As the FIFA World Cup kicks off today (yes, pun intended), here is a look at a few of our favourite World Cup ads so far…

Nike Football:  The Last Game

Adidas Football:  All or Nothing

Beats By Dre:  The Game Before the Game

#WorldCup on Twitter:  Love Every Second

Kia Motors:  Adriana Lima Football Vs. Futbol

On June 3rd, we’re holding Ireland’s first ever Inbound Marketing conference: The Power of Me. Inbound Marketing is the concept that’s electrified the marketing world – and Dialogue is the first marketing agency in Dublin to embrace this radical new approach. Book your place here.

A survey was conducted on digital trends and there are some interesting insights. The results confirm that social media has come of age as a marketing tool as both agencies and client businesses use it more regularly than any other digital marketing channel.

It’s great to see insights are emphasising the importance of mobile optimized sites and apps. It also shows how agencies are leading the way in the use of video, s so it’s good to see they’re practicing what they preach! Most of those who responded to the survey still see websites as first and foremost providers of information. This all proves to us how essential social media is to the consumer.

Here are a few of the results:

• What businesses do when they receive complaints through social media? Only 5% ring their agency or hire a hit man! 20% surprisingly delete the comments and the other 69% engage in conversation.
• How often do you use social media marketing? 67%
• 96% of respondents have a smartphone.

Here’s a video with all of the results in more detail.

So you think you are ready to dip your toe into Inbound Marketing but you might not know where to start. Well, let me share a few straightforward steps that will get you going:

STEP 1: ATTRACT

The first thing you need to do is build your buyer persona – this is an holistic profile of your ideal customer. What are they really like inside and out – their goals, aspirations, motivations and pain points.

Once you know who you want to talk to, you then need to attract them to your website. The best way of doing this:

• Targeted Outbound media – unlike many Inbound Marketing specialists, Dialogue passionately believe (and have the case studies to prove) that Outbound Marketing (i.e. Press, Outdoor, TV, Radio) can get your Inbound Marketing strategy kicking with the right tailored content.
• Blog – use your blog to speak to the personas you have developed. Answer their burning questions and help them along their journey.
• Social Media – share highly relevant content. Create to relate! Put a human face and a personality to your brand.
• Keywords – know what your buyer peronas are searching for. Optimise your pages, create content and build links around terms that will appeal to them.
• Website – make it easy to find what your prospects are looking for / and what you are looking to sell them.

STEP 2: CONVERT

So your prospects have now noticed you, you’ve struck a chord. Now you need to convert them into leads and customers. It is hugely important; no it is actually vital that you now get their contact info. This is an online marketers most valuable currency! But you will need to offer your prospect something in return for this valuable information, something they will value. Think ebooks, informative / educational short videos, whitepapers etc.
Tools to help you convert:

• Calls to Action – make sure your CTA buttons are visible and enticing
• Landing pages – this is where they fulfil your offer, the place your potential customer gives their contact details. Once they fill in their information they now become a lead. We like leads!
• Forms – make the information gathering as easy as possible. We have tricks and tips to do this really well.
• Contacts – keep a central database of your leads. Having all your data in one place helps you make sense out of every interaction you’ve had with your contacts. It is really important you do this.

STEP 3: CLOSE

Now to transform your leads into customers. These marketing tools will help you close the right leads and the right times:

• Lead scoring –score your leads on their sales readiness. This is a useful tool for taking the guess work out of the process.
• Email & Marketing Automation – this involves sending a series of focused, useful and highly relevant emails. They need to be tailored to the needs and lifecycle stage of each lead. Their job is to build trust and help your leads become ready to buy.
• Closed-loop reporting – integration of your marketing efforts with your CRM system / sales team will insure you know which marketing efforts are bringing in the best leads and converting those leads into customers.

STEP 4: DELIGHT

Inbound Marketing is all about providing highly relevant content throughout the customer lifecycle. Existing customers will drive your business if treated the right way. It is so important to continue to engage and delight them once they have become a customer – they will buy more from you and tell others all about you.

To help you delight them you should:

• Have smart, personalised call to actions – these are offers that change based on buyer personas and lifecycle stage.
• Social Media – use it for delivering real-time brilliant customer service.
• Email & Marketing Automation – relevant and useful communications that help your customers achieve their goals and do their job better.

If you would like a hand putting your Inbound Marketing campaign together please give me a call or drop me an email.

