Posted by Aaron Bare on Tue, Aug 31, 2010 @ 12:00 PM
A social media strategy is not deciding to use Facebook and Twitter. Those are tactics. So what is a social media strategy?
Much like a politician should prepare a messaging platform and define perceptions, issues and tactics for each speech, a social media strategy and its content implementation needs the same preparation.
In the movie Our Brand Is Crisis, James Carville explains these principles which should be considered for political candidates, as well as companies' social media usage.
Simplicity – the ability to simply state, in a single phrase, what you will do for your clients or customers.
Relevance – the ability to tell the story in the eyes of your clients or customers.
Repetition – the relentless effort in telling the story over and over and over again.
So once you have your messaging platform, content creation becomes easier as you listen to social media and engage in the conversations that are most important to your brand, industry, products or service. From there, you can publish relevant blog posts, be repetitive on your story and make sure you always create a call to action while sharing your simplicity.
Every company should think about defining a strategy so it is consistent with its message, brand and product marketing within all facets of social media. With social media being a tool that allows for multiple touch points, it will be important for the future of branding to have a grip on a social media policy, as much as it does their brand promise and perception in the marketplace.
Do you have a social media strategy? How did you come up with it?
About the author: Aaron Bare is the CEO of an online buzz and word of mouth company focused on elegant social media optimized websites.
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Posted by Itai Boublil on Fri, Aug 27, 2010 @ 07:45 AM
In the inbound marketing realm, 'free' rules! We have free webinars, free ebooks, free data charts, free content, etc. Have you ever wondered, though, why companies are willing to invest so much time, effort and resources to create 'free' incentives?
Enter the behavioral economics realm, where two worlds known as social norms and market norms exist side by side.
In the social norms realm, friendly requests and free offers, created by companies through the use of social media, shape the daily interaction. In this world (in the context of inbound marketing), companies provide us with insightful free knowledge, refer us to free webinars, or even let us download free ebooks that detail a topic that interests us. All for free!
Why, then, the allures about all that is free?
The short answer is that social norms are wrapped up in our social nature and in our need for a community. This type of norms are usually 'warm-and-fuzzy', and don’t require any instant paybacks. It is like keeping the door open for that person walking right behind you.
From a business perspective, social norms are not only inexpensive, but often more effective in the long run. While webinars, ebooks, and daily blog articles are all financially inefficient (it costs money to produce them), they are still important social lubricants.
It is this type of social norms that help us build long-term relationships and make friends that can sustain us through the ups-and-downs of our business. (Read this great example.) Sometimes a 'waste' of money can be worth a lot in real terms when taking the social norms approach to promote your business.
Market norms, on the other hand, is a world where exchanges are sharp and often time include fees, prices, and paid packages. In the marketing realm, these actions are also known as traditional marketing, and it’s when companies try to push their products on us, using tactics that leave us resentful and, worse, with products and services we don’t want. (For example, a two year locked contract).
Marketing Takeaway
When developing your inbound marketing plan, keep in mind the rules of social norms. It is important to remember that money can only take you so far, and that social norms are the forces that can make a difference in the long run.
How do you use social norms in your business?
About the author: Itai Boublil is a marketing manager at Princeton University and can be found on Twitter as @ItaiBoublil.
Posted by Dick Wooden on Wed, Aug 25, 2010 @ 08:15 AM
A journey starts with the first step.
Here are seven ways that the Inbound Marketing University training has helped me and my business help my clients... and how it can do the same for you!
1. It expands what you don't know, but should know. You can use IMU to move out of "Unconscious Incompetence" and begin to become more aware of the bigger, positive possibilities to grow a business. Share those new insights with your clients.
2. It gives you high quality resources for more in-depth analysis and a place to go for expertise. We all can use more purposeful and valuable content. Sign up for the professors' blogs and read their books. Share the resources with your clients.
