Marketing via email gained traction around the turn of the 21st century as personal email accounts became common. Email marketing remains a solid way to generate leads and convert prospects for your business, as long as you do it correctly.

What comprises effective marketing has changed substantially over the past few years. There's increased consumer skepticism and plenty of new technology. As you develop your brand's marketing strategy you need to note what the current effective marketing tactics are and what  impacts consumer buying habits. Clever brands, business owners, and startup entrepreneurs realize that social proof offers vast potential for growth, and they're using positive social proof to influence purchasing behavior.

Over time, the blogosphere has become a huge, congested, and noisy space where hordes of blogs are all fighting to get noticed. Readers have adapted to this environment by learning to be expert scanners, and they quickly grew weary of clicking on a compelling headline only to find mediocre content. Most, maybe even 90%, bounce within 10-20 seconds.

If you were to ask any number of companies about their content strategy, most of them would tell you about continuing content creation. Maybe they'd mention monitoring performance of their content for insights about what their editorial calendar for future months should include. The best online marketers know better. They understand the importance of looking at past content with an eye toward adjusting pieces to improve results into the future.

Traditional marketing, inbound marketing, social media marketing, content marketing, online marketing, outbound marketing, “push” marketing? Sometimes it seems like the marketing world has gotten a bit overly complex in recent years, doesn’t it? So what ARE the differences between all those seemingly different niches listed above? We’ll admit, we cheated a bit on that list, as several of those are actually synonyms for the same set of tactics.

In the marketing and startup worlds, "inbound" has become such a buzzword that we may not even remember a time when we weren't talking about it. But where did inbound marketing as we know it come from? And why is it here to stay?

You've bought in to the idea of content marketing, and you're following all the best practices. The customer research is done and you're writing content targeted at your buyer personas. You're starting to see results. There's been a boost in organic traffic. Shares on social media are up. You are psyched, and if you have a team, they're psyched, too. But you're also a little overwhelmed by the amount of work it took to get to this point.

A branding guideline, or a brand style guide, or a style guide, is a document that details all the particulars of how your company presents itself to the world. It's a reference tool that enables your startup to be consistent in delineating what your brand looks, feels, and sounds like.

From the current crop of articles out there, one might get the impression that inbound marketing was set to eliminate outbound in the battle for eyeballs. We don’t think that’s an accurate assessment at all. In fact, if you look closely you’ll see that a growing number of agencies and in-house marketing departments alike are adopting a hybrid approach. They’re taking the best pieces of each methodology and combining their power to improve ROI even more than either could do alone.

Contrary to what seems to be a commonly held belief, content marketing is not a one-and-done operation. Just as content marketing is itself a long-game, you have to be in it for the long haul to see the kinds of amazing results you’ve read about. But then, we hope most of you already know this part.

“Inbound” and “lead generating” may not be two phrases that you often think of together. Well, it may be time you did. Inbound marketing is a long game, that’s true. However, that doesn’t mean it can’t also work for you in the near term as well, like bringing in quality leads. There are, in fact, many ways inbound marketing tactics can help increase lead generation, for today’s article we’re going to focus in on three primary aspects of your inbound strategy that have a particular impact on lead generation: content, social media presence, and website optimization/SEO.

The idea of a content marketing funnel is to create content that resonates with your target market at every stage of their buyer’s journey. Those stages, in case you're new to this topic, are Awareness, Evaluation/Consideration, Conversion/Purchase, and Delight/Retention.