5 Marketing Lessons From Inc. 500 Companies

The companies that land on the Inc. 500/5000 list (including one of my clients) never fail to impress me.  From their growth trajectories to what it is they actually do, I find it all fascinating.

HubSpot analyzed the winners using their Marketing Grader tool.  Below, I share their findings about 5 of those companies’ marketing strategies, along with my takeaways:

#5: Gold & Silver Buyers

They have a great rank, but their online marketing efforts fall a bit short. They have a blog, but only post every few weeks, and what little they do post cannot be shared because there are no social share buttons on their site.

Takeaway: Blog consistently (at least once a week) and add those social share buttons to your website! If you don’t know how, your website developer can do it for you.

#11: Nasty Gal

The peeps at Nasty Gal are doing a lot right, but one thing they are not doing at all is analyzing their website.  This is one of the easiest and most important things a small business can and should do to improve marketing.

Takeaway: Just set up a Google Analytics account (it’s free!), and you’ll learn so much valuable information about your website, like number of visitors you’re getting each month, which pages they’re visiting, keywords you’re being found for and so on.

You can then tweak your website as needed – maybe remove pages no one is visiting and develop more content around the products and services that are drawing the most online eyeballs.

#9: Red Frog Events

This company a has a lot of SEO issues that are affecting their website. A technical one is the lack of 301 redirects (so if someone doesn’t type in the www before your company name and domain extension, that person will still be pointed to your website). Nontechnical ones include a boatload of images with no tags and pages missing unique page descriptions.

Takeaway: Go into your content management system (CMS), and open up the media gallery. Check that each image, photo and graphic has an alt tag so search engines know what the image is.

Next, open up each page in edit mode and add keywords to each page title, to make it easier for search engines to find you based on what you do or sell.

#47: Vitals

This company does a lot right, and with one small tweak, they can do a lot more: add an email subscription option to their blog.

Takeaway: No matter how much your customers like you, they are not going to check your blog regularly for updates. An email subscription option ensures that all subscribers receive a ping whenever you post a new blog post – and thus gets more eyeballs reading the content you create.

#37: Webimax

This company is doing pretty much everything right: they blog every day and share their content on social media. They have a mobile version of their site that is optimized for a good user experience. They have landing pages that they link to from their blog posts, making it easier to convert visitors into leads. They use marketing automation software to nurture leads. They use analytics to track their marketing efforts.

Takeaway: Putting together an integrated marketing strategy can certainly pay off – Webimax grew from revenue of $123,000 in 2008 to revenue of $7.1 million in 2011.

Now you know what these successful companies do – and don’t do – what small fixes will you make to improve your own website and marketing strategy?

Image courtesy of HubSpot

This entry was posted on Monday, November 12th, 2012 at 9:00 am and is filed under Branding, Marketing, Search Marketing, Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.


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