3. It builds your skill level in areas like social media usage, attraction marketing and remarkable content creation. Help your clients create the basic core social media profiles in LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Start to build a personal brand. I have helped several businesses start a blog and now they are seeing new prospects being attracted.
4. It builds your capacity to develop relationships. You'll discover more methods to connect and enhance business relationships. Help your client understand the value of connecting their employees with prospects, clients, and other business partners.
5. It gives you the opportunity to learn from others' experiences, including how they got started in inbound marketing, what worked and what didn't. Some of the best practices may apply to your client's business model, so pass them along. Follow some of the ideas presented in the classes to get started, now.
6. It makes you think at a deeper level about what attracts your ideal client and helps you focus on benefits--not features. Consider what keywords and phrases attract your clients, and then help your clients attract more prospects matching their "ideal."
7. It's fun and an entertaining way to learn new concepts that are also immediately practical in today's world. The folks at HubSpot have an engaging and fun spirit. Join the Inbound Marketing University and start learning useful strategies and tips to grow your business with the principles at the core of inbound marketing.
What skills have you learned at Inbound Marketing University that you plan to use to help your clients?
About the author: Dick Wooden is an IMU Graduate, Customer Relationship Management consultant, and Inbound Marketing Specialist who lives in the Southwest Michigan, Michiana area. His passion is helping entrepreneurially minded people strengthen and grow their business centered around business relationship development.
Posted by Rebecca Corliss on Mon, Aug 23, 2010 @ 10:30 AM
This article is a guest post by Stephanie Gehman. Here, Stephanie discusses the role social media plays at her company, Harrisburg International Airport.
Did you know that airports are social?
At Harrisburg International Airport (HIA), we jumped aboard the social media bandwagon in mid-2008 with a Facebook profile and the fly HIA blog. Since then we have expanded the profile into a business page, we regularly tweet on Twitter, photo share on Flickr, opened our YouTube channel for the aviation geek in all of us, maintain a LinkedIn group, and we’re just getting started with Tumblr. Combined, these social media platforms help us routinely and intimately serve the needs of several thousand of the travelers in our facility.
The benefits of these platforms are both direct and indirect. Below are six of the most significant benefits we've experienced at HIA.
Using social media has afforded us the opportunity to build relationships. we are now able to communicate with air travelers in a real-time manner and even have the opportunity to occasionally meet them when they’re in the building departing for a flight.
We’ve extended the reach of our customer information department. We cannot always directly fix the issue, but social media, especially Facebook and Twitter, are means to efficiently acknowledge a problem and let the customer know that we want to help remedy that which warranted their public post or tweet.
HIA has increased our expedience in sharing airport-related condition reports. We can, with great efficiency, tweet and post to Facebook, reports related to weather, delay, and roadway conditions that may impact a traveler’s commute to/from HIA.
Social networking facilitates conversation with worldwide industry professionals. We’ve re-tweeted or reposted the content of professionals from across to globe, as well as those folks right in our backyard. There are intelligent people on the other side of those tweets and posts, and many of them are happy to answer questions or share their insight and opinions on activity transpiring in the aviation industry.
HIA has a new means to market our brand and our vendors/partners. We will continue to utilize traditional means of advertising, such as print, radio, outdoor, etc. However, we can take the message of those efforts to social networking and engage our followers/friends in dialogue about that message.
Social networking amplifies the reach of and the visits to our website. Now that Google and Bing are including social content in their organic search engine results, HIA has the ability to appear more frequently and steadily in a host of categorical searches we may not have appeared in before.
I could detail a number of other benefits that HIA has reaped from social media, but all-in all, the common theme is that of community building, engaging and conversing with those audiences that have a vested interest in the airport, and the airlines and vendors operating at HIA. All of these benefits build off of and are directly related to engaging with users in dialogue, instead of the monologue that results from traditional means of marketing and advertising.
Don’t miss out social media's interactive and real-time value that can complement your traditional advertising and marketing strategy. And more importantly, don’t miss out on the opportunity to engage and converse with that core group of supporters who are willing to routinely purchase your product or service and recommend your business to others.
