This week in inbound marketing, our biggest story comes courtesy of Facebook's hoodie-clad CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Though few have been granted access, graph search is in beta testing, and social media marketers are already buzzing about how it'll affect brands and business marketers once rolled out to the general public.
But the big graph search announcement didn't keep our bloggers distracted from sharing their expertise in additional areas of inbound marketing! This week's other top stories cover context marketing, educating clients, effective CTA placement and more. Read on!
Imagine the power a marketer would have if he or she knew exactly when and where you were thinking about buying that new golf club or subscribing to that service. As connected as we all are, it would be easy for them to reach out right then and help us make that decision with a little helpful info or a bit of a deal sweetener. That's the essence of context marketing. It's about knowing what to say and when to say it to help a potential buyer make a decision. It's about being in the right place at the right time with the right message. Keep reading!
The most recurring issue/question in email marketing is, “Why does my email look differently in different email clients?” It's simple find technical information about how different clients (Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, etc.) read emails, but that can be hard to understand and doesn't necessarily explain the HTML tricks that make emails look the same cross-client. That's why we've compiled a list of the HTML markups we use most when creating emails. See the list here.
A study released last week by FunctionFox, a time and project tracking software provider for small creative companies, predicted design, advertising, public relations, web and marketing communications companies are poised for growth in 2013. The survey results show the majority of small creative companies that employ 25 or fewer people expect to keep the same number of employees in 2013 as they did in the previous year, and 41 percent of companies are expecting to ramp up hiring to meet increased revenue projections. See what this means for your agency.
As inbound marketers, we spend hours every day ensuring each of our clients’ demands are being met. From posting on social media and optimizing blogs, to developing content and providing web maintenance, oftentimes it’s easy to let our professional social media profiles fall by the wayside. But it’s just as important to promote our clients and ensure their social pages/networks and websites are up-to-date, as it is to do the same for our personal accounts. Discover tricks for optimizing your newly designed LinkedIn profile here.
After much anticipation and wacky speculations from social media enthusiasts everywhere, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg introduced Facebook graph search, a better internal search function, yesterday at the company’s Menlo Park, California, headquarters. Without the ability to monkey around with graph search, it’s difficult to say exactly how business marketers will be affected, but we can speculate. See our ideas on how the internal search function will affect business marketers here.
Sometimes, educating an inbound marketing client can be difficult, especially if you fall into the same old rut of making a PowerPoint with word-heavy slides, mumbling through it and expecting people to remember what you said. As attention spans shrink, and cell phones allow for easier access to email (and Angry Birds), the challenge has become finding an entertaining way to earn and maintain the attention of those in the room. Discover why we believe telling a story is the best method for educating an inbound marketing client here.
Driving quality traffic to your site is a challenge in itself, so it is important to have strong calls to action (CTA) on every page of your site once you get visitors there. CTAs have two purposes: grab attention and encourage an action. Here, we discuss how CTA placement can significantly impact lead capture.
Not every potential lead is going to fit the definition of your ideal customer, nor are they all going to voraciously download every fact sheet on your website. So, how much of a fit, and howengaged does a lead have to be for marketing to hand it off to sales? This answer will be different for everyone, and the key to making it work for your organization is intelligent lead scoring. Read more!
Thanks for reading. Have a great Sunday!
Photo Credit: Search Engine Land
Known as Hawkeye for her near superhuman copy editing abilities, Lisa Gulasy applies her unique experiences in agency and journalism to manage strategy and day-to-day engagement of client social media profiles and assist and researching and writing blogs, press releases and advanced content. Find her on Twitter and LinkedIn.
