Inbound & Digital Marketing Blog

Passion-Inspired Video and Other Creative Content (GF502)

The use of video to market powerful content has exploded in recent years! Whether it’s used in blogs or as a viral content strategy, video gets peoples’ attention! When searching popular keywords, Google now gives videos first-page rankings. Sites that would otherwise score unfavorably are now able to make the top of first-page search results by posting video content. So, what does this tell you? Video is an incredible opportunity to drive more traffic and leads to your website!    

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The video advantage

Since video is fairly new to online marketing, there’s less video content to compete with. This means, if you’re smart about optimizing your video content, there’s a pretty good chance it can show up at the top of Google search results. Many businesses are still preoccupied with optimizing keywords for only text-based mediums. They haven’t discovered that keywords can be optimized using video as well.

Where to post video

Hosting your videos on third-party sites like YouTube may be a good strategy if you’re only interested in getting your content out in public view, but if you’re serious about directing more visits to your site, focus on hosting content on your own site. YouTube generates lots of traffic, so posting your videos on YouTube will help you generate lots of views quickly, but won’t do much for your site rankings.

Optimize your video content

Use rich keywords and position them as far to the left of the title as possible. Video itself doesn’t contain content Google can decipher, so be sure to upload a transcript of your video. Transcripts should be time-coded and the video script broken down into segments. Here's a useful video that shows you how to upload a transcript to YouTube videos.

Create a video sitemap

Search engines must know how to index the pages on your site that contain video. Building a video sitemap will accomplish this. A video sitemap is able to identify and tag videos on your site. It should include the URL for the video file, a thumbnail URL, play page URL, and title and description information. Take a look at how to create a video sitemap using Google's Webmaster Tools.

Measure your content

Like blog posts, keep your videos short and concise. People watch videos because they’re trying to absorb meaningful information in a short amount of time. Ten minutes should be the maximum length for your video. If it runs longer than that, consider cutting it into a series of shorter videos. Make sure your content is relevant and informative to your audience. Videos have the potential of attracting lots of inbound links IF they contain content people find useful.

Promote your video

Spread the word by posting links to your videos on your LinkedIn and Facebook pages. Send out tweets to your Twitter followers so they can check out your new content postings. Generate more activity around your videos by encouraging others to leave comments about them. Video is a popular medium for viral marketing. If you have something valuable to share, your content could spread like wildfire!

Online video is a dynamic tool to use in your inbound marketing strategy. If your site's having difficulty getting higher search rankings, consider tapping into the SEO potential video can offer. Video can be an effective way to sell your brand, educate your audience, and generate more traffic for you site.

Advanced Marketing Analytics (AZ501)

Interpreting your customers’ online buying behavior is not always obvious. Good sales results require an in depth understanding of their most pressing needs and wants. Some businesses focus so much on gorgeous website design, they overlook what’s most important – the data. A pretty page may be pleasing to the eyes, but if it lacks data that helps solve peoples’ problems, who cares? At the end of the day, building a website around the needs of your customers is what expands your customer base. What’s the key to knowing their needs? Knowing their intent. Web analytics tools will help you with this.

In his blog article about understanding consumer behavior with web analytics, Google’s analytics guru, Avinash Kaushik discusses how to identify customer intent. He poses 4 key questions you should answer about your website:

1. How did your visitors arrive?

Some visitors stumble upon your website by entering keywords in a search engine. Others enter via referral links. Web analytics provide you with a list of URLs that referred traffic to your site. Correlating conversions with specific referring URLs helps to identify which sites are sending you traffic with high conversion rates. Knowing which sites your customers are being referred from also helps you understand more about their interests and motivations.    

2. What are your visitors looking for?

Search engines now guard keyword data much more than in the past. Still, with a little detective work, you can get a good idea.

If you don't have Google Webmaster tools setup, go do it right now. It's the only way you can reliably get clues about what your visitors want. 

First, identify your high traffic pages. Then, look them up in webmaster tools and see which keywords are sending traffie to each page. You may be surprised and get ideas on how to tune your pages and your copy.

