HubSpot's Inbound Internet Marketing Blog

Neuroscience Makes Strong Case for Engagement, Personalization in Marketing

Corey Eridon — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 19:52:00 GMT

Recently, Facebook sponsored a study run by NeuroFocus -- found via Search Engine Land-- intended to quantitatively determine how people respond to websites and website ads. The results had some interesting findings for marketers who are wondering how their site structure and ad campaigns affect how users react to their website. Let's just dive right in to those results and see what marketers can learn from their experiments.

What the Study Looked At

NeuroFocus used devices to measure the brainwaves of searchers when visiting websites, and looked to see if any patterns emerged. The test subjects were 50% men, 50% women, aged 21-54, and with a minimum annual household income of $30,000. The researchers tested the subjects' reactions to the Yahoo! homepage, The New York Times homepage, and their personal Facebook news feeds. These are the reactions they measured:

Attention: The test subjects had clear instances of sustained focus, and shifted focus -- meaning it was easy to measure when they were very interested by what they were looking at, and when their attention got diverted by something else.
Emotional Engagement: There was a clear delineation between positive and negative emotional response to certain page elements. For the purposes of this study, a positive emotional response is called "approach motivation," which means the test subject felt motivated to do something, while a negative emotional response is called "avoidance motivation," which means the test subject felt compelled to avoid a certain action.
Memory Retention: Researchers could clearly detect when something on the page was interesting enough to be stored in the test subjects' memories.

The researchers were able to combine scores given for each of these responses into something called Overall Neurological Effectiveness, a composite measure of the efficiency of a test subject's cognitive processing.

Interesting Findings From the Study

To see how each website fared individually, you can read the whitepaper in its entirety. Here are some of the most interesting findings that emerged from the study.

1.) Overall: The New York Times had higher levels of attention and memory than the other two pages, but less emotional engagement. The Yahoo! homepage had higher levels of emotional engagement than The New York Times homepage, but less than the Facebook page. And Yahoo! had the least amount of memory activation out of all three pages.

People viewing their own news feed on Facebook, however, had high levels of activation on all three metrics -- attention, emotional engagement, and memory. The Facebook page had statistically higher levels of emotional engagement than The New York Times and Yahoo!

2.) Effect of Ads on Attention: The mere presence of ads had neither a positive nor negative effect on subjects' attention levels.

3.) Different Types of Ads: There's higher attention and emotional engagement with social media ads than with TV ads or ads on a corporate web page. But ultimately, subjects' memories weren't activated enough in any context. Take a look at the results of an experiment NeuroFocus ran with a Visa ad on television, on a corporate web page, and on a social media site.

People paid more attention to the ad in the two online contexts, the ad had the most emotional engagement in the social context, but it had low memory levels in all contexts. NeuroFocus reported that memory scores at these levels usually indicate an ad has weak persuasive capability and that viewers discount it in their memory.

4.) Effect of Stimuli on Memory: Memory scores tend to be higher when stimuli are personally meaningful and provide learning opportunities.

5.) Post-Facebook Activity: After subjects view their Facebook pages, the next site they visit makes subjects feel more connected -- more users associated their experience with the word "connecting" than they had before.

6.) Engagement vs. Attention: Overall, emotional engagement scores are lower than attention scores. This makes sense, since online content demands more attention than passive media like television; there are simply more elements competing for a user's attention, and consequently the study found that emotional engagement shows a slightly negative correlation with attention. The results indicate that high attention levels have a diminishing impact on emotional engagement.

7.) Effect of Prior Expectations: All of the consumers' responses to the websites were found to be impacted by the expectations of the site that they carried with them before visiting.

What Marketers Can Do With This Information

If nothing else, it's encouraging to know marketers are on the right track when we strive for a more and more personalized experiences in our marketing -- even beyond our website. Along with great nurturing and segmentation, allowing people to interact with your brand in a social way is key to achieving this personalized experience. This study has shown that marketing is about more than just information consumption and cognition. Facebook is so successful because it provides new information that is both emotionally driven and highly personal. That means the information delivered is relevant to the user, and it makes it far more likely they will remember what they see on that site.

In the age of information overload, it's remarkable content that can actually embed its way into someone's memory. That is only achieved when you really know your target audience, what they want to hear, and you present it in a way that resonates with them. It's just as much about the topics you select as your presentation of it -- something that A/B testing can help you refine.

And as if you didn't already know it, your reputation matters. Every time people come to your website, they are building up a pre-conceived notion they will carry with them on every subsequent site visit. So be purposeful with what you put out there and the brand image you build for yourself. Selectivity is a good thing; what you don't publish is just as important as what you do publish. Use your website and company social media accounts to build the emotional experience you want people to have when they interact with your brand.

Finally, it appears that site with social elements are particularly attractive for advertising because they have both the high emotional engagement of TV (without the high costs) and the active cognitive engagement characteristic of the online experience. So, if you're going to run an ad...run it online!

Have you run any tests on your website to see how users engage with your content? Share your findings in the comments!

Image credit: digitalbob8

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The History of Marketing: An Exhaustive Timeline [INFOGRAPHIC]

Corey Eridon — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 14:00:00 GMT

Ever since people have had something to sell, we’ve been marketing. But the effectiveness of those marketing methods have waxed and waned over thousands of years, and as consumers and their technologies advanced at a more and more rapid pace, marketers have had to change their game.

At one time, cutting edge technology was limited to just a small segment of the population – and these advancements were slowly rolled out to the masses over decades (and even centuries!). Now, adoption rates are faster than the speed of light and more widespread than ever – and it’s putting control back in the hands of consumers. It’s up to marketers to keep pace in this cluttered, fast-paced world if they want their message heard. Through the lens of marketing history, watch how marketers are succeeding. Take a look at how technology has changed the way marketers do their jobs, how consumers have responded (not always so favorably), and let us know where you think the future of marketing lies. As always, feel free to share and embed at your liesure!