How does social media impact your company? What are your everyday benefits?
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Posted by Ken Mueller on Thu, Aug 19, 2010 @ 08:30 AM
If you’re trying to get found, one of the most overlooked tools at your disposal is Google Places (formerly Google Local). When you do a local search, the first thing that often shows up in the organic search listings is a Google Places map with pins showing the locations of nearby businesses. These pins are accompanied by customizable listings. The best part? It’s all free.
When I first discovered Google Places, I quickly snatched up my listing and found that on most local searches I was the only one who showed up on SERPs for several important keywords.
Here’s all you need to do to claim your Google listing:
1) Go to Google Places and create your listing. If a listing already exists, make sure you claim it for yourself.
2) Load it up with relevant info and don’t forget your keywords. Include your services, hours, methods of payment, etc.
3) Go the extra mile with photos, videos, and other information that your customers will find helpful. Product brand names are a great option.
4) Add special events or a printable coupon. These can be changed regularly, and a coupon will help you track the effectiveness of your listing.
5) Stay on top of your listing. As your business changes, make sure your listing follows suit.
If you’re the first one in your business category to claim your listing, what a great boost! But if your competitors are there while you’re not, it’s time to catch up. You may be late to the game, but there’s a chance they’ve forgotten about their listing and aren’t using it properly. Also, remember that Google is constantly tinkering with the search algorithm. You need to be aware of the changes so that you can optimize before your competitors do. If you like to track things (and you should), Google Places comes with its own analytics, allowing you to see how many impressions your listing has received, as well as click-throughs.
And while Google is king, make sure you also claim your listings on other search engines, such as Bing Local and Yahoo Local, not to mention geo-location and review services like Foursquare, Yelp, etc.
Claim your Place now and help yourself get found! You can get assistance through the Google Places Help Center.
Are you using Google Places already? If not, do you plan to check it out?
About the author: Ken Mueller is a Social Media & Inbound Marketing Strategist at Inkling Media, a Lancaster, PA based Inbound and Social Media marketing company.
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Posted by Leon Spencer on Tue, Aug 17, 2010 @ 08:00 AM
Many companies who are timid to adopt social media into their marketing feel that way because they don't know where to start. For those of you who may be just beginning to dip your toe into the social media world, here are five tips to get you started.
#1: Discover Your Ideal Audience
First, familiarize yourself with the terms and communication style that your customers are comfortable using, as well as the places where they talk to each other on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, blogs and other social bookmarking sites.
Decide the basic profile for your average client. Where would you place them in terms of education, interests, use of technology, and time spent using social sites?
#2: Address Your Audience's Top Issues
Sharing knowledge and information through social media is like taking on the role of a reporter for your industry. In order to think like a reporter, you must ask yourself: "What are my readers most interested in knowing?"
Source Trusted Resources in your Content: Research plays a significant role in social media strategy, which makes choosing trusted sources a must. Save your audience effort by staying on topic, highlighting the most important parts, and maintaining a high quality of content. The result will be clients, fans and followers who regard your information as credible and worth their time.
#3: Map Out Your Content Creation
Who will be responsible for researching, composing and publishing your content? Will you be in charge of this? Do you have a team that can work on it instead? An assessment of what your company can realistically deliver is necessary before setting any goals for volume or frequency.
#4: Setup Your Plan
Brainstorming: If you have some concepts you'd like to examine in complex ways, mind-mapping is useful for viewing them from a number of unique standpoints.
Editorial Calendar: An editorial calendar is highly effective tool to help you more clearly define your content and do so within a certain time frame. Just remember how much can be accomplished by working on deadlines!
Keywords: Including keywords in your calendar is an extra bonus, and will remind you of the important words and phrases to use in each article or post.
Content Rotation: A common practice by those planning content is to assign certain types of blog posts to different days of the week, such as: Top 10 lists each Monday; product reviews each Tuesday, unique experience sharing each Wednesday, and so on.