3. Where are visitors landing, bouncing, and viewing?

Visitors enter your website through many different entry points, not just your homepage. Analytics alert you to which landing pages visitors frequent most. If certain pages are popular with visitors, you may want to consider developing them further for even greater results. Similarly, isolating your most unpopular pages alerts you to the ones that require more optimization.  

Analytics also tell you which pages have the highest bounce rates – pages where visitors landed, looked around then left quickly. This is a clear sign that your page is not meeting customer expectations. Optimize it so it caters to their interests!

4. What are your website’s trends over time?     

Identifying performance trends is another valuable feature of analytics tools. They enable you to segment your data over timelines – you can pinpoint which days of the week or time intervals from which products sold best.

Twitter for Business (GF501)

Twitter is becoming an increasingly important platform for online business communication. It’s a microblogging service that enables users to send out and read tweets of up to 140 characters. Twitter has unfolded as a valuable and easy-to-use social media tool that enables businesses to share up-to-the-minute information about their products or services. Businesses that are active members of their business community rely on Twitter to share ideas and keep tuned in to what their competition is doing.

Image by: stevegarfield

Building relationships
Twitter is useful for building a more personalized brand for your business by developing deeper relationships with your customers. If your business has the reputation of being sociable and approachable, people will want to do business with you! When consumers have questions about a product, they want to be able to reach the manufacturer quickly and easily. Nowadays, so many businesses restrict their communication channels by throwing up barriers between them and their customers. Remove the barriers and give your buyers access. Twitter provides them access via real time interaction with your business.  If you can establish deeper relationships with your customers, they will feel more loyal about doing business with your brand.    

Receive consumer input
Listen to your customers…closely. Twitter is a perfect way to discover what people are saying about your business. Before considering a new product launch, get feedback from your Twitter followers on whether or not they think it’s a good move. No one understands the value of your products better than the people who use them. Consumer input is the key to developing better products. People buy your products to solve their unique problems. If your products are not delivering the intended results, you want to know about it. Twitter provides an open channel for you to learn ways to better enhance your offerings and make them more marketable.

Promote your business
The nice thing about Twitter is that it’s ideal for people on the move who use mobile devices like iPhones or Blackberries. You can easily deliver your message straight into your customer’s pocket without having to depend on email or expensive printed media. Twitter is the perfect medium for sharing the latest news, promotions, or events related to your business. It’s often easier to announce an upcoming webinar in a short tweet than in an email because many people are more apt to acknowledge tweets than emails. As long as you adhere to the 140-character limit, Tweets allow you to include links to your web pages, blogs, or videos.   

Broaden your horizons
Develop greater expertise in what you do by following industry experts on Twitter. Staying connected with the leaders in your industry provides you with a steady stream of fresh ideas, resources, and tips focused on how to build a better business. Engage with those you follow by joining conversations. Contribute answers and make suggestions so you can build a reputation within your business community. Retweet particularly valuable content with your Twitter followers. The more informative content you forward them, the more reliable they will view you. As your reputation grows, so will your list of followers.    

Chris Brogan’s 50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Business post offers some practical steps on how to get your Twitter business network set up. Do you have some additional Twitter tips for business? We’d love to hear your comments! 

PR for Inbound Marketing (GF402)

In HubSpot’s Inbound Marketing University video, PR for Inbound Marketing, Todd Defren of SHIFT Communications eloquently sums up public relations for inbound marketing as “frequently distributing relevant content via the right channels, to boost credibility and findability.” What running a successful inbound marketing PR campaign comes down to is adding value to your buyer community. If you target the right prospects in the right places, and prove your content to be valuable for them, you’re running an effective inbound marketing PR campaign.  

