you can create with those keywords in mind.
Cheap Traffic Sources: First, optimize your content for Google search results. If you find powerful keywords, this can equate to great traffic opportunities. It is also very easy to drive traffic for solid content from all social media networks. Whether it’s Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or others, people love great content and most likely will engage if it’s truly connecting with them.
Pixel Them: When visitors visit your content you can “paint” them with special pixels, and then follow them with different medias. With tools like Google Analytics and Facebook Ads, you can create different pixel lists and segment them by interactions and demographics
Direct Offers Campaigns: after they have expressed some interest in your message, you can then place your offers in front of your captivated audience on almost any media you want: Facebook Ads, Google Adwords, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc..

With this strategy we achieve:

Cheap Traffic
Bigger Exposure
Better Leads
Higher Conversions and More Sales

Here’s a quick example on how this method can be implemented into your business:

Let’s say you have a product for small businesses. You can see there are several hundreds of searches per month for terms like: “blogging for business” or “blog for business”.

You can create an interesting article about “7 advantages blogging for business has over other marketing methods”.

This article (with some SEO effort) can get to the first page in Google and drive consistent traffic to your website. You can also use social media and advertising platforms to promote this content and drive cheap traffic to your website.

Inside your article you can leave CTA’s (calls to actions) to your offer or to “Lead Magnets” where the visitors can leave their email to receive further great content. All the while, the visitors are pixelized to your remarketing lists and are now ready to see your offers.

Your remarketing lists can be also segmented by visitor behavior and interaction with your content. You should test several combinations until you find your winning and most converting funnel.

As you can see, the old method of direct offer targeting, especially for B2B audience, is getting more competitive and expensive. People are smarter than before and have less patience for annoying ads for things they have never expressed interest in. Nevertheless, the opportunity with B2B lead generation tactics is bigger than ever, as not many companies have adopted the Inbound Marketing Methodology yet.

If you want to win the game in 2017, you should join the movement and implement the tactics that are proven to work.

6 Ideas to Generate More Leads from Your Calls to Action

Posted on February 23, 2017February 26, 2024 by Moshe Pesach

Calls to action (CTA) are the secret to driving people to your offers. If your CTAs aren’t effective at capturing people’s attention and persuading them to the click, then it makes the offer useless.

CTAs can be used on product pages (non-landing pages), in display ads, email, social media, direct mail and pretty much anywhere you can market your offer. But not all CTAs are created equal. In a world where every brand is fighting for consumers’ attention, it’s critical that prospects choose your offer over your competitors. In this article, we’ll uncover tips to creating CTAs that work.

#1 Place Your CTA Where the Eye Can See

A call to action does best “above the fold” – the space where your web page is viewable to the user without having to scroll down. According to heat map analysis, anything “below the fold” will only be viewed by 50% of people who visit your page. Doubling impressions on your CTAs can significantly increase your lead generation count.

#2 Clarity Trumps Persuasion

That is one of my favorite phrases I learned from the folks at Marketing Experiments. Often, marketers will put more focus on being clever than clear. Be crystal clear about what offer is in your CTA. And be specific. If you’re giving away a free guide, say “Download our FREE guide to X.” If you’re hosting a free webinar, say “Register for our FREE webinar on X.” X should clearly convey a compelling benefit of receiving the offer. This is much more effective than “Download Now” or “Get a Free Article.” These simply aren’t specific enough.

#3 Use Contrast to Make CTAs Stand Out

A call-to-action is meant to stand out, so if your CTA blends in too much with your site design, no one will notice it. You want as many eyeballs to land on that call-to-action as possible, so use contrasting colors to make the CTA stand out, and more importantly, use design to make it clear that it’s a clickable call-to-action.

#4 Link Your CTA to a Dedicated Landing Page

This tip might seem minor, but it’s incredible how often businesses miss this opportunity. Calls-to-action are meant to send visitors to a dedicated landing page where they receive a specific offer. Do not use CTAs to drive people to your homepage. Even if your CTA is about your brand or product (and perhaps not an offer like a download), still send them to a targeted landing page that is relevant to what they are looking for. If you have the opportunity to use a CTA, send them to a page that will convert them into a lead.

#5 Promote Offers on Product Pages

CTAs shouldn’t be one size fits all. If your company offers various products or services, you may want to consider creating a different offer for each of them. Then you can place CTAs linking to each offer on the website pages that are most relevant to that offer.