#5: Content Scheduling
When scheduling your content, take into account the formats you plan on delivering and with what sort of frequency. Services like TweetDeck, HootSuite and Socialoomph make it possible to synchronize your posts across Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other sites.
Quality Above All Else: Daily posting is not necessary in order to successfully establish a social media presence. The frequency at which you post should be customized to the needs of your business. Keep in mind that quality outweighs quantity by a ton. If the quality of your content suffers at the rate you're attempting, then cut it down to a frequency that doesn't compromise quality.
Was this post helpful? What other suggestions do you have for fellow marketers to build a social media strategy?
About the author: Leon Spencer is a Social Media Strategist who works with small to medium sized businesses to get them involved with social media platforms.
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Posted by Robbert van den Heuvel on Wed, Aug 11, 2010 @ 10:00 AM
At the time of writing this article, I am one of the few Inbound Marketing Certified Professionals from the Netherlands. (Please leave a comment if you are too!) Therefore, I would like to encourage all my fellow Dutch marketers to attend Inbound Marketing University, take the exam and embrace the inbound marketing philosophy as soon as possible!
It appears to me that a majority of the Dutch marketing community is still relying toward traditional "outbound" marketing methods. For example, earlier this year I was talking to a fellow marketing manager of a medium-sized insurance company who was thrilled about the success of a recent lead generation campaign.
Proudly, he told me that the campaign was a radio advertisement; he had bought the rights to a popular song by an upcoming Dutch singer-songwriter and hired a professional voice actor to summon the listener to go to the company website and apply for a minibrochure. The radio ad was broadcasted on a national business radio station for two months during rush hours. The total cost of this campaign was 35,000 Euros, or $45,000 USD.
After he finished his story, I was very curious why he was so proud of his campaign. What was his success? How many leads did the campaign generate? His answer? The marketing department received 26 completed forms, and he had yet to enquire with the Sales team if any had converted into clients.
I asked him his thoughts on the heavy cost per lead (around $1,600 USD per lead). He was aware of the high costs, but told me I shouldn't underestimate the boost in visibility “the company brand” received from the campaign. However, he could not prove his statement with substantial data.
Compare this campaign to a recent campaign my agency developed for one of my clients:
Earlier this year, my company was hired by a legal advisor to develop a lead generation campaign for her firm. After talking to her about the possibilities that an inbound marketing-focused campaign could offer to her company, she agreed to try this unfamiliar strategy.
Together, we developed an e-course on the topic of standard business contracts. She wrote relevant content for the course. My company developed a microsite, which we promoted with a modest PPC-campaign ($150 USD) and through social media channels. The results? This mini-campaign harvested 35 interested subscribers in only a few months time.
Apart from the minimal energy and effort it took to develop the inbound marketing campaign, it's pretty obvious which of the two lead generation campaigns was most cost effective, isn't it?
What do you think? Do you have one or more examples of the cost-effectiveness of outbound vs. inbound marketing? Please share in the comments!
About the author: Robbert van den Heuvel is owner of Dutch inbound marketing agency and Certified Hubspot Partner Heuvel Marketing. He is also one of the founding members of business network organization “Colour My Company”.
Photo credit: moonstarsandpaper.blogspot.com
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Posted by David Hale on Mon, Aug 09, 2010 @ 10:00 AM
No Internet marketer in history has built any type of ongoing revenue online without building an opt-in email list of some kind. It does not matter what your product or service is, who you are selling to, or what your current online efforts have brought you.
Creating a list will do two things for your business: 1) provide you a means to sell to your existing customers; and 2) covert opt-ins to customers. Before you begin building your list, make sure you have an autoresponder account, or an email marketing software product, that can send follow up messages to new email subscribers. The two services I suggest are Aweber and Getresponse.
Now you need to create an email strategy based on continually pumping out quality information to your list. This will help you build credibility while also attempting to convert initial opt-ins to paying customers, and paying customers into repeat buyers.
