Posted by Roman Kniahynyckyj on Thu, Sep 02, 2010 @ 06:40 AM
Wired Magazine's September issue eulogizes the Web while proclaiming the continuing value of the Internet. This assessment has far reaching implications for inbound marketers and for B2B and B2C marketing.
Wired makes a distinction between the Internet - essentially the infrastructure and protocols that allow information and content to flow - and the Web - which is the way users and consumers interact with the information and content the Internet makes available.
Certainly, we no longer just browse the Web. We download songs from iTunes or update our Facebook status from a Droid app, or use Hootsuite for Twitter updates. The way we plug into the Internet is much more specialized.
This shift offers marketers some important concepts to consider:
- The Internet as Electricity - Think of the myriad items you plug into electrical outlets today. Laptops, blenders, lamps, TVs, even Glade PlugIns. They all function differently but are all powered the same way - through electricity. Much like electricity, the Internet will continue to underlie and power a user's online interaction with a brand. But as more consumers shift from Web browsing to other ways of interacting with the Internet, how will you change the way you plug your brand into the Internet? Through an app, a widget, a feed of some sort? How will you continue to generate leads and sales as more and more people become aware of your brand via their smartphone rather than their computer?
- Where are Your Plugs? - Where is your market? Do you need a specialized plug for China? Or for Silver Surfers? In much the same way that traveling overseas requires you to pack a gaggle of plug adapters, how do you alter your brand plug for the different markets you serve and the way your market plugs into the Internet?
- Designing Your Plugs - Maintaining a consistent brand presence across the plugs you design is critical. Whether your brand's plug is a Facebook game, a YouTube video, or a downloadable podcast (or all three), core elements of your brand must be present.
Feeling a bit unplugged in the new world of the dead Web? Let us plug you back in.
photo: Robert Whyte
Posted by Chris Knipper on Mon, Aug 09, 2010 @ 06:33 AM
Depending on your Internet experience and social media comfort level, inbound marketing either seems impossibly complex or ridiculously easy. The truth doesn't reside at either end of the spectrum but somewhere in between.
If your business marketing campaign is still focused on outbound marketing strategies such as trade shows, email blasts, cold calls and telemarketing, it can be more than a little disconcerting to jump into the free-wheeling, paperless, high-speed world of social media where instant gratification seems to reign.
On the other hand, if you've embraced social media in your personal life, spend hours updating your Facebook page and posting messages to your friends, and are a dedicated tweeter, you may fail to recognize the distinct differences between personal and business use of social media and the need for a certain amount of careful restraint in business applications.
In both cases, your company's marketing campaign will benefit from development and hands-on management by an experienced inbound marketing professional. Among the distinct advantages inbound marketing experts bring to the table is the expertise to build a platform of individually tailored social media products and measurement analytics to power your company's specific needs and target both broad and narrow goals.
The speed and targeting accuracy made possible by computerization and Internet dispersal allow inbound marketing strategies to be quickly and continuously tweaked by knowledgeable professionals. Computer analytics provide immediate, measurable results that quickly reveal the effectiveness of individual inbound marketing strategies. Inbound marketing experts use carefully selected analytics to continuously monitor and tweak marketing programs to ensure that they quickly produce the desired marketing results. Constant evaluation ensures that your marketing program reacts to and gains the greatest benefit from consumer response, market forces and changing demographics.
The wide variety of inbound marketing products and platforms allows businesses to capitalize on broad spectrum dispersal of their marketing message with one media while targeting very specific consumer demographics with another. Successful inbound marketing campaigns generally employ diverse techniques to approach company goals from several angles to maximize success. To the uninitiated, inbound marketing attack plans can appear to be random and fragmented. Indeed, it is manipulation by skilled inbound marketing professionals that produces a cohesive campaign.
Contact us for a free inbound marketing consultation.
Posted by Chris Knipper on Wed, Jul 21, 2010 @ 06:55 AM
If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video is priceless, particularly when you're talking about inbound marketing campaigns. Everyone's familiar with the speed at which a video can go viral on YouTube. Teen heart throb Justin Bieber owes his mega-star fame to home videos of the young crooner posted on YouTube by his mom. Scottish singer Susan Boyle became a worldwide overnight sensation when a video of her Britain's Got Talent performance went viral. Celebrities and celebrity-wanna-bes have made adept use of Internet video sites like YouTube to promote themselves and claim their 15 minutes of fame. Post a catchy video on YouTube that catches viewers' attention and you can put yourself in the spotlight again and again.
