December 4th, 2008 → 6:28 am @ Admin
This content from: Duct Tape Marketing
Marketing is Everyone’s Job
Far too often businesses of all sizes leave the official job of marketing to, well, the marketing department, which can also be known as the owner of the business or top sales person turned into the marketing person. But, here’s a little flash – anyone associated with [...]
Getting Started & Public Relations (PR) & Word of Mouth / Viral Marketing
November 18th, 2008 → 2:01 am @ Admin
The numbers this fall aren’t good.
After a high above 14,000 last year, the Dow is now thrashing around well below 9,000. The U.S. government is spending over $700 billion to buy unprecedented stakes in the nation’s largest banks. Many industries, including technology, are hemorrhaging jobs.
This post isn’t about all that. It’s about the silver lining — the fact that, just as we saw eight years ago when the first Internet bubble burst, financial pressure is now forcing companies to make changes. And just like last time, these changes are laying the foundation for a new, more efficient period of Internet growth.
In 2001, when the last downturn began, businesses began shifting some of their marketing dollars to search engine advertising. It was more measurable and targeted than display advertising, so it was appealing to marketers with tight budgets.
As we enter a second Internet downturn, businesses are again seeking efficiency. They’re shifting money out of expensive paid search advertising, and into optimization, content and social media that help them get found in organic search results.
These changes are laying the foundation for a new era of marketing on the web – the Inbound Marketing era.
Inbound Marketing is marketing focused on getting found by customers.
In traditional marketing (outbound marketing) companies focus on finding customers. They use techniques that are poorly targeted and that interrupt people. They use cold-calling, print advertising, T.V. advertising, junk mail, spam and trade shows.
Technology is making these techniques less effective and more expensive. Caller ID blocks cold calls, TiVo makes T.V. advertising less effective, spam filters block mass emails and tools like RSS are making print and display advertising less effective. It’s still possible to get a message out via these channels, but it costs more.
Inbound Marketers flip outbound marketing on its head.
Instead of interrupting people with television ads, they create videos that potential customers want to see. Instead of buying display ads in print publications, they create their own blog that people subscribe to and look forward to reading. Instead of cold calling, they create useful content and tools so that people call them looking for more information.
Instead of driving their message into a crowd over and over again like a sledgehammer, they attract highly qualified customers to their business like a magnet.
The most successful Inbound Marketing campaigns have three key components:
(1) Content – Content is the substance of any Inbound Marketing campaign. It is the information or tool that attracts potential customers to your site or your business.
(2) Search Engine Optimization – SEO makes it easier for potential customers to find your content. It is the practice of building your site and inbound links to your site to maximize your ranking in search engines, where most of your customers begin their buying process.
(3) Social Media – Social media amplifies the impact of your content. When your content is distributed across and discussed on networks of personal relationships, it becomes more authentic and nuanced, and is more likely to draw qualified customers to your site.
As the economy slows down, companies are turning to Inbound Marketing because it is a more efficient way of allocating marketing resources than traditional, outbound marketing. As our CEO, Brian Halligan, puts it, when you’re inbound marketing, the thickness of your brain matters a lot more than the thickness of your wallet.
There are three specific ways Inbound Marketing improves on the efficiency of traditional marketing:
(1) It Costs Less – Outbound marketing means spending money – either by buying ads, buying email lists or renting huge booths at trade shows. Inbound Marketing means creating content and talking about it. A blog costs nothing to start. A Twitter account is free, too. Both can draw thousands of customers to your site.
(2) Better Targeting – Techniques like cold-calling, mass mail and email campaigns are notoriously poorly targeted. You’re reaching out to individuals because of one or two attributes in a database. When you do Inbound Marketing, you only approach people who self-qualify themselves. They demonstrate an interest in your content, so they are likely to be interested in your product.
(3) It’s an Investment, Not an Ongoing Expense – When you buy pay-per-click advertising on search engines, its value is gone as soon as you pay for it. In order to maintain a position at the top of Google’s paid results, you have to keep paying. However, if you invest that money in quality content that ranks in Google’s organic results, you’ll be there until somebody displaces you.