Like most things online, there is a cookie-cutter approach to building this strategy that works almost every time. Start, by implementing the following five-step process:
1. Start by writing some free content as an offer to attract email opt-ins. It does not matter what exactly it is, just make it free, informative and assists in developing your credibility. It can be a free tutorial series, ebook, report or something else. The main point is that it is free and attracts email opt-ins. However, do not waste your time developing low-budget material. It may attract opt-ins but will do nothing to develop credibility.
2. Design a landing page (squeeze page or opt-in page) to collect new subscribers. Unless you want to do spilt testing with two or more pages, I recommend placing an opt-in box in the upper right hand side of your home page. Make it an irresistible offer with a prominent call-to-action.
3. Consider getting creative by adding a hover-over ad, slide-in or pop-up ad on your home page. You may want to send people to another opt-in page in order to track conversions. There are also programs to use on pop-up ads that will do this for you.
4. Send as much traffic to your opt-in page as possible through articles, blog posts, forum commenting, PPC ads, and joint ventures. Again, send the traffic to a domain opt-in that allows tracking so you will know where the traffic is coming from. Tracking the traffic source of your leads will help you understand the convertability of those sources, so you know where to allocate the majority of your efforts.
5. Lastly, you need to monetize your list. This is where the rubber meets the road, so to speak. Continue to nuture your list. Eventually they will know you from the information you are sending, and they will like you after receiving free content that is helpful. Many times, people send the content you provided to friends. Be sure to include affiliate links for your programs or links where people can learn more about your products. All this leads to possible purchases and affiliate commissions to you.
As mentioned at the beginning, list building is the toughest part of Internet marketing. It is one thing to develop the list, but yet another one to monetize it. Use your list to market your products, but first provide them with valuable content and information so they will know, like and trust you.
Was this article helpful? What other ideas for effective email marketing do you have up your sleeve?
About the author: Dave Hale, Ph.D. is the Founder and President of DHI-Communications, a full-service organizational communications form specializing in assisting companies with integrating inbound marketing channels into their marketing mix.
Photo Credit: mag3737
Posted by Tracy Terry on Thu, Aug 05, 2010 @ 08:00 AM
Every website owner strives to be on the first page of Google search results. At one time or another, we are given direction on what to do in order to achieve this goal, but not the specifics of actually how to do it.
The following are some tips that have helped me in the past with optimizing on-page SEO in order to achieve higher page rankings in Google.
1. Do not make your tags and titles too long. Try to be keyword-specific in your titles and optimize each tag for just a couple keyword phrases.
2. Place your keywords at the beginning of your tags. Do not place your company name first. The phrase your prospective customers will be typing in the search bar is the phrase that needs to be placed first in your tags. For instance, if you sell shoes and your company name is Foot Stop, do not place it before your keywords like this: “Foot Stop selling shoes to the Phoenix, AZ area.” Instead, it should read something like this: “Shoe store in Phoenix, AZ selling men’s and women’s shoes – Foot Stop”.
3. Place tags in your headings. For example: Before the title on your page, place < h1 > in the coding (without spaces), then write your title text. At the end of the page title, place an< /h1 > tag.
4. Bold your heading and some of your keywords.
5. Look at your coding and see where your text is located. If your text is coded all the way at the bottom of your page, Google will never reach it. Highlight and copy each < div > tag that includes your text and paste it just after the tag. Your text will remain in the same position on your page. You have now moved the text you want Google crawling to the top of the page where it can be reached and read.
6. Place alt tags into every image you have on your page. You can do this by looking at the code on your page and locating the < alt > tags. At the end of the tag, just before the closing bracket (<), add the following: alt=”typekeywordshere”. Alt tags allow those who do not have images turned on their computer to see what your image is about. This is a great place to put more of your keywords.