Image by: Fritz Park

We’ve undergone a revolution in mass media distribution. A social media explosion of blogs, podcasts, and RSS feeds now enables the common person to communicate directly with the world via social networking tools. The objective of PR for inbound marketing is to generate prospects who will convert into qualified leads. If you can draw prospects to your website where they opt-in and eventually create purchase orders, you’ve successfully completed your mission. Where do you begin? I’ll show you how:

Steps to Complete Your Inbound Marketing PR Mission

1. Pinpoint your targets. Who are your prospects and where do they go to acquire their information? The more you know about your prospects (what they do and where), the more accurate your targeting strategy will be.
2. Blog your targets regularly. Craft relevant blog articles your prospects are likely to find valuable and post them frequently (at least 3 times per week). Distribute your content through channels that are most likely to reach your targets. Analyze your website traffic often and tweak your SEO accordingly.
3. Check for explosive content. Measure the relevancy of your content. Is it explosive enough? If your content is not being actively shared through the social networks or your conversion rate is dwindling, it may not be relevant enough to your target market. Reassess your target audience and figure out what they find relevant for solving their unique problems.
4. Unleash your content arsenal. Use every social media tool at your disposal to direct your valuable content at your target audience. In addition to blog posts, leverage videos, podcasts, articles, tweets, and eBooks to promote your message. 
5. Assess mission effectiveness. Determine which of your blogs is generating the most traffic by using Google Analytics, HubSpot’s Blog Analytics, or Technorati. When you tweet, are you using TweetReach to track just how far your words are spreading? If you’re deploying video content, use TubeMogul to spread your content across several sites.
6. Get promoted to a higher rank. How are you ranking? Are you building enough credibility for your community to view you as an authority in your field? Prospects are unwilling to convert to qualified leads until they’re convinced that you have what it takes to solve their problems.
7. Strategize outbound tactics. Give bloggers in your industry a reason to write about you. Bloggers not only help your search engine rankings by creating inbound links to your website, but they help promote your brand by getting its name out there in front of others.  
8. Remove your camouflage. Get yourself found by making SEO at the forefront of everything you do. Optimize your social media content as you would your website to make it as easy as possible for your prospects to find you. The more interest you can draw, the more apt prospects will be to find you.        

Takeaways

• Add value to your community of buyers by helping them solve their unique problems.
• Create compelling content that prospects find interesting.
• Leverage social media outlets to reach your audience.
• Analyze your campaign’s effectiveness on an ongoing basis using analytics tools. 
• Build credibility with your online community and enable your business to be found.    

Successful Email Marketing (CV301)

You can easily manage email marketing yourself, but if your business relies heavily on email marketing and your time is at a premium, you may want to seriously consider using an email service provider. ESPs are extremely convenient for many businesses because they take the industry’s best practices and automate them for you. They save you time by dealing with headaches businesses typically don’t have time to deal with such as managing new subscribers, handling email bounce-backs, removing unsubscribers, and tracking delivery results. If you’d prefer to manage your own email marketing campaign, then read on.

Image by: digitpedia

Connect with your prospects

The first step is to establish quality connections with prospects who would be most interested in your product or service. Place a signup form or guest book on your landing page for people to join your email list. If visitors find your Web content useful in helping them solve their problems, they will most certainly leave their contact information in hopes of learning more. These are the types of quality connections you want when building a reliable email list. When you give people the choice to send their contact information, you’re enacting permission-based marketing – the type of marketing that offers the best quality leads. On your signup form, clearly describe the nature of your email content and how frequently you plan to send it. In addition to name and email address, be sure to include a category where prospects can discuss their interest in your business. Knowing your prospects’ interests is extremely valuable. It enables you to direct specific email to those with a clear interest in your topic.     

Create valuable email content

There’s only one reason why prospects would leave their contact information for you – they find your content so valuable, they want to learn more! When crafting email content, keep asking yourself, “Is my content informative?” If your emails are considered valuable enough, leads will forward them on to their colleagues or print them off for reference. Valuable content should be educational – it should give guidance and direction on how to solve common problems within your industry. It’s equally important that your content promotes your product or service and relates to your audience. Keep in mind that a key objective of email marketing is to build deeper relationships with your customers. 

Determine your email format

Email format depends on your objective. Newsletters are used to communicate educational content and typically contain lots of text, few images, and soft calls to action. They are often written in a concise summary format with bulleted points, and are distributed weekly or monthly. Promotional content usually contains more images and less text. The distribution frequency is contingent upon your business and the stage of the sales cycle. Promotional content includes strong calls to action that entice prospects to click your ad images. Announcements are triggered around specific events such as press releases, holiday greetings, or thank you cards. Email distribution times should be tracked in a master schedule. Determine when your audience is most likely to read your email (day of week, time of day) and develop your email frequency around it. 