Gary McLoughlin
Managing Director
01 6622277
gmcloughlin@dialogue.ie

Inspiration can come at the strangest times–last Sunday morning to be precise, the day after the media started leaking the story that Martin O’Neil and Roy Keane were rumored to be forming a ‘deadly’ double act and take charge of the Irish soccer team. I say ‘deadly’ as I’m sure you’re all familiar with Mr. Keane’s, let’s say, ‘fierce determination’! So ‘fierce’, in fact, that during his days of managing Sunderland (BOOOOOOOOOO!) he couldn’t get over the fact that his struggling team weren’t as good as he was in his playing days and used to kick merry hell out of his tactics flip charts!

So, back to last Sunday morning. My son plays soccer for Malahide United (where the Irish team train) and during half time, the ‘soccer dads’ were having a chat…

“OK, everyone…” I said to them, “Roy Keane and Martin O’Neil…..discuss”. “Aaaghhh”, was the general response, “It’ll be carnage”, to which I quipped “I hope Malahide United have their flip charts insured!” And so, an advert was born, visualised first thing Monday morning, presented to Jim Leyden at Bizquip, and you’ll see it on page 15 in this weekend’s Sunday Business Post!

‘Back of the net’, I believe the saying goes.

I’ll finish with saying ‘all credit to unexpected double acts’ and wish Martin and Roy, but especially Bizquip and Dialogue the very best of luck.

First things first.

Let’s clear things up and apologies for sounding like a teacher, but for those who don’t know, a landing page is NOT your web site’s home page. Your landing page (sometimes referred to as lead-capture page) is a single web page that appears when a search engine optimised search result, an online banner ad or a link to a download is clicked.

The general goal of a landing page is to convert site visitors into sales or leads. In fact, it can generate a 5-15% conversion rate on average.

Specifically, the job of a landing page is to tell your visitors exactly what you want them to do. It’s not (as home pages do) to give them free range to meander through your website.

So do you actually have a landing page and does it deserve perfect marks?

Here are the top three top tips of how to increase your landing page conversion rates:

1. Landing pages must contain the following elements

• A headline and (optional) sub-headline
• A brief description of what is being offered
• At least one supporting image or short video
• Most importantly, a form on the landing page itself to capture information. If for some reason you can’t include a form on the landing page, use a large call-to-action button to direct visitors to the next step.

2. Remove or limit extra navigation

• A landing page is used for one purpose and one purpose alone – to encourage a visitor to take one specific action. When visitors land on a page, we want to keep them there until they perform that action. Don’t encourage them to wander.

3. Keep the objective simple and clear

• This is a BIG mistake made by some companies. Don’t try to stuff too much information on your landing page. Make it clear what the page is about and what you want the visitor to do. Limit the amount of copy, images, media, and links to only what’s necessary. It’s especially important that the call-to-action is as crystal clear as possible for the visitor. Remember: the MORE you put in, the LESS they take out!

But these are only three top tips. For the FULL lowdown on how to increase your business leads, simply click below to download Dialogue Marketing’s e-book on ‘The 30 Greatest Lead Generation Tips, Tricks & Ideas’ where you’ll click through to – guess what – the perfect landing page!

Class dismissed.

Paul Gibson
Art Director

When you hear a couple of flies buzzing around the house, do you chase them with a rolled up newspaper?

Or do you put a dollop of jam on a saucer and wait for them to appear?

One approach demands a lot more energy. Yet spooning out the jam can get far faster results.

And this really is the essence of ‘inbound marketing’, a term you’ve probably heard bandied around a lot recently.

Of course, buzzwords are nothing new in marketing. Back in the 50s, Bates originated the ‘Unique Selling Proposition’. Since then (and probably long before), marketing has been awash with magic formulae which have promised to deliver customers and loyalty in equal measure.

But Inbound Marketing has an edge in the way it uses the Internet to turn the tables. It encourages  customers to find you instead of you hunting for them using traditional and costly marketing campaigns.

In a nutshell, Inbound Marketing is any campaign that tempts interest in a product or service by offering relevant online information. In effect, it uses the likes of blogs, e-books, infographics, whitepapers etc., as bait.

Potential customers with an interest in the general area served by your product or service conduct their research online. So to connect with them, you make relevant information easily avalable via SEO, social media etc.

They’ll come to you rather than you going to them. And because they’re doing most of the hard work, it’s far more cost-effective.

Of course, slapping out any old bait won’t necessarily work. Since your potential customers are already on the hunt for something resembling your product or service, your SEO needs to be up to scratch and focused–but that’s a subject for another blog.

Here we’re talking about why organisations should add inbound to their marketing repertoire. As with any other marketing question, the ultimate arbiter must be return on investment.

So does inbound marketing actually get results? Yes–but it’s not an instant sale.