#6 Thank You Pages Are Great CTA Real Estate

Even if someone completes a form on your website (they’ve converted as a lead), don’t stop there. Increasing engagement is also a top priority for marketers so that prospects turn into loyal fans.
Once someone reaches a “thank you page,” the page that a visitor arrives on after completing a form, use that space as an opportunity to promote more offers and content. For example, if a visitor to our site downloads a guide on email marketing, we can then give them another offer for an email RFP for a chance to see a demo of our email marketing platform.

Internet marketing expert Jeff Bullas summarized it well: “Creating a persuasive call to action takes time. It needs to be simple enough so that users can easily understand your message and at the same time compelling enough to persuade them to do what you want them to do. That being said, it is essential to remember that practice makes perfect. Be experimental and see what works best for your audience.”

Need more awesome tips for generating leads ?

12 Most important marketing tactics to grow your business in 2017

Posted on January 8, 2017February 26, 2024 by Moshe Pesach

At the start of every new year we say to ourselves that this year is going to be different: “This year we will set some real goals and achieve them.” “This year we will be proud of ourselves and blown away by the progress that our business made.”

Yet usually, we wake up on the last day of the year and feel that something went wrong… again! We look at our business and see that we aren’t even close to where we wanted to be this year. We blame our planning, our goal setting, our optimism and our lack of time to handle everything.

So, how can we make this year different?
If you’re serious about seeing significant growth in your business, here are the 12 most important marketing tactics to focus on in 2017:

1) Smart Goals

It is not enough to set goals and simply believe that they will happen (we’ve tried it and been there), we need to set goals that we are fully committed to and passionate about.
In our inbound marketing methodology we use “SMART GOALS” as our compass for the client’s success journey. The SMART goal framework stands for:

Specific – Your goals should be clear to your team, so that everyone understands what needs to be done and who is responsible for what.
Measurable – You should be able to check if you have reached your goals exactly by numbers, and not by assumptions.
Attainable – You should set realistic goals that are actually achievable. . It is very frustrating to fall short of a goal every time – don’t set yourself up for failure!
Relevant – Your goals must be related directly to your business.
Timely – Your goals must be mapped out within a specific timeframe.

Without clear and measurable goals your rocket might fly high but actually miss the target! Know what you want to achieve by breaking down your goals “SMARTly” – with details!

2) Quick Wins

Half of all new businesses fail within the first five years – which is why you want to see positive results in your company as soon as possible. You must not depend only on strategies that take months to see progress. Instead, look for marketing activities that can get results fast in order to fuel and motivate both your team and yourself.

Every business has an opportunity to see fast interactions with its audience. The most common tactic is PPC advertising, yet you could find many other options such as flash sale to your email list, viral contests on Facebook, etc. No matter what you’re planning to do this year, start seeing your potential results as fast as possible, in order to build confidence and meet your goals for the year.

3) PERSONALIZATION

Your prospects are becoming less patient to marketing messages that don’t talk directly to their specific problems. In 2017 you should be much more aware of this, and adapt your marketing system to this environment.

For example, if you used to manage direct lead generation campaigns with PPC traffic, in 2017 it is going to be more challenging to get results. There are more and more ads on all digital platforms, the competition is getting fierce and expensive, and the people are more wise and aware of it.

With new technology and smart strategies you can send the right message to the right person at the right time. You need to segment your audience with more specific targeting and personalize your message to their state of mind. For example: Don’t advertise your service or product to the general audience, but instead send relevant and great content, segment them by their interest and interaction and then send them a specific offer, relevant to what they were interested in.

With today’s technology, it’s easier than ever!

4) Multiple Conversion Points

Many companies rely mainly on just one sales funnel, and try to sell the same thing to the same audience over and over again. This can be repetitive, and ineffective.

If you want to see exponential growth this year, you must create several different offers that can be delivered to your prospects in case they don’t convert on your main offer. Once you create different conversion points, you will significantly increase your sales opportunities and therefore your income.

5) Automation

Today’s marketing efforts can seem huge, and overwhelming. If you don’t automate some of your tasks, half of them may not even get done.

