You may be wondering to yourself what exactly a “persona” is and how is it a secret weapon? It is critical to be aware of your prospects' personas along their buyer’s journey with your company. As an inbound marketing company, you will see someone go from a stranger, to a lead, to a customer, all the way through to a promoter and the persona comes into play every step of the way.

Creating the Persona 

To put it simply, personas are representations of ideal customers you create to help your team develop focused content formation and nurturing strategies. To create personas, you will use information you already have about your target market or current customers. There are several aspects you need to consider to make a comprehensive persona. Here are some questions you can begin with followed by examples:

Updated: February 15, 2016

Inbound marketing is, simply put, quite popular these days. If you have any doubt about that just look at HubSpot, a leader in inbound marketing. Founded in 2006, it went public last year, is valued at over 1 billion dollars and has over 15,000 customers. That goes to show the popularity of this approach to marketing. If you are unfamiliar with the definition, read about inbound marketing on our blog. You don’t want to miss out on this massive internet marketing shift.

While all of this is fascinating, we know you really clicked to see our recommendations on blogs, so here are the top 7 inbound marketing blogs we recommend you keep up with:

Perhaps the most important element of the inbound methodology is the final stage: Delight. This is what truly sets the inbound approach apart from traditional sales tactics. Delighting your customer goes a long way for an inbound marketing company’s reputation. Delighting your customer builds trust, which is vital to developing a meaningful, helpful relationship with them.

If you haven’t implemented an inbound marketing strategy to improve your company in 2016, then now is the time! It doesn’t matter if you’re the CEO or the CMO, this blog is for you. I bet there are sales people knocking at your door and flooding your email with different services that they offer to give you the strategy and internet services to help your business. But who do you trust? This is where an inbound marketing consultant can help you.

It’s not just marketing that has been transformed by the inbound approach. The sales process has also changed significantly over time as well due to the changing of the buyer’s journey. As an inbound marketing company, aligning your sales practices with the inbound methodology is key to making sure your marketing efforts convert into sales.

Few people have ever been excited by a pop-up ad appearing in front of an online article. There is no thrill from a favorite program being interrupted by a commercial. Few moments seem to drag longer than the five-second countdown on YouTube’s “Skip Ad” button.

Ghosts, goblins, zombies, and witches got nothin’ on the scary stuff that may sneak up on an inbound marketing company at any given moment. It’s not the danger that lurks in the deep web. It’s not the mystery behind the curtain of the all-powerful Google. It’s not even the creeper factor of the suspiciously timed emails we receive relating to a conversation we just had. If you dare, keep reading to learn what scares the inbound marketing staff at Half a Bubble Out, and how we slay these marketing vampires sucking the blood out of your business.

In order to fully connect your entire marketing strategy with your social media strategy, it’s important to invest in social media training. Businesses often turn their heads to this, but it’s a critical step. Don’t make this mistake!

As a marketer or business owner, you may have heard the terms inbound marketing and outbound marketing at some point along the way. You may be wondering “what is the difference between the two?” or “why do I even care?” It can be helpful to know the difference, especially so you can know the most effective way to allocate your marketing dollars. Here are a couple of quick definitions of inbound and outbound marketing:

Website redesign projects seem to be born out of a variety of different issues unique to your business. But usually, if narrowed down to the core level, a redesign is necessary for one of two reasons: either there is an issue with the way your website “looks” or the way it “functions.” Quite possibly it could be a combination of factors that include both the “look and function.” Whatever your motivation is for a website redesign, there are quite a few things to consider and questions to be asked.