Our partner Hubspot researched this question las February and reported the following:

• 92.34% of companies using inbound marketing increase their traffic
• 92.7% of companies using inbound marketing increase their lead generation
• 42.2% of companies using inbound marketing increase their lead-to-sale conversion rate

But if you’re twitchy for immediate results, don’t pin all your hopes on inbound marketing. Remember that this is a slow-burn strategy; as another statistic from Hubspot confirms, you may have to wait a while:

• 85% of companies using inbound marketing increase traffic within 7 months

If your boss is screaming for sales, inbound marketing may not be the cure-all you’re looking for.

But if you want a smart, cost-effective strategy to get customers knocking on your door, then it’s well worth cracking open the jam jar to see if you can create a buzz…

Abstract

What can inbound marketing really offer organisations? The answer is solid results without the cost of traditional marketing campaigns. The secret lies in tempting customers to reach you by offering relevant, high-quality and easy-to-find content. Research has shown that over 92% of companies using inbound marketing increase their traffic.

Des Columb
Creative Director

Check out who is the latest fan of their new book “The Gathering – Reflections on Ireland”. Former President Bill Clinton was presented with a copy of the book by An Taoiseach at Leinster House yesterday!

Founded by the energetic Prof Dylan Evans Jones, The Wales Fast Growth 50 has become the established award that entrepreneurial businesses in Wales aspire to. The annual gala dinner was held last week in Cardiff with a full house of 500 guests and has developed into the largest Welsh business event of the year.

Over 25,000 jobs and an estimated £14billion of additional turnover is delivered annually by these up-and-coming companies, much of which is spent in their local area. Yet despite this success, much remains to be done to turn fast-growing firms into super-growth companies that can have a major and continuing impact on the Welsh economy. Dialogue are expanding their global footprint by identifying scaling companies who wish to expand globally and Wales is one market worth exploring.

Michael Killeen, Dialogue Chairman,  presented this year’s fast growth award to Village Bakery of Wrexham. ‘’It was a superb event, reminding us of the early Celtic Tiger years when Irelands pride and confidence were at an all-time high. There are tremendous opportunities for Irish service companies to assist Welsh growing companies to a new levels of super growth beyond the UK borders’’.

Dialogue has expanded  its international reach working with companies in Israel, USA, Russia and India. The Welsh exploration was inspired by an opportune meeting with Dylan Evans Jones. ‘’It was a real knock on the side of the head.  Here we have English speaking business people happy to work with Irish neighbors rather than London or Manchester based agencies.’’ Killeen said.  ‘’There is high energy in Wales at the moment and the UK Government are keen to support this momentum.” Unlike Irish people, the Welsh people are more insular and Killeen mentioned on the night for the need of a collaborative effort to start branding Wales Inc. and linking with their diaspora around the world to open up new markets. He was booed off the stage.

Michael Killeen
Chairman

What approaches can help marketing, branding and communication professionals decide what marketing solutions should play a role in generating better results?

1.  Maintaining a cohesive marketing strategy
While this may seem obvious, maintaining cohesion when the channels you are using to reach customers are dispersed and diffused is a constant challenge. And what was previously a matter of identifying needs and communicating benefits now requires a whole new range of skills and capabilities in order to engage customers.
Read more:  4 principles of Marketing Strategy In The Digital Age

2.  Using social media effectively
One of the ways to increase engagement with a customer is by using email in conjunction with social media. Marketers can then, by capitalizing on the strengths of the different channels, keep their customers engaged and their message fresh.
Read more:  5 Tips to Improve Engagement Across Email, Facebook and Twitter

3.  Influencing customer behaviour in the marketplace
Few companies consider the full customer experience and how each stage of the experience can add value. A customer experience that is efforless and then meets the customer’s expectations can work in the same way as nudge theory. By making the desired action the easy thing to do, we encourage and influence that action.
Read more:  How ‘Great Customer Experiences’ can influence behaviours

4.  Measuring the effectiveness of your marketing efforts
Marketers need to be fluent in using analytics to compare how different aspects of a marketing initiative are performing, and not just in terms of ROI, but also how it has affected brand recognition and perception.
Read more:  Marketing Analytics: What It Is And Why It Matters

5.  What are the new challenges for chief marketing executives?
Marketing currently has an enhanced profile as businesses realise how critical it is to ensure growth. However, this puts more pressure on marketing executives to demonstrate this in practice. This means driving top-line growth and brand strength in an era where customers are empowered by social media.  To do this, marketing executives must reorient company culture to be more customer-centric and ensure that the customer experience is consistent with the brand promise.
Read more:  Preparing the Next Generation of Chief Marketers

Paul Rooney
Web Developer