Viral Videos and Inbound Marketing
The power of video to attract attention and promote brands and products hasn't been lost on savvy marketing directors. Coke, Pepsi and computer giant HP are just a few of the Fortune 500 companies that have discovered marketing gold in posting Internet videos and hosting online video contests. They and others have embraced the quirky creativity of amateur video artists to tap into the public's unquenchable thirst for another 30-second chuckle. In doing so, they not only tap a new, young, hip, tech-savvy audience but they create new perceptions about their brand, widening its consumer appeal beyond core demographics.
Poking a bit of fun on YouTube isn't a good match for every brand, but the power of video can be harnessed in a number of more traditional and highly effective inbound marketing applications to draw customers and sell products. Consider a few of these proven video enhancements:
- Add a demonstration video to your website, blog post or Facebook page to demonstrate how your product works. In a simple one- or two-minute video of your product in action, you can show customers how your product operates, something that might take pages to describe in writing
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Offer a list of how-to videos for do-it-yourselfers, naturally featuring the use of your product.
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Give your company a public face by filming a greeting, personal appeal, invitation or introduction by your company's president. Video is an excellent way to connect with consumers and establish a more personal relationship.
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Offer a video showcase of your products in use to spark customers' interest and suggest new uses for your products.
How does video fit into your inbound marketing strategy? We can help.
Photo credit: HeyGabe
Posted by John McTigue on Mon, Jul 12, 2010 @ 08:08 AM
Every business blog has the potential to become a marketing powerhouse, but achieving that goal takes a solid strategy, a bit of creativity and astute manipulation of search engine optimization techniques. When effectively produced and managed, business blogging can become a key element in your -Internet Marketing Strategy. Blogging has proven to be an effective way to build brand recognition, drive motivated customers to your website, generate sales leads and nurture positive customer relations.
Effective business blogs use a marketing strategy:
Interesting and useful content. Consumers return to blogs that provide information they can use. To attract potential customers, your blog should inform and be relevant to your particular business. Industry news, product updates, interviews with industry experts, developing trends, the impact of current events, and personals insights into topics important to your target audience are all potential blog topics. - Regular content updates. Blogs should be updated regularly to encourage readers to return frequently in search of new content. Publishing new blog posts three times per week, spaced every other day, is optimal. While regular additions of new content to your blog help build reader anticipation, encouraging them to return, posting new content also gives Internet spiders new material to crawl, boosting your search engine rank.
- Create a distinctive voice. Blogging is an informal medium. Approach blogging as a conversation with your readers. When you write a blog post, avoid insider acronyms and corporate gobbledygook. A blog shouldn't sound like a formal journal article or a memo to employees. This is an opportunity to humanize your business, to show potential customers that behind your website are real people waiting to take care of their needs. Most bloggers find it most comfortable to blog in their own voice, and it's okay to be chatty and humorous.
- Optimize your posts. Make sure that every post has strategic keywords in the title, headings, url, link text, body text and alt tags on images. Your blog content should be relevant to those keywords (and vice versa), i.e. make it a coherent keyword-rich post that conveys a message.
- Spread the word. Promote every blog post on social networks, social bookmarking sites and e-mail newsletters. Tell people what your post is about and why they should be interested. Use url shorteners to preserve as much descriptive text as possible in social networks like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Leverage hashtags in Twitter to spread the word beyond your personal network of followers. Target groups, memes or audiences that should be interested in your post. Include social media sharing buttons and subscription forms on every post to encourage people to spread the word and come back for more.
Potential customers will return repeatedly to a blog that is informative and entertaining to read. Include a call to action in every blog post that is relevant to the topic at hand. This creates an opportunity to capture leads from your blog readers.
Content and voice are just the visible face of blogging. Underneath the words is a structure of search engine optimization elements that, when properly incorporated into the structure of your business blog, help to promote your brand in the search engines and bring in qualified leads.
Your blog - is it driving home the sales leads? Need some help with that?
Photo Credit: hughelectronic
Posted by Chris Knipper on Fri, Jul 09, 2010 @ 06:41 AM
Effective search engine optimization (SEO) is a complex dance between actions that take place on and off your website. The on-page SEO factors that we discussed in our previous post can be quickly and directly controlled by website designers and so provide the easiest and most efficient paths to achieving search engine optimization. However, off-page SEO factors, while more complex to manipulate, promise the bigger SEO payoff and can have a greater impact on your inbound marketing strategy.
Off-page SEO manipulation requires exacting knowledge of search engine operation, practiced experience with search engines and a high level of Internet expertise. Inbound marketing professionals are highly experienced in implementing effective off-page SEO techniques.
