While everyone is celebrating their Leaving Cert results, we thought we’d join in and celebrate our own exam results!
We’re delighted to say that having completed 18 in-depth classes covering each facet of inbound marketing and passed a comprehensive certification exam, we are now “Inbound Marketing Certified Professionals”(ooooooooh!).
In order to receive the Inbound Marketing Certification, we had to attend a variety of courses and pass a comprehensive certification exam, demonstrating knowledge of subject matter expertise in the following areas:
- Advanced Search Engine Optimisation and Ranking Improvement Strategies
- How to Blog Effectively for Businesses
- Social Media and Building Community
- Business Applications for Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other Social Networks
- Viral Marketing
- Creating Strong Calls to Action and Effective Landing Pages
- Inbound Lead Nurturing (Turning Leads into Sales)
- Successful Email Marketing
- Analyzing Results and Demonstrating ROI
Ok, enough of the sales talk now. While a fancy certificate is all well and good, it has given us more insight into taking advantage of search to build your profile online, since the majority of people will search for a service now on google and other search engines. This is in contrast to outbound marketing where people used to have to “buy, beg, or bug their way in” via paid advertisements or paying commissioned sales people.
While we are not implying that this rules out the need for traditional advertising, it provides a base for growing your online presence so that you can capture potential new customers/clients through search engine traffic. We’ve tried and tested this ourselves over the past few months, and now get regular enquiries through our website from search traffic. We’ve also been testing this with other clients, who have also reported increases in enquiries through their websites.
This also adds value to your website, rather than a “build it and they will come” attitude, you can give it a significant injection of search traffic and potential sales, which costs just an hour or so of your time, every few days. So next time you are searching for a service/product, give some thought to how you found the service, and which sites you trusted more. Are they the ones that just repost other articles and try to put a new shine on others work, or is it the ones with genuinely unique content and relevant information?
Since we’ve been back to school now, got some gold stars and smiley faces, it’s inspired us to do some extra homework and we’re in the middle of putting together a FREE Beginners Guide to Facebook for Business. Keep an eye out for it soon!