JDR Group's 'Digital Prosperity' Blog

For every business process there is a software application claiming to make it easier, cheaper and more efficient. Each platform costs money and may or may not sit well with other software you use. So it is with marketing automation – and you reach a stage where you have to ask “is it worth the money?”

This client, an international book distributer, initially approached JDR for a website redesign which led to hosting their website with us. They originally planned to hire their own employee to handle all of their marketing in-house but made the decision to outsource to the JDR team instead. Here’s how we helped this business.

Producing regular articles for the blog on your website is a way of significantly growing your website traffic, building an audience, establishing your knowledge/expertise and raising awareness of your business. With our marketing clients, we’ll write and publish their blog articles for them which leads to some fantastic results, and part of our programme is to review the progress each month using website analytics.

If you want to increase your turnover you must increase your sales, right? Great - so where do we start?

Well in order to increase your sales you are, in turn, going to need more people to be interested in your products and services. So how do we do that?

Data harvested from analytics platforms is only useful if it is accurate, so it’s disconcerting when apparent discrepancies appear between different platforms over the same metric. It is common for businesses to have Google Analytics, and to also to have additional analytics from software programmes like HubSpot, Lead Forensics, or built-in website stats. When businesses have two or more forms of web stats/analytics, they often show different figures.

Another year, and another series of Love Island draws to a close. It’ll be back next year but it’s been a controversial one this time, and it seems to be all anyone can talk about! I bet there’s a lot of you reading this who watched every episode – following all the storylines, who’s coupling up, who’s being evicted… but were you also following up on the best marketing tools to help your business grow and expand? Instead of voting for Amber and Greg, we vote marketing automation!

I have said it before and I will say it again when it comes to social media: even though it may not seem like it sometimes, it’s quality - not quantity - that counts. And guess what… Instagram agrees with me!

Zoho and HubSpot are both automation platforms offering CRM and sales features. There are plenty of areas in which the two applications overlap, and for this reason Zoho is sometimes seen as an alternative to HubSpot. Zoho is cheap, easy to use and has plenty of features, which you can scale up so you only pay for the functions you need. Moreover, an entry-level version of Zoho is available for free for up to 10 users.

You may have heard sentiments like these spoken about content marketing:

‘Effective lead generation depends on high-quality content.’ ‘Content is king.’ ‘Content marketing is the cornerstone of lead generation.’

Hold for a moment… all these expressions emphasise just how important content – and especially written content – is for an effective marketing strategy. But sometimes they confuse the matter by failing to explain what exactly content marketing is, and why you should bother with it at all.

In this article our intention is to cut past the jargon and hype to answer three fundamental questions about content marketing:

A brand new HubSpot account has no contacts, and one of the first things to do is add your existing contacts into the CRM database. So how do you go about doing it?