Sean Parnell
Innovaxis Is Your HubSpot Gold Partner
After years of helping clients get the most out of their marketing automation capabilities, Innovaxis is proud to be taking the next step as an official HubSpot Gold Partner.
From Pardot to SharpSpring, Marketo, and more, we have worked in a lot of marketing automation platforms. And – simply put – HubSpot is the best.
As the most powerful and intuitive marketing automation software we’ve seen, HubSpot is flexible, agile, and scalable to a company’s needs. HubSpot is a great option for companies who do not have a CRM, but for those that do, the platform seamlessly integrates with existing CRMs for streamlined marketing efforts.
We have used HubSpot for years and have experienced the benefits of the platform firsthand.
... Continue Reading >>Accelerating Your Rebound through Digital Marketing
We are proud to be a member of the Illinois Manufacturing Association (IMA). The following article, written by the Innovaxis content marketing team, appears in the 2020 Q3 Edition of Illinois Manufacturer.
The COVID-19 pandemic has put lives and livelihoods around the world at risk, and Illinois manufacturers have shared the pain. Manufacturers of any size could relate to Caterpillar Chairman and CEO Jim Umpleby when he said the pandemic’s impact was more severe than “any cyclical downturn we had envisioned.”
Crisis-driven orders for medical products, food and first responder equipment have kept some manufacturers busy, but that demand won’t last forever.
Most Illinois manufacturers anticipate a rebound, but they face concerns as they restart operations: returning employee health,
... Continue Reading >>How to Grow Your Business Out of Uncertainty
If you’re struggling to conduct “business as usual” right now, you’re not alone. Whether it’s a global pandemic or a more ordinary hurdle, uncertainty can be crippling.
If you think of your brand as a story, “uncertainty” is your new villain – your nemesis in times of crisis. But there is a path to a happy ending, and we can help you get there.
Here are four steps for growing your way out of uncertainty.
Step 1. Embrace the Situation
Uncertainty is often a product of unexpected change; finding your way out means accepting that things are different. You certainly don’t have to like it. But there’s a lot of opportunity out there—there always is—though it can be stressful as we work through the churn.
... Continue Reading >>B2B Ecommerce that Drives Sales
Welcome to the transactional side of B2B businesses: ecommerce.
Rising digital expectations make it difficult to keep up with the promise of one-click purchases (ahem, Amazon) but, if ecommerce is right for your business, it can create an entirely new revenue stream to supplement current sales, sell outside your current geographical area, expand into new markets, and appeal to those who want to buy without any human interaction.
Many, particularly manufacturers, have three main concerns regarding ecommerce:
- Channel Conflict: businesses with channel partners and distributors worry that they will be stepping on the interests of partners they’ve built relationships with
- Implementation: it is costly,
SEO & The Role of Content Marketing
“Creating compelling and useful content will likely influence your website more than any of the other factors discussed here.” – Google SEO Starter Guide
Once all of your current web pages and blogs are fully optimized for SEO, you’ll see significant rankings increases often 2-30% or more. For keywords where you’re not yet ranking on Google page one’s top 3 results, you will need more content to drive them higher in addition to offsite link building, which we will cover later.
After brainstorming and prioritizing new content ideas, you will have a new content calendar. We recommend that you create at least three new website content items per month that include fully optimized page names,
... Continue Reading >>#fail: How to Completely Screw Up Your B2B SEO
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the most thoroughly understood subjects in digital marketing – just ask 20 different SEO experts for help and you’ll get 20 different plans.
Hire them all and presto! You’ve got… a lot of plans.
If that seems confusing, you could try to learn it on your own. Keeping up with Google is fun – there are only 500-600 ranking algorithm updates per year.
We’ve Seen It All
With a landscape that changes every couple of clicks, SEO know-how requires a lot of keeping up. But SEO know-how-not-to is its own kind of expertise as well.
We’ve optimized websites since the days of Lycos and AltaVista.
... Continue Reading >>5 Key Building Blocks of Successful B2B SEO
There are numerous components to search engine optimization (SEO) in business-to-business (B2B) marketing, so how do you know where to start. Here are five key building blocks that, once mastered, will increase traffic for any website by 30-300% or more.
Keyword Rankings
“The power of keyword research lies in better understanding your target market and how they are searching for your content, services, or products.” – Moz
Tracking keyword rankings is central to the success of all SEO activities. Keywords are a leading indicator for lead generation, along with organic search traffic and lead generation. Rank for the wrong keywords, and you will have wasted a lot of time and money.
... Continue Reading >>#fail: How to Suck at B2B Marketing Strategy
They say 80% of businesses fail, so it’s actually pretty easy to suck at B2B marketing strategy.
Still, a broken clock is right twice a day and you could get lucky, so here are some tips for covering all the bases in your next strategic marketing debacle.
Don’t Listen to Your Customers
The quickest way to fail is to ignore the people who might actually buy from you.
You know what’s best for your channel partners and customers, so why bother with getting their input? After all, it would be better if we didn’t have to deal with them at all, right? So why would we want to [gulp] actually talk to them?
... Continue Reading >>Why SEO?
Before you jump into the bottomless pool of opinion on how to do B2B search engine optimization (SEO), it’s important to consider an often-overlooked question in the overheated debate around SEO strategy: Why do it? What is the underlying goal?
SEO is perhaps the single most misunderstood factor around the process of creating a B2B website in the hope of converting visitors into customers: if you don’t have high-quality content aligned to a sales and marketing strategy, an SEO strategy is worthless.
The Whole Point
Strange but true – SEO efforts often overlook the fundamental purpose behind the whole exercise: delivering information to a target audience in a way that will prompt them to buy what you’re selling.
... Continue Reading >>B2B Messaging Under Duress: 3 Recommendations for Managing COVID-19 Communications
Your clients have a lot of things to worry about right now. First of course, is protecting the health and safety of their employees and others around them.
But while that’s the priority, the economic risks are hard to separate from our other worries right now. Your clients, like all of us, are navigating the health threat while also scrambling to keep it from spilling over into a threat to their businesses.
How do you communicate with them without simply adding to the noise, or worse – creating the impression that you put profits ahead of public health?
Here are three recommendations on how to communicate with your customers or prospective customers during this crisis:
Share the State of Your Operations
Your customers need to know if there are changes to your capacity or availability.
... Continue Reading >>