This is the final part of our 4-part series on specialized construction marketing plans. Particularly when it comes to content marketing, you have 4 steps to see success:

The Internet exists for only a few purposes: Curating a perfect life on social media and videos of people being scared by other people!  Ok...that’s not the real reason obviously. The internet actually exists to get the best, most relevant information to people searching for it.

There are a few “search engines” that exist to help people find this information. Google, Yahoo, Bing, and DuckDuckGo are some of them. When you search for something using the search engine, it crawls the web (it’s actually called “spidering”) and “reads” all of the information on every website.

This is part 3 of our series for marketers creating a marketing plan. Check out part 1: create a defined strategy and part 2: create relevant content.

When you’re looking for the results of this year’s marketing budget for your specialized construction business, can you easily show what’s happened with that money? Can you show the money spent, the content produced, the leads brought in, and results of those sales opportunities?

Sure, inbound marketing can be great for B2C companies. Creating interesting content for those companies is a great way to increase leads with consumers. But it’s just a waste of marketing dollars for your B2B manufacturing company… you’re looking to connect with other businesses, not people. Right?

Wrong. You know nothing, Jon Snow.

The modern buyer has changed the sales process, and now the sales process is being redefined. Today's sellers are adapting to the modern buyer, and as a result, the mantra of "always be closing" no longer works. Today's buyers must always be helping.

Keep reading to learn how modern sellers are adapting to today's buyers, and how you can apply this to your own sales process.

Marketing teams are under increased scrutiny today thanks to the advent of Big Data. Executives can analyze everything from overtime cost/benefits and depreciating machinery assets to the return on investment of a single employee to the advantage of healthy vending machine options versus junk food choices. It’s no wonder that business leaders are looking for better, more exact return analysis for their marketing budgets, as well.

Summer in Wisconsin means spending the three warmest (and least likely to have snow) months outdoors taking advantage of the beautiful weather. As a kid, one of my favorite activities was my family’s annual camping trip to Door County. 

Complete with a four-hour road trip in an eight-passenger van, a massive tent, nightly campfires, and plenty of gear, the trip was quite the undertaking. There were lists (thanks, Mom!), weeks of organizing and packing, and lots of planning.

Like those camping trips, creating successful inbound strategy for B2B businesses also requires a number of essential elements. I’ve assembled the essentials here in the form of an Inbound Survival Guide, just like we created for our summer camping trips.

The thought of writing this post initially left me with a mild panic attack. After all, my audience consists of marketers, yes - but it also consists of CFOs, CEOs, and small business owners. And here I am, talking about a long-term investment strategy into your business: inbound marketing (and sales enablement, but that’s a story for another post). It’s hard enough to talk about long-term marketing plans face-to-face; it’s a whole other prospect to talk about it in writing.

As I sat down to write this post, I immediately dove into researching statistics, articles, and trends about maximizing success at trade shows. About 10 minutes into my search, with multiple tabs open across multiple windows, I stopped. And I laughed. Where was the first place that I went to jump-start my ideas? The internet. Google searches. Websites.