Inbound marketing is designed to attract people to your website by providing remarkable content that helps them solve problems in their research process.

Let’s face it. Paid search campaigns are not the easiest thing in the world to manage. Some companies hire an overpriced agency hoping for a magic PPC bullet that will cure their website’s terrible performance. Others follow the misguided advice of their well-intentioned marketing manager who wants to save costs and keep it in-house—only to realize after the fact that they’ve wasted thousands of dollars trying to manage something they don’t understand.

Have you ever thought about doing paid search advertising campaigns but you're not sure where to start? Or maybe you currently have someone running them for your company but you don't feel like you're getting as much out of them as you'd like? Hopefully these tips will help you get started or improve your current efforts!

Online advertising campaigns play a leading role in reaching your target market, but how do you know the right people are getting your message? How do you know that your hard-earned advertising budget is being spent in the right place and that you're actually getting a reasonable rate of return? 

I just returned from Inbound 2015, where over 10,000 inbound evangelists gathered to talk agency, sales, and marketing. I'm a bit of a conference cynic so I was a little skeptical about how much actual value I would gather that would help DMD and its clients grow, but I have to say...Good stuff!

The way we sell has changed.

Sales used to be ruled by people who were seen as being naturally good with people. People who were good at schmoozing and getting their prospects to like them in order to buy their product or service. The way reps prospected for clients was totally different. There were much more prevalent direct marketing and sales methods, such as door-to-door and cold calling. And after a sale, there might not be much interaction besides the occasional "checking in." To quote Roger Sterling from Mad Men, the series based on the advertising industry in the 1960s, "The day you sign a client is the day you start losing them." That was the old mentality.

Smarketing meetings are regular meetings between sales and marketing departments, often held monthly. The meetings are a time for the two teams come together to review conversion rate and activity level goals, celebrate successes, and discuss next steps to improve.

Welcome back to our series on smarketing (sales + marketing). In our first post we explained what smarketing is and then we shared a Q&A with Hubspot sales rep, MJ, on how inbound marketing campaigns help her sell. This week we want to touch on some system set up items that should be done before your first smarketing meeting, to make sure it's productive.

Enter, "closed-loop marketing."

Connected Systems

What is closed-loop marketing, in non-jargon speak? It means we can easily see who is a visitor, lead, or customer in your online marketing database.

In the first post in our Smarketing series, we gave a general overview of what Smarketing is and some tips for building buy-in with your staff. This week, we have a Q&A with our HubSpot partner sales rep, Mae Joyce Gay. Now you can hear straight from someone at the company pioneering these new ways of marketing and selling what works for them—specifically her, as a sales rep. Here it is: 

In the previous blog, Are You Planning for Failure, I discussed some conversion rates to consider when determining whether your business is doing enough marketing to generate enough leads—to generate enough sales—and to hit its profit and revenue goals for the year.

This week, I want to introduce the concept of Smarketing, which is a fairly new concept just like inbound marketing, that can help guarantee you're getting the best quality leads and that those leads are turning into sales.

Smarketing stands for sales and marketing. The key shift here by smashing the two words together is *alignment.* Traditionally, sales and marketing teams have mostly been at odds. Sales thinks marketing is out of touch and marketing thinks sales doesn't follow up enough on leads.