7. Place keywords throughout your text without overpopulating. Optimize for 1-3 keywords per page. Place keywords in your heading and bold the heading. Place keywords in your body and bold some of your keywords, preferably in your first couple sentences. Be sure to place keywords at the end of your body text as well.
If you follow these seven tips for on-page search engine optimization, you will see an improvement in your Google organic page listing. These simple tricks helped me achieve first page ranking in just eight shorts weeks with a brand new website.
And of course, learn more about search engine optimization in Lesson 2 of Inbound Marketing University, SEO Crash Course to Get Found.
What do you think? Any other SEO tips to add?
About the author: Tracy Terry is a Certified Inbound Marketing Professional and Educator. She started Trust eMedia in 2010 and was HubSpot's June 2010 Inbound Marketer of the Month.
Posted by Jeff Coon on Tue, Aug 03, 2010 @ 08:00 AM
Learning the principles and methodologies of inbound marketing may seem daunting at first - especially to veteran marketers and seasoned business professionals who may be used to traditional (outbound) marketing. When beginning inbound marketing, it helps to put the tools and technology aside and begin with things you already know.
We like to relate inbound marketing and social networking to traditional business networking events. The same principles and social graces apply to both endeavors. The steps to joining a traditional/offline networking group usually go something like this:
1. Find a group to join that aligns with your business
2. Attend group events and monthly meetings
3. Get to know the group members
4. Find out how you can offer value to the group
5. Pass along referrals to other group members when possible
6. Continue to build relationships by being trustworthy, credible and
active in the group
7. Present at a monthly meeting and showcase your expertise
8. Accept business referrals - or kindly ask for them when appropriate
Networking is all about developing real relationships - and that takes time. People want to do business with real people - particularly people they know, like and trust. This principle has been, and will remain, true forever and is just applicable online as it is offline.
Using the same list from above, here is how you can begin to engage and network online, using social media and other tools.
1. Look for a LinkedIn Group to join that aligns with your business. (Why not start with the Inbound Marketing Group). Find people to follow on Twitter. Find a couple industry blogs to read.
2. Check in regularly with your online groups, tweeps (twitter people), read industry blogs daily.
3. By checking in regularly, you’ll get to know who the influencers and key members of the groups are. You’ll also get to know the pulse and interests of the group. Before engaging, you must first spend time listening. You wouldn’t attend an offline networking event for the first time and immediately ask to be one of the key presenters for that day.
4. Based on the discussions and topics you’ve been following, identify where the opportunities to start engaging are. You can begin by commenting on articles and adding your professional insight into existing group discussions.
5. Introduce other group members or bloggers to your network by sharing their articles with your network (obviously giving credit where credit is due), retweeting their posts, fowarding to a friend via email, etc. By promoting other members’ content (when applicable) they will be more likely to share your content in the future - exposing you to their network.
6. Continue to be active in your LinkedIn or Facebook Groups, post to Twitter a couple times a day, comment on blogs weekly and build your trust and credibility by adding value to the group through insightful comments.
7. Now that you’ve been an active member in the online community, begin to showcase your expertise by writing industry-related blog articles. A big part of inbound marketing is creating valuable content. Look to start a discussion within your LinkedIn Group. The idea is not to sit on the sidelines forever. At some point, you have to dive in and show ‘em what you’ve got - keeping in mind that the goal is to provide value to your network. Being “salesy” won’t work!
8. Keep being active! Contributing to your groups, writing great content and promoting it (and others) when appropriate will expand your reach, increase your credibility and will ultimately lead to new opportunities.
Success won’t happen overnight. It takes time and commitment. Offline relationships don’t happen immediately and generating new business offline can take months - even years - so don’t look for online success to be instantaneous. But, if you follow the inbound marketing methodology and are a good online citizen, you’ll reap the rewards of the community.
Will these tips help you? For inbound marketing pros, what tips did you wish you received when you were getting started?
About the author: Jeff Coon is a Partner/Art Director/Inbound Marketer at Stream Creative Design Group located in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.