Prevent your email from getting ignored

Lots of marketing email ends up in spam folders or trash cans. To counteract this, there are a few tricks you can use to maximize the chances of your email being read by its recipients. In the “From” line of your message, use a name that your recipients are most likely to recognize. In most cases, your brand name would be an ideal choice. Keep your “Subject” line short and concise (30-40 characters including spaces). The subject line should be a phrase that clearly promotes the immediate benefits of your email. Use words that are attention grabbers. For instance, if you’re emailing a newsletter, avoid generic subject titles like “monthly newsletter.” Use titles that draw instant attention like, “Turn Leads into Cash-Paying Customers.” Avoid using titles that may be misconstrued as spam.

Track your results

It’s a good idea to track your click-through rates (CTR) – the level of interaction received from links in your email. By imbedding HTML tracking code within your links, you can easily monitor which ones receive the most clicks. This is a great way to identify which links your audience finds most interesting. If you’re able to identify who likes certain topics of interest, you can target individual leads with information they would find most useful. CTR is also beneficial in weeding out which ads are underperforming and require optimization. Low CTRs can result from an unclear opt-in process, marketing to the wrong target audience, poorly written subject lines, confusing email design and layout, and lack of urgency created in calls to action. 

Inbound Lead Nurturing (CV201)

Would you like to generate 50% more sales-ready leads at 30% lower cost? Did I hear a resounding yes? Inbound lead nurturing makes this possible. Lead nurturing is all about building and maintaining relationships with qualified prospects regardless of where they’re at in the buying process. To retain early stage leads, it’s extremely important that you have a well-defined nurturing process laid out.

Who needs nurturing?

First, define your ideal customer profile. Isolate what type of buyer would be most interested in your product or service. To find your best prospects, make sure your target market is clearly defined. Consider how long the nurturing process will take before your prospects become sales-ready. Most prospects who visit your website are interested in checking out the products or services you offer before making a purchase decision. Your objective as a marketer is to transform them from leads into customers by keeping them engaged in relevant and personalized communication. 

Create a dialogue

When you’ve identified your prospects, it’s time to qualify them. When they land on your landing page, use your inquiry form to acquire basic yet valuable information about them. Refrain from using a form that asks too many questions – being bombarded with too many questions too early on in the buying process is a big turnoff for prospects. Set up an automated inquiry email response so prospects receive an immediate acknowledgment in their inbox. Subsequent email should be crafted in a way that conveys relevant and personalized dialogue. Its content should not only demonstrate your expertise, but should contain information prospects need in order to move forward in their buying process. Gauge closely where your leads are in the buying process and develop your email track around it. 

Cultivate relationships

Unlike email blasting, lead nurturing offers precise targeting. When leads fill out your inquiry form, they’re revealing specifics about their interest in your offerings. This is valuable data you can use to cater to their individualized needs in subsequent nurturing emails. Once leads express interest, develop your relationship further. Send them additional content that illustrates how your expertise can help solve their problems. If you cultivate leads during the early stages and intensify their interest with compelling content, they’re far more likely to become buying customers. 

Calls to Action & Landing Page Best Practices (CV101)

Did you know you can double or even triple your conversion rates by making just a few simple adjustments to your landing pages? Landing page optimization is one of the easiest ways to boost your website’s performance. To motivate a customer to buy, sometimes all it takes is making a small change to a button or tweaking a headline.

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Try it for Free!

The first thing to know about landing pages is that they need to convey a call to action – your page needs to create a sense of urgency. Use persuasive language that stirs consumer emotions and compels them to take action! Be specific about the action you want them to take. When visitors click on a button that says, “Get your free eBook here,” ensure that the button redirects them to a page where they can actually get their free eBook. Some marketers create deception by creating buttons that redirect visitors to a page completely unrelated to the button they clicked on. Bad idea! This only frustrates people and prompts them to go elsewhere. Instill trust in customers by being genuine about your calls to action. Follow through and give customers what you say you’re going to give them.

Make it clickable and colorful!