Effective off-page search engine optimization begins with a great website and blog. Well-designed and well-written websites attract site visitors and keep them coming back for more. All that activity keeps your click popularity soaring, one of many factors search engines measure to determine website rankings. Healthy website traffic also increases critically important link popularity. Using the on-page SEO factors we discussed in our last post to create a dynamic website sets you up to capitalize on off-page SEO factors.
Off-page SEO factors
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Link popularity is the SEO gold ring. Before your website can start climbing the rankings ladder, it has to be noticed. The more links from outside sites that point to your website, the greater your Internet visibility. Particularly on Google, link popularity is essential in winning the keyword competition. When many sites use the same keywords, it is link popularity -- the number of other websites that link to your site -- that will make your website stand out from the competition.
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Link building can be augmented by exchanging reciprocal links with website visitors. Invite visitors to link to your site. Blogs, Internet press releases, Facebook pages, white papers and newsletters all provide opportunities for reciprocal linking. The most effective links are created when one of your keywords is included in the link text. To help ensure that others link to your keywords, include your keywords in titles and headings, the items most frequently selected when creating links. Don't engage in mass reciprocal link exchange campaigns or services. They often provide low quality inbound links that aren't relevant to your site and may even damage your site search rankings.
- Social media engagement - the more of this you do, the better. Comments on blogs provide an opportunity for inbound links. They may not always provide SEO "juice", since many will have a "nofollow" attribute that prevents search bots from following them to your site. But in general, your comments should show your expertise and interest in the topic and may entice people to visit your website. In any case, social media engagement exposes your website to more people and often leads to more traffic and better SEO results.
What is your off-page SEO strategy? How well is it working?
Photo credit: adwriter
Posted by Chris Knipper on Tue, Jun 22, 2010 @ 03:28 PM
Companies spend considerable time and money generating leads. A wide variety of inbound marketing techniques -- blogs, Facebook, Twitter, white papers, ezines, enewsletters, press releases -- are used to attract potential customers to your website and engage their interest. But attracting leads is only half of the marketing equation. Capturing those leads and then converting them into sales is what puts money in your profit column.
An effective landing page has 5 critical elements:
- Grabber headline. An attention-grabbing headline pulls in site visitors and entices them to scan your lead capture page. The goal is to engage visitors' emotions on a visceral level. Put your promise in the headline so visitors immediately understand what they'll gain by opting in to your offer and what they'll lose if they don't.
- Strong offer. The stronger your offer the more likely visitors are to opt in and provide the lead capture information you seek. Tag your offer to the search parameters most likely to land visitors on your capture page. Consider offering a range of items requiring different levels of information sharing with the highest value offers requiring visitors to provide greater levels of contact information. For example, a name and email address might be required to receive your enewsletter; but a downloadable white paper might also require a home address and telephone number.
- Video hook. Nothing hooks attention like a video. We live in a visual world. A video that starts playing as soon as your lead capture page opens instantly command's the visitor's attention, creating a more personal connection with site visitors.
- Bullet lists. Lists are easy and fast to read and assimilate. Bullet points distill important information down to its quickly digested essentials. Focus bullets on the two most powerful human motivators: gaining pleasure and fear of loss.
- Opt-in opportunity. Two types of people visit lead capture pages: rapid responders who want to take immediate action and careful cogitators who need to think it over first. Your lead capture page should provide both a highly visible fast action opt-in button near the top of the page, and a second opt-in opportunity farther down the page for those who need to read more information before providing their contact information. Your should also follow up with captured leads via lead nurturing campaigns - sending out follow up information and offers via e-mail at regular intervals. The idea is to keep people engaged, keep them coming back for more. Your chances of converting these leads to customers go up with each repeat visit.
How effective are your landing pages? We can help.
Photo credit: bulldog1
Posted by John McTigue on Fri, Jun 04, 2010 @ 08:47 AM
Your business blog is an essential part of your inbound marketing strategy. Your blog should provide interesting insights into your business - not just what your company is doing, but what's happening in the industry. You can use your blog to establish your leadership in your industry by providing expert commentary and helpful solutions. Visitors will read and subscribe to your blog if they feel it is valuable and not too self-promotional. Remember, it's not a newsletter or a webcam showing your employees working. Nobody cares about that. Your blog is for reaching out to communicate with your market and for building a loyal following with consistently excellent content. Think of your blog as a spider web that helps you capture leads brought in from your social media venues and search engines. A well crafted blog post not only interests readers but also inspires them to post links in social media and sign up for offers on your landing pages.
Why do so many business blogs get sidetracked?
