Content marketing seems to be the buzzword these days. It's certainly an easy term to throw around. Exactly what tactics and techniques does content marketing encompass? And why should your company invest in creating content?

Looking for a great way to engage leads, prospects, and keeps customers “in the know” about your company/product? Email marketing is your answer.

Email marketing allows you to target a specific market audience; it draws people, and enforces a call-to-action. Here are a few tips to help you make the most of your email marketing campaign.

• With any email, it is important to make sure that you state who you are and why the customer is being contacted. By reestablishing the relationship with your reader, you are more likely to have a high click-through rate on the call-to–action you have included in your email.
• An easy email marketing technique is to send an email if your customer has abandoned a shopping cart on your website. With this email, you will want to remind the customer that they have left some unfinished business and call them back to your website. While doing that, you will want to remind them of the value of your service or product.
• You can send an email that will help you to later personalize future emails to your customers. Think of a shoe website asking a few questions about what a customer likes or have them take a "test”, by doing this you are capturing a lead, as well as getting information that will allow you to send more personalized emails in the futures. With this approach, your “test” should be short, provide clear instructions, and only have one call-to-action. The easy and more upfront the email is, the more likely your customer will be to fill out the information
• Email marketing should be all about keeping your customers informed, to do this send out emails that let your customers know about any special promotions or upcoming events. You can combine this idea with the idea above to really show the customer your care about them and which promotions/events are going to suit their needs best.

With these few tips you are ready to create an email marketing plan that will keep you in the inboxes of many current and potential customers.

Showing quality results and success is the best way to report to your clients that your inbound marketing strategy is working.  When creating the marketing and analytic reports, it is important to include the right information.

An SEO campaign is a large component of Inbound Marketing. The SEO campaign is compiled of different parts and strategies. One of these should be Local SEO, connected with Local Citations.

Using local citations will increase the chances of your services being found in search results instead of just your business name and city location. The process is similar to building links to your website with organic SEO. To begin the process, you need to build structured citations with the help of a third party data provider, such as Whitespark.

Whitespark searches beyond basic directories to find valuable citation sources based on your location, phone number, or a keyword phrase you provide in the Local Citation Finder tool. It will then compare citation profiles (yours and your competitor’s) and help you build the citations and track them.  In your search results, you will see the total number of citations for each site, view specific sources, and a comparison. Whitespark also provides links to submit your site to a citation sources if you are not listed for specific results.

Providing your business information to Local Citation Sources validates the popularity and credibility of your business within a search engine. Citations should include the following information:

• DBA (Doing business as) Name
• Business Phone Number
• Business Website URL
• Business Categorization
• Main keywords for your business

Heres a number of citation sites to get you started*:

• Judy’s Book
• ShopCity
• Yellow Bot
• Super Pages
• Dexknows
• Magic Yellow
• Zidster
• Info USA
• Localeze
• Yellow Pages
• Yelp
• City Search
• Yellow Book
• Insider Pages
• Kudzu
• Local.com
• MerchantCircle
• CityVoter
• CitySquares
• Foursquare

* Source: poweredbysearch.com

Having sharable content is one important part when using Twitter. The other part is knowing when to tweet and share your content. Tweeting during the right times increases the reach of your content, and the chance of your links and content to be clicked and shared further.

Saying more with fewer words or characters is the entire basis of conversation on Twitter. Efficiency is already something top of mind in the business world, and that rule of thumb should be applied to social media tools such as Twitter as well. Getting your point across in an effective way that uses Twitter abbreviations can influence the way your customer (and potential customers) see you and your message.

Today as part of HubSpot's Marketing Agency and Consultants Office Hour we had the opportunity to get a sneak preview of HubSpot's new Email and Contacts tools.  So far, from what I've seen the email process seems more intuitive and cleaner than any other email tool I have previously used.  

The new tool will be available to new customers Tuesday (5/22/12), and rolling out to existing clients over the coming months via a migration process.  All customers will be migrating to the new email tool regardless of the product version you subscribe to.

Here are some of the highlights from the presentation:

SPEED IMPROVEMENTS

HubSpot already offers an incredible closed loop marketing system aimed at helping companies get found online. Their software and inbound marketing methodology builds brand awareness, increases online visibility and can turn your website into a valuable lead generation tool.

Today Litmus announced a new tool for testing HTML emails for cross-email client compatibility.  The new tool they've dubbed "Interactive Testing", allows HTML email developers to view and make real-time edits to their code in each of the popular email clients. This could potentially be a huge time saving feature for trouble shooting issues and giving you piece of mind your email will look flawless no matter what email client your audience is using.