When creating calls to action, use clickable, eye catching images to direct people to your landing pages. It’s good practice to make an entire ad image clickable – it reduces confusion about where to click. If your images are interesting enough, people won’t be able to resist clicking on them! It’s also good form to use consistent visual style between the clickable ad image and your landing page. Color is important! You want your colors to compliment each other nicely. Make sure there’s stark contrast between words and the background they’re placed upon. Colors should make sense – if your call to action button says something like, “Save money now,” it would make good sense to use a green color so people will subconsciously associate it with money. Also, if you have multiple buttons on a single page, make each one a different color – this will allow visitors to easily differentiate between them.

Is your customer having happy landings?

Arrange your landing page layout so it's simple and well organized. Your most important information should be placed at the top of the page. Visitors should not have to use the scrollbar to find your most valuable content. Strategically place your buttons in locations that are easy to find. People hate wasting valuable time searching for stuff! So, a word of wisdom – make things as easy as possible for your customers to find. Don’t force them to go hunting for it or they just might use their “Back” button! From time to time, check the functionality of your buttons to make sure they’re pointing to the right locations. Again, consider the frustration factor – people have little tolerance for broken links. Preserve your professional reputation by maintaining connectivity to all links. Also, monitor the effectiveness of your calls to action. If one call to action is not generating traffic, switch it out for another one. Experiment until you get the results you’re looking for.

Which flight path is your landing page taking?

When designing a landing page, place yourself in the shoes of your customer, “Why am I on this page and where is it supposed to take me?” Make sure that you’re fulfilling the primary purposes of the page – creating enough urgency that it prompts visitors to take action, and pointing them to where you want them to go. Just in case visitors missed your primary call to action at the top of your page, place a secondary call to action at the bottom. Make your page navigation clear and easy for people to understand and you’ll get them where you want them to go. Check out Jacob Gube’s blog for some good examples of call to action buttons.    

Advanced SEO Tactics: On Beyond Keyword Research (GF401)

When it comes to SEO optimization, links are king! Everyone knows creating remarkable content is vitally important to SEO – but, the best written content in the world will only get you so far if no one links to it. There are some extremely important factors that help your content rank highly with the major search engines. Here are the top five most important page-specific ranking factors.

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Factor 1: Anchor text

This one ranks at the top of the list! Create keyword-rich anchor text links and get others to post them on their sites. The strategy is to create anchor text using the keywords you’re targeting. As more and more people add your anchor text link to their sites, you’ll rank higher and higher for your desired keywords. Also, it’s important that your anchor text describe the content of the target page it links with – it must be relevant to the target page. In the blogs you write, get in the habit of including anchor text for targeted keywords and you’ll begin to see your rankings improve.

Factor 2: Link popularity

Externals links are important for indexing and crawling. The more people who add links to your website from their own pages, the greater your rankings will be with the key search engines. Having a large quantity of links is important but having quality links is even more important. Long established sites that are reputable and rank highly with search engines hold a lot of water. Earning external links with the pros means a lot in the SEO world. When link building, target sites that have the potential to boost your rankings.      

Factor 3: Link diversity

Search engines prefer sites with high link diversity. Build links with as many different domains as you can. Establish a healthy link profile for your site by leaving behind link trails from diverse sources.  Be active – post fresh content and comment on others’ content that pertains to a wide range of related topics. The idea is to establish content from diverse sources, but maintain links that are relevant to your site. When using anchor text to optimize your keywords, don’t use anchor text for the same one or two keywords repeatedly. Instead, use anchor text that targets multiple keywords. This will enable you to diversify your link profile.      

Factor 4: Ranking with trusted sites

Search engines look suspiciously at links to untrustworthy sites. Trusted sites are not in the business of using deceitful marketing gimmicks or underhanded tactics that trick search engines into giving them good rankings. Trustworthy sites actively produce new and genuinely useful content for the benefit of the user community. Be choosy with the sites you link with. Establishing a host of backlinks with unscrupulous sites will do nothing positive for your search engine rankings. When determining your site rankings, Google will evaluate its trustworthiness, so don’t allow bad sites to drag it down.    