Blogging is hard work and can be quite time consuming. If you're doing it right, your blog is well written and optimized for seo with important keywords. Not every company has a designated person or team capable of writing about their business not only with authority but in an engaging voice. Fewer still have professional seo experts on staff. Even those who have a talent for writing can feel overburdened by the pressure to create blog entries on a regular basis. For blogs to work their marketing magic, new posts should be published at least three times a week, or about every other day. Many business people simply don't have the time or resources -- or continuous flow of ideas -- to maintain the level of commitment successful marketing blogging requires.
Naturally, there are solutions. Many firms are now turning to professional blog writers or inbound marketing agencies to design and manage a comprehensive blogging plan, to provide original content and to optimize each post for search engines. Contracting out inbound marketing, including blogging, allows them to tap into resources and professional expertise most businesses can't afford to employ. Agencies can arrange for professional writers to update and maintain a company's blog site. Ghost writers typically write as staff members and sometimes as the business principal. Contracting out your blogging services allows you to focus on your business while reaping the marketing benefits blogging can provide.
How's your blog performing as an inbound marketing magnet? We can help.
Photo Credit: Mrs Magic.
Posted by John McTigue on Tue, Apr 13, 2010 @ 08:10 AM
Business owners and executives considering adding inbound marketing to their marketing plan wonder how much to spend each month. What is a reasonable budget that will yield results justifying your program and meeting marketing objectives? As always, it depends on the goals of your marketing strategy. For businesses seeking to increase sales through online marketing, we are starting to understand the costs and benefits of inbound and social media marketing. Here is a framework for creating a solid budget for your company.
One of the common urban legends about inbound and social media marketing is that they are inexpensive. While fixed costs may be lower than traditional advertising and marketing, labor costs are higher. Our estimated budget is for labor costs, which is by far the largest component of any inbound marketing/social media program. Other fixed costs, such as software, hardware and subscriptions will need to be added. Let's break it down by the disciplines required for increasing sales leads through inbound marketing:
Inbound Marketing Strategy and Analysis
You will want to spend at least 2 hours per month on strategy, analysis of results and planning with an experienced strategist in inbound and social media marketing. One of the key principles of inbound marketing is review, analysis and adapting your strategy to improve results. While top level consultants often charge more than $300 per hour, you could probably negotiate this as part of a larger package deal for around $500 per month.
Blogging
A recent study by HubSpot of over 760 companies engaged in inbound marketing found that "leads started to grow once blogs offered a critical mass of articles, on the order of 20 to 50 articles" per month. Although it's certainly possible to write a blog post in a few minutes, most bloggers will tell you that if you account for idea creation, research, copywriting, SEO on-page optimization, and social media promotion, we're looking at 1-2 hours per post, perhaps more, depending on the blogger's experience level and familiarity with SEO and social media. According to HotGigs.com, average hourly rates for bloggers are about $30 per hour. This gives us a range of $600 - $3,000 to budget for blogging each month. According to ReadWriteWeb, a reasonable budget for most companies would be about $1,500 per month.
SEO
You will need someone to oversee and execute your search marketing strategy. This includes keyword research, on-page and off-page search engine optimization for your website, social media optimization for your social networks and pay-per-click campaigns. I'm not including on-page SEO for your blog, since you paid for that in the previous section. The amount of time required depends on the amount of content your site contains and the amount you add per week. If your company is somewhat active (and you should be to improve online lead generation), let's assume 1-2 hours per day is reasonable. According to SEOmoz, mid-level SEO consultants charge $100-200 per hour. At a minimum you're looking at $2,000 per month. Again, you could probably negotiate that down to $1500 per month as part of a package.
Social Media
This is a more difficult area to quantify, because the nature of social media interaction involves a variety of activities, including listening (monitoring), engaging (commenting and conversing), and creating (new comments, tweets, etc). According to Chris Brogan, "two hours a day is a minimum for MOST efforts". Many business people would find it hard to invest that much time each day, but the activities could be divided up among several employees or outsourced. Assuming that a good social media strategy and plan is in place and we're budgeting for daily activities, if we take 2 hours as our minimum for social media activities, that's an average of 40 hours per month. If you hired an agency to do your social media marketing for you, for example a HubSpot Partner, you would pay at least $75 per hour for these services. At 40 hours per month, that translates into a budget of $3,000 a month. You could probably negotiate a lower rate or package deal, so let's put our stake in the ground at $1,500 per month.
Advanced Content/Social Media Campaigns
Regular blogging, seo and social media activities will get you well down the road to improving brand awareness, web traffic and leads, but there is no substitute for high impact content, like webinars, videos and whitepapers and the social media campaigns to promote them. Your content team can produce some of these special projects as part of their regular activities with personal video cameras and publication software, but more sophisticated content with professionally produced video, music and graphics will cost extra. Costs for these types of content and campaigns vary considerably, but count on $2,000-$10,000 per campaign.
