Inbound Sales Network can tailor a program to meet your needs and your budget. By the hour, by the project, by the year – we are flexible to meet your marketing needs both big and small.
Market Strategy Development
- Competitive Research Assessment
One of the most common mistakes we see in businesses today is the assumption that a website is the same thing as a marketing plan. While it’s true that your website may be the most important reflection of your business, and your brand, even tremendous success on the web can be fleeting – remember it’s just code that can be easily copied by competitors. That’s why the development of the entire marketing strategy is SO IMPORTANT. A website should be a reflection of your plan, not the other way around. Your site should be dynamic, responding to new information, new customer needs, competitor manoeuvres – and ALWAYS consistent with your brand image. While the Internet is an exciting business opportunity, it must be harnessed (properly/effectively) to meet the precise needs of your customers and deliver value to your bottom line. Out-sourcing your Internet marketing needs to Inbound Sales Network is smart. You can keep an eye on your business while we make sure your web presence is finely tuned to your company’s needs.
- Marketing Plan Development
If you don’t have a marketing plan, you are probably wasting a LOT of money! A marketing plan is a research-based roadmap to create profitable growth for your business. Some of the elements of a plan include an examination of the growth potential in your industry, the nature of competition, customer needs, and threats. The plan doesn’t have to be expensive or complicated, but it does have to be RIGHT. Following an inaccurate plan is worse than having no plan at all! That’s why you should hire somebody with experience, insight and strong business sense to help you create a plan that helps you grow in the most cost-effective manner possible. By outsourcing something as important as your marketing plan to Inbound Sales Network, you can access world-class talent and decades of experience at a fraction of the cost of full-time resources.
- Product and Service Positioning and Branding
EVERYTHING you say and do, and EVERYTHING you don’t say and do, communicates. Discerning customers have an unprecedented amount of information at their fingertips, allowing them to judge, compare and evaluate. Your brand is your promise to your customer. What is that promise? The best service? The lowest price? Cutting-edge style? What is the message you provide to your customer base? Is everything consistent with your promise? If you don’t actively, passionately and relentlessly protect and promote you brand, it will be done for you by your customer word of mouth and the position of your competitors. In the end, nothing about your business is as important as your reputation, your promise, your brand” - because that is ultimately what is going to keep your customer coming back and bringing new customers to your door. Do you have an accurate view of your brand? Is your brand promise aligned with your customer needs? Is everything you do consistent with your brand promise?
- Project Management
We recognize that a marketing plan is ineffective if it isn’t skilfully executed. A website isn’t successful unless it results in new sales leads. We won’t rest until your business goals are realized. We are available to see your projects through to successful completion.
Marketing Communications
- Message Development
Every good marketing planning process starts with the customer. Inbound Sales Network can help you look at your customers and their needs in a new way. By leading you through a strategic needs assessment, we can help you hone in on new ways to serve your customers more effectively and more profitably. The heart of competitive advantage is listening to your customers effectively and responding with valuable new products, services, and strategies to beat your competition. And speaking of competition … let us help you take a closer look at what the other guys are doing. If you are trying to compete with a “me-too” offering, we need to help you create a distinctive value proposition that enables you to break away from the pack. As the great hockey player Wayne Gretzky once said, “A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.” That simple wisdom hold true in our complicated world of marketing and lead generation. Our research services can help you find your strategic advantage – an area not served, or under-served, by the market – and help you score big wins!
- Complete Creative Services
Once you have determined your marketing strategy and brand message, it’s time to put a clever strategy into play to persuade potential customers to consume more of what you sell! The most effective advertising has even transcended the products they sell to become part of the popular culture. Entire TV programs have been dedicated to the “World’s Funniest Commercials.” Super Bowl ad viewing has become almost as important to water cooler office talk as the football game itself. Buzzwords and catch phrases from commercials routinely become part of the world vocabulary. It’s not uncommon for the advertising icons to become beloved and maybe more popular as the products they represent. Another critical aspect of the creative effort is WHERE the promotion takes place. With the advent of social networking media such as blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace, the options for business advertisers are more exciting and promising than ever. Some of the most captivating and effective creative efforts are taking place on internet-based social networking platforms that didn’t even exist five years ago. Inbound Sales Network has a network of creative professionals who can help determine the most effective strategy and medium for your message at the lowest possible cost.