Factor 5: Ranking with PageRank

PageRank is Google’s link analysis algorithm – it measures how Google views a page’s level of importance. Pages perceived as important receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to receive favorable search result rankings. When a trustworthy site links to your page, a vote for its importance is cast on your behalf. The more votes that are cast for your page, the greater your page ranks in level of importance. The only way to rank highly with PageRank is to establish as many good external links as possible.

Viral Marketing and Worldwide Raves (GF301)

Did you know it takes only a handful of people to create a worldwide rave about your product or service? Be smart about how you present your content, and word about your business will spread like wildfire! Write compelling content and place it in front of people who are interested in reading it. If you generate attention with the right buyers, your marketing will go viral!

Image by: ausnahmezustand

Write to your buyers’ personas

Knowing your buyers’ personas is critical for success. Determine the demographics for the buyers you’re trying to reach, and then reach out to them. Many businesses make the mistake of writing content around their products. They go on and on about the greatness of their products and why people should buy them. Did you ever stop to think that buyers don’t really care? They’re not interested in reading about fluff – they’re interested in reading about how your product will help solve their problems. Write your content around your buyers’ personas and you’ll capture their attention.   

Earn your buyers’ attention

If you get your buyers’ attention through cold calling and spending gobs of money on advertising, you’re likely to wind up with ticked off ex-buyers and empty pockets. Everyone knows buyers distrust pushy car salesman tactics, so why do so many businesses still use them? Annoying customers into buying your products just won’t work. Use your marketing to genuinely help them, and they’ll feel compelled to do business with you. Deceiving your customers into buying from you won’t work either. If you portray yourself as authentic, they’ll feel good about doing business with you. If you dupe them into believing your product’s something it’s not, you’re sure to receive payback in the form of negative publicity.

Spread your message

Shake the world by spreading your marketing message! You want your ideas to be discovered, right? So, go viral by sending them across cyberspace. Remember, you want to gain as much attention as possible. Draw attention on the social media sites where your buyers hang out most. Speak their language by reflecting their personas in your content. Offer up free information that is valuable to them – something that will keep them coming back for more. Being helpful gives them a reason to blog about your remarkable content. As your ideas go viral, you’ll be creating your own worldwide rave!       

Professor: David Meerman Scott, author of New Rules of Marketing & PR and World Wide Rave      

Successful Business Uses for Facebook and LinkedIn (GF202)

If you’re jumping on the social networking bandwagon, consider LinkedIn and Facebook. Interaction on these popular sites will help your business gain momentum. A good strategy for any social media objective includes:

1. Strategically connecting with people in groups who share common expertise in your industry.
2. Creating unique content that is valuable to your audience.    
3. Enticing your audience to interact with you.

Make connections 

Connections are extremely valuable to the growth of your business. The more like-minded people you establish connections with, the more resourceful your network becomes. Your connections not only create job opportunities, they introduce you to a community of experts willing to share their knowledge with you. When you run into tough questions, tap into the wisdom of your peers to find answers. Be choosy about the connections you make. Focus on building quality connections rather than quantity of connections.

Gain referrals

LinkedIn and Facebook are great places to get business referrals. A connection who’s pleased with your work is likely to refer you to one of their peers. If you run into a project beyond your area of expertise, it’s easy to find helpful vendors through your peer network. Establish a mutual referral system between connection vendors – refer web design work in exchange for copywriting work.      

Stir interest with unique content

Create valuable content on your LinkedIn and Facebook pages. If your content is useful to your target audience, they will follow your work. Promote your social network by posting links to your website or blog from your LinkedIn and Facebook pages.  Post fresh content frequently so you keep your audience engaged. Make your content unique and informative. Resist overusing it as a means of self-promotion. People get turned off when content reads like spam.     

Stimulate interaction

Engage your audience by commenting regularly on their postings. This stimulates interaction and allows opportunity to showcase your knowledge. Encourage interaction further by posing questions on your blogs and responding to public queries.  Your thoughtful responses are a demonstration of your expertise. People will view you as an expert in your field and a go-to person when making referrals.     

Professor: Elyse Tager, Silicon Valley American Marketing Association