Only in the past year and a half have the technology, the tools and the public’s use of both evolved to the point where Inbound Marketing is practical.
In the early days of the Internet, there was no mainstream marketing. There were lots of experiments but few business buyers and consumers.
In the mid-1990s, as the first Internet bubble grew, companies began to follow their customers online. Tools for independent publishing were weak, so companies’ online presence mirrored their offline presence. They sprayed advertising across mass media sites and prayed a few potential customers would see it.
When the dot-com bubble popped in 2001, marketers began to reassess the effectiveness of the spray-and-pray approach. They saw that consumers and business buyers were starting their purchase process less on mass media sites, and more on search engines. They discovered that in many cases targeted search-engine advertising was far more effective than display advertising on large media sites.
As spending poured into search marketing, a new era of Internet growth began. In addition to changes in Internet marketing, this phase of growth – Web 2.0 – produced significant changes in the way we use the web. It shifted from a read-only platform to one where anybody could publish, connect with friends and share content.
Now, as we enter a new economic downturn, online marketers are using the tools of this new read-write web to become more efficient. They’re using social media, they’re publishing content and they’re optimizing it. They’re becoming Inbound Marketers.
Eight years ago, when the dot-com bubble collapsed, the idea of a single man using great content, social media and search engine optimization to build a New Jersey liquor store into a $50-million-a-year business in the course of two years would have been absurd.
Yet that’s exactly what Gary Vaynerchuk has done since he launched Wine Library TV in 2006.
This is the power of Inbound Marketing.
With the tools that have become mainstream over the last two to three years, the scale of any business can be unlimited. If you have a great product and the skills to communicate with your customers, you can compete with the biggest advertising budgets.
That is exciting, and for small businesses it’s empowering.
Blogging & Getting Started & Public Relations (PR) & SEO / Search Engines & Word of Mouth / Viral Marketing
November 11th, 2008 → 7:23 am @ Admin
You should be tracking the word of mouth about your company. You should know what is being said about you in blogs, reviews, and social media. If you’re a big company, you should hire one of the great monitoring firms…
Monitoring / Analytics & Public Relations (PR) & Social Networking
November 6th, 2008 → 7:05 am @ Admin
One way to build awareness, brand, credibility and buzz about your blog is to appear in mainstream media (read more about the Benefits of being featured in Mainstream Media).
A lot has been written about how to get your blog featured on other blogs – but how do you get press coverage whether it be TV, [...]
November 6th, 2008 → 1:24 am @ Admin
As a reporter and editor at Forbes Magazine, Erika Brown handled a lot of story pitches from companies. Now she’s director of marketing and business development at Matrix Partners (one of HubSpot’s investors), making pitches of her own.
In an interview earlier this fall, Erika explained to HubSpot’s Karen Rubin how she thinks companies should pitch.
The full video is below. Here are her top tips:
(1) Know Your Company: “One of the things I found that was the most frustrating as a reporter was people who would call and email you and they really didn’t know what they were selling.”
(2) Be Open and Honest: ”Whenever I felt I got some pushback and someone was trying to hide something from me … my journalist reflex got excited and I thought, ‘Ah! There’s a story!’”
(3) Know Your Target Audience: “What you should always think about when working on a media strategy is what your customers read … if you think about what they care about, and where they’re going to get information, that’s where you want to be.”
(4) Know the Writers You’re Pitching: “You really need to pay attention to what they write about and what they care about.”
November 4th, 2008 → 5:00 am @ Admin
Several of the TopRank Online Marketing team attended a Social Media Breakfast last Friday, along with about 150 local business leaders, code warriors, internet marketers, agency peeps and social media enthusiasts, to hear a presentation by David Meerman Scott, author of “The New Rules of Marketing & PR”. TopRank CEO Lee Odden posted a short [...]
November 3rd, 2008 → 1:26 am @ Admin
Let’s say you’ve gotten the approval to get your company involved in social media marketing and are ready to launch your efforts. How will you define success?
This is an important question, because a large number of companies have jumped into social media without any clear business strategy. Before the financial meltdown of the last few weeks, some companies had the resources to experiment with social media without worrying about financial accountability. But now, most businesses must demonstrate an ROI on any new effort.