- Direct Marketing
To some, “direct marketing” may equate to “direct mail.” While that still makes sense for some business needs, the ability to reach customers in a very targeted and meaningful manner has improved exponentially in just a few short years. Here’s one example you may see every day: When you do a search on Google, do you notice the ads on the top and sides of the search results? They’re not there randomly or by accident. Technology can help us find customers who are looking for YOU and then speak to them in a very targeted and effective way.
- Media Strategy
The marketing mix available to you has never been more diverse – or overwhelming. Thirty years ago, the choices were straightforward: network television, radio and the local newspaper. Today, ad revenues for those channels are declining rapidly and/as new channels are emerging. For one client, an entire marketing campaign was built off of a professional networking website! The cost? Nothing. But even new media such as social networking takes a focus on business fundamentals to produce results. KNOW your objectives before you DO ANTHING. That’s right. Don’t just set up a website, Twitter, Blog, etc. without clear objectives of what you want to accomplish. Why? Because you can waste big bucks and time executing the wrong tactics. Let us help you sort through the options and develop the ultimate marketing mix for your business.
- Measurement and Response
Peter Drucker, the father of American management, famously said, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” Our philosophy is to measure everything we do … learn from the results … and adjust rapidly. And then repeat! The market is too dynamic for you to think that yesterday’s promotional strategies will continue to guarantee tomorrow’s results. Proper measurement can provide an indicator of success as well as competitive problems.
Website Development
- Content development and design
I often hear business people complain about how hard and expensive it is to work with web design companies. What’s the problem? Let me give you an example from my own experience. I approached a local web company with a design opportunity. I visited their lush and ultra-hip downtown office space and was greeted by a receptionist who called my account manager … who was an intermediary between me and an artistic director. Then, the artistic director assigned a creative manager to my account to actually do the work. Do we need all three management layers to create a website? Do we need high-rent offices and walls of plasma screens? Will the person actually doing my work understand my business enough to translate my brand promise to web design? No, no, NO! Quality web development does not have to be hard and expensive. At Inbound Marketing Solutions, we can help you envision an appropriate site that will represent/reflect your business and work. We work with a network of professionals who are among the best in their field – and they have little or no overhead so we can pass the saving on to you. Our web development and design services are typically half the cost of a big-agency quote. And we make sure that every word of copy and every design element is aligned with your business needs and moves your story forward.
- Search Engine Optimization
In the past four years, I bought a car, a house, and more than $20,000 in consumer electronics. My first stop for research and information? A web search engine. And I’m not alone. Today, the Internet is overwhelmingly the first place to go for shopping, entertainment, education, and information. Consumers, suppliers, potential employees and other stakeholders will all be trying to find you on popular search engines such as Google and Yahoo. Not having your business show up in the top level of searches probably means leaving you’re leaving money on the table. Getting those juicy search results is not easy and the means of obtaining them are constantly shifting/changing. That’s why Search Engine Optimization - ,SEO - has spawned an entirely new industry over the last 10 years. Big companies, maybe even your competitors, may have teams of people or an entire department dedicated to the marketing wizardry it takes to make the search engines work for their products. SEO is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a website search engines via “natural” (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results, or the higher it “ranks,” the more searchers will visit that site. As a strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines. It probably doesn’t make sense for you to devote that kind effort to SEO but you can’t ignore the importance of it either. Out-sourcing SEO to Inbound Marketing Solutions might be the right move if your business depends on Internet-based leads.