So – what are the main things you should automate? Here are some ideas:

Lead Nurturing: With a well-planned email automation process, you can nurture cold leads and turn them into real sales opportunities.
Post Scheduling: Whether it’s blog posts or social media content, most of this can be scheduled far in advance so you can let the computer do the work, and focus on the distribution of the content
Content curation: Use tools such as Google Alerts, Buzzsumo or others to help listen to conversations online that would be of interest to you, chatter around your brand, and industry-related content that is applicable to your audience. This makes it easy for you to share with your listeners.

6) Mapping Your Buyers Journey

There are three stages your prospect goes through before making decision to buy from you. The stages are: Awareness, Consideration and Decision.

If you don’t want to flood prospects with the wrong content and offers, you must map your buyer’s journey very clearly and organize your content planning and campaigns based on his or her buying stage. This makes it easier for you create the right content and lead your prospect through a smart pipeline until they are ready to buy from you.

Overall, a smart sales funnel will help you sell more easily, without being too pushy or aggressive in any stage of the sale.

7) Structured Sales Funnel

Your team is the most important yet most expensive asset in your business. Build a rock-solid sales funnel that will provide your sales team with high-quality leads, thus allowing them to work faster and smarter.

8) MULTI-CHANNEL TRAFFIC SOURCES

You can’t rely solely on one source of traffic. A strong and long-lasting business is always searching for new traffic sources that intelligently interact with one another, creating an unstoppable lead machine.

Each traffic source you use must be analyzed and tracked with a clear ROI report. This sheds light on which one has the highest benefit and where to focus your efforts on.

Multi-channel traffic sources are crucial for sustainable business and must be planned into your growth strategy.

9) Blogging

Research shows that businesses that use blogs generate higher traffic and significantly more leads than those that don’t.
Here are some stats to support it:

Business blogging leads to 55% more website visitors (Source: Hubspot)
Small businesses that blog get 126% more lead growth than small businesses that do not blog. (source: Impactbnd.com)
B2B marketers who use blogs generate 67% more leads per month than those who do not.
B2C companies that blog generate 88% more leads per month than those that do not.
On average, companies that blog receive 434% more indexed pages. (Source: Hubspot)

What more reason do you need to start blogging now?

10) Social Media Knock Out

Social media is not just a great source of traffic but also a main platform to engross and build trust with your audience.

Because of this, social media marketing should be an integral part of your businesses’ digital marketing strategy. By having the right social media marketing strategy, your brand can help you stay ahead of your competitor, and engage and interact with your audience, which ultimately will have a huge impact on your business.While using it to create raving fans that genuinely want to spread the word about you to their friends and family., it simultaneously becomes an amazing viral prospects lead machine when used with care and authenticity.

However, social media can backfire if you abuse it with too hard of a sales pitch, or not responding well to your audience; more specifically, unhappy customers.
Use it wisely, use it with care – and use it more often! Social media is dominating the way people communicate around the world.

11) Reports

I have found that so many businesses don’t actually know their numbers. If you don’t know and control your numbers, then odds are you are losing money, or at the minimum not earning as much as you can.

What’s your average sales conversion rate? What is your best traffic source that brings the biggest deals to the business? What is your EPC (Earning per Click) by media?

Do you know the answers to these questions? If not, we need to do some homework – together. It is crucial for you to understand exactly which source brings you money, and where you should invest your next campaign. Yet, without basic reports that will give you control over your business results, this is difficult to do.

12) All Platforms

Mobile, apps, all screen sizes…. nowadays, people have less time and are less patient for non user-friendly interfaces. Adapt yourself to all platforms… or LOSE!

There are tons of responsive websites out there that have poor mobile interfaces. Chances are high that if a mobile user clicks to sign up and is taken to a tiny, non-mobile site asking for too many details, they will lose interest. It is crucial to optimize the conversion funnel for the user. Today more than ever, consider simplifying all of your platforms to make it as simple and easy as possible for all users.

Extra – Inbound Marketing with Hubspot

There is the old way of digital marketing and then there is… Inbound marketing! Inbound marketing is a methodology that creates a solid and long-lasting marketing system for any business. It utilizes all of the 12 points discussed above and fits them it into one great business execution plan.

Hubspot platform helps us manage and control all aspects of the methodology and automates it into the highest level of marketing performance. It even has artificial intelligence that optimizes and tailors each massage, to reach the right audience, at the exact time – converting the best leads you’ll ever get. Amazing!

The sooner you join the Inbound Marketing Movement the faster you’ll see change and growth in your business. Don’t get left behind!