In fact, the lack of good metrics is cited as the biggest barrier to marketers’ adoption of social media. Particularly in this shaky financial climate, measuring impact is one of the definitive measures of a marketing strategy’s value. If you want to skip the blind experimentation, particularly in view of our current global financial crisis, we’ve assembled a list of 5 tips to help you start leveraging social media with minimal investment and with strong systems in place to measure success.
The first step to measuring success in social media marketing is proper scope. There are new social networks popping up each week. It’s a waste of resources to join every new social network only to find you have no time to manage them. Find out where your most active customers & influencers spend time online – then listen and take notes.
Here’s some tools you can use to tune into the conversation: Technorati, Google Blog Search, Ice Rocket, Bloglines, Twitter Search, AideRSS and HubSpot’s HubFeed. More advanced social media monitoring tools include Radian6 and Techrigy.
The second step towards success is consistently utilizing social media to engage prospective customers. When you start listening to conversations, you might hear some things about your company that aren’t very complimentary. That’s ok. Your job now is to engage these customers and find a way to help. Be willing to acknowledge mistakes when they happen. Customers are surprisingly forgiving if a company engages in an honest and egoless manner.
If you’re one of the lucky companies who only has enthusiastic and happy customers, recognize their desire to interact with you and be generous with your time. Be open to engaging with them on their turf. They’ll reward your brand with greater enthusiasm – which is a message that spreads through social networks like wildfire, and solidifies your brand.
For instance, on Twitter both Starbucks and Whole Foods share customer comments, local specials, and ask customers what their favorite items are. It’s casual and open, yet subtly appeals to the attractiveness of the brand. Check out some of the brands on Twitter, and implement some of their conversation techniques.
How involved is your team in communicating with prospective customers, influencers and current customers on social networking sites? How often are you publishing great content that helps your prospects do their jobs? How often do you blog, Tweet, post photos on Flickr, comment on other blogs, Podcast, upload videos, etc? The more content that you produce and publish on social media sites, the more traffic you can attract back to your website. If your site is designed well to convert visitors into leads, these activities will help you increase sales.
“Social media strategy should tie to business and communication strategy, rather than being based on the available tools. But it is not possible to develop a social media strategy without at least having an understanding of the various tools that are available, their functionality and purposes, and the kinds of audiences and conversations for which they might be best suited.” – Joel Postman, Principal Socialized PR
It’s critical to tie your business strategy to your social media strategy. However, without a knowledge of what social media and social networking sites enable you to do, it’s hard to know how to do that. It’s important to establish a blog as your home base. Then, learn the capabilities of each site to help you interact. For example, Twitter provides an almost unfettered ability to connect with your prospective clients. But, it only allows you to type 140 characters at a time. So, maybe a video posted to youtube would be a better way to publish a “how-to”. Linkedin & Facebook let you see who your contacts know. But, facebook makes it much easier to connect with them. LinkedIn Answers is a much better place to answer business focussed questions than any other social network.
It’s important to learn how to use these sites in order to get business value out of your social media activity. Talk to an expert to determine where to spend your time to get the best return.
Many experts agree that social media will affect the next generation of search engine optimization techniques as search engines start to use the signals we collectively leave as we network and share media online. Even today, social media activity affects the success of many other inbound marketing techniques:
- Search engine ranking
- Social bookmarking activity
- Social networking connections
- Video/podcast views/listens
- Inbound links
- RSS subscriptions
- Comments on your blog
- Mentions of your brand
- Number of times people search for your brand
- Visitors (first-time and repeat)
- Leads & Customers!
The end goals is lead generation and sales. But, there are plenty of leading indicators as you ramp up your efforts.
Use tracking codes, a solid analytics package and closed loop marketing in order to track the visits, leads and sales that occurr as a result of your social media activities.
This article was co-authored by Peter Caputa IV from HubSpot & Ghennipher, a 10 year veteran of the Internet Marketing world. Ghennipher is an independent Social Media Marketing consultant and writes on Social Media’s effect on business. Subscribe to her blog here.
Getting Started & Public Relations (PR) & SEO / Search Engines & Social Networking