Bottom Line
Routine Inbound Marketing: $5,000 per month
Special Projects: $2,000 - $10,000 per month
Budget Range: $84,000 - $180,000 per year
Return on Investment
If you can generate enough sales from your inbound marketing program to exceed the budget (and you don't overspend the budget), you have achieved a positive ROI. On a monthly basis, can you generate $7,000 to $15,000 in sales? If not, should you consider a scaled-back program? Remember that your lead volume and conversion will most likely drop accordingly.
In-house or Outsource?
Consider the costs of hiring experienced people who can perform the above tasks. Here's our summary of costs involved with building your own inbound marketing team. You may find that it's less expensive to at least start with an inbound marketing agency, build up your current team's experience with time, and avoid new hires.
What's your experience budgeting for inbound marketing? We'd love to hear from you.
Please feel free to contact us to discuss your inbound marketing program.
Posted by John McTigue on Mon, Apr 05, 2010 @ 09:25 AM
If you're interested in inbound marketing, you know about HubSpot. They're the industry leaders in inbound marketing software, and their customer list is growing rapidly among small and large companies in all industries, b2b or b2c. An important new development within the past year has been the HubSpot Certified Partner program, in which agencies must pass a rigorous exam on inbound marketing and HubSpot technology in order to become certified. Partner agencies are qualified to sell inbound marketing services and are promoted via the HubSpot Service Marketplace. Here's how these partner agencies add value to companies engaged in inbound marketing.
Extending Your Team
Partner agencies can create a working strategy and plan for your company, then, depending on the scope of the service contract, do some or all of the work to get your company found online, capture leads and convert them to customers. Services may include:
Improving Results
You can work with your Certified HubSpot Partner to achieve specific goals, such as improved web traffic, keyword ranking and lead conversion. You can monitor progress through the HubSpot reports and optimization tools. You can improve your own staff's understanding and experience in inbound marketing by having them work side-by-side with your HubSpot partner with the goal of eventually bringing all of the work in-house.
Going Beyond
Your HubSpot Partner agency has a different perspective in addition to being an inbound marketing agency. Most of the Partners have strong experience in advertising and marketing, internet marketing and web design. They can leverage this experience to provide you with an optimized strategy and use their knowledge to create and manage goal-oriented marketing campaigns both online and offline. They can make your HubSpot website stand out from the crowd. They can find the right mix of marketing to fit your company's objectives and budget.
Hire a HubSpot Certified Partner today! You'll be glad you did.
Posted by John McTigue on Thu, Mar 18, 2010 @ 12:25 PM
Congratulations! Your brand new HubSpot Super Mach-12 swept wing mega-fighter* got delivered yesterday. Now you can dominate the marketing skies like no other brand and bring your pilots home to talk about it. Yes, we're talking about the inbound marketing force multiplier that's the envy of every marketing airforce around the world. Now what? Oh yeah, we need to fly this thing before we can rule the skies.
Let's see, looks like we'll need...
Strategy - we can't just fly anywhere and waste a bunch of fuel and ordinance. We don't want to rain bombs down on our friends' heads. We'll need an inbound marketing strategy, social media policies, people to do the work and more people to analyze the results.- Training - hmmm, not quite as simple as the video games, huh? We'll need an experienced partner to help us learn the ropes.
- Design - gotta scrape those HubSpot labels off the wings and put our own insignia on there. Gotta make the enemy run when they see us coming. We'll need a design team for that.
- Maintenance - hmmm, this thing cost us a bunch of money. Let's make sure we use it right, first time, every time. Let's test and analyze to keep this baby humming at mach 12.
- Impact - ok, so the training and all may take us a while before we're the top aces in the skies. Maybe we should bring on some pros to drive this thing for us for a while, wear our uniforms and scare the heck out of our enemies. When we're ready, we'll jump into the pilot's seat and wreak havoc.
Where do we go for all of that?
Well, good thing HubSpot has certified partners performing these services. These guys all had to pass rigorous tests before they could fly the Mach-12, so we know they're the best of the best. We can even compare them side-by-side and contact them for quotes. OK, is everybody clear on the mission? Oorah!
* No, it's not really a HubSpot Mach-12 fighter. It's a McDonnell Douglas (now Boeing) F-15 Eagle, and no it's not owned by HubSpot, and no there's no HubSpot Air Force, although the way they are growing, you never know...