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What do you think the future of marketing holds?

Sources

(1) http://american-business.org/2595-magazine-industry.html
(2) http://adage.com/article/ad-age-graphics/ad-age-a-history-marketing/142967/
(3) http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/tag/bulova/
(4) http://www.reuters.com/article/2008/12/03/us-radio-idUSTRE4B287U20081203
(5) http://information-marketing.net/BrandingAdvertisingMarketing/Traditional%20Advertising%20Revenues/MediaInRecession_BroadcastStumbles.pdf
(6) http://www.startupnation.com/buyersguides/115/telemarketing-buyers-guide.htm
(7) http://www.marketplace.org/topics/tech/news-brief/illustrated-history-apples-products-and-execu
(8) http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2007/01/72496
(9) http://stateofthemedia.org/files/2011/05/2010_execsummary.pdf
(10) http://business.highbeam.com/industry-reports/business/radio-television-publishers-advertising-representatives
(11) http://www.internetworldstats.com/emarketing.htm
(12) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foSIInqb2ak
(13) http://www.google.com/press/pressrel/analytics.html
(14) http://www.quora.com/How-many-users-or-websites-are-using-Google-Analytics
(15) http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2011/03/a-brief-history-of-blogging/
(15) http://www.thestartuparena.com/dotcom-bubble-began/
(16) http://timelines.com/2000/3/10/dot-com-bubble-reaches-peak
(17) http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/30495/25-Eye-Popping-Internet-Marketing-Statistics-for-2012.aspx#ixzz1lL5po4p3
(18) http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/ta-googleanalytics/all/all
(19) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_mobile_phones
(20) http://blogs.wsj.com/in-charge/2011/06/08/ban-on-yellow-pages-heads-to-court/
(21) http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3078614/ns/technology_and_science-tech_and_gadgets/t/teens-tune-out-tv-log-instead/

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How to Score Your Leads So Sales Works the Hottest Prospects

Pamela Vaughan — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 21:47:00 GMT

The good news about inbound marketing is that it can help you attract high volumes of leads. The challenge then becomes, how do you separate the good, quality leads from the people who are just starting to look around? That’s where lead management, and specifically, lead scoring comes in. With lead scoring, you can attach values to each of your leads based on their professional information and the behavior they’ve exhibited on your website.

For example, you would likely rank a vice president-level lead who has spent time on both your products and pricing page higher than an intern- or coordinator-level lead with the same behavior. You might also rank one VP over another if the first VP has demonstrated a higher level of engagement on your site.

Each of these scores go into a profile of your lead to help you determine when they're
ready to talk with a sales person. The more time quality leads spend with your content and the better informed they become, the more likely they’ll be interested in hearing from your sales team. Lead scoring takes thought, knowledge of your business operations, and lead management software to set up, but once it's set, it shouldn’t take much day-to-day management. If you're considering setting up a lead scoring program, here's what you need to know to get started and set up a scoring system that benefits your business.

Decide if Your Business Needs Lead Scoring

First and foremost, you need to evaluate whether your business is one that would actually benefit from a lead scoring system. The fact is, it's not a must-have for every business, and in many cases, scoring leads can actually be a waste of your time. According to MarketingSherpa's B2B Benchmarking Report, while many are thinking about lead scoring for their business, only 21% of B2B marketers have actually established a lead scoring program.

To evaluate whether lead scoring is right for your business, ask yourself the following questions:

Is my sales team getting fed with enough leads? If your sales team
doesn't even have enough leads to begin with, lead scoring is hardly necessary. Instead, your marketing team should be focusing on generating more leads.
Does my sales team even call the leads I do send them? Furthermore, do they always complain about bad leads? Lead scoring would probably solve these problems, right? Maybe not. What's more likely in this situation is that you have a sales/marketing alignment issue on your hands. If your business doesn't have a service level agreement (SLA) in place between your sales and marketing teams to clarify how many leads marketing must deliver to sales and how many sales must follow up with, sit down together and create one before you even think about lead scoring.
Do I have enough data to implement lead scoring? In order to implement a lead scoring system, you need to have two types of data in place: demographic information captured by conversion forms, and lead intelligence, or behavioral data based on how a lead interacts with your website. Are you collecting the wrong information from your lead gen forms, or failing to track how leads interact with your site using an analytics and lead management platform? Then you don't have the right data to start lead scoring.

If you can answer "yes" to all three of these questions, then there's a good chance your business could benefit from lead scoring, and you should read on.

Identify What Criteria Makes for a Marketing Qualified Lead

The first thing you'll need to do to set up a lead scoring system is to decide, with your sales organization, which criteria makes for a marketing qualified lead. A marketing qualified lead (or what we geeky marketers like to call an MQL), is a lead who is more likely to become a customer compared to other leads based on their demographic information and their activity on your site before they become a customer. By identifying the individual characteristics that make for an MQL, you can assign point values to each of these qualifications to form the basis of your lead scoring system.

Sit down with your sales managers to determine which demographics, activities, and behaviors make for a marketing qualified lead.

First, discuss which demographics are more likely to buy than others. Are they VP-level executives from certain industries? Do they typically represent small or large businesses? This is the information you'll be gathering from your conversion/lead-capture forms. Here's what you should consider, as well as any other criteria that may be important to your business.

Qualifications From a Lead-Capture Form:

Role/Job Title
Company Size/Number of Employees
Company Type/Industry

Next, look at behaviors that indicate a lead's type of interest. Here, you'll need to use your lead intelligence data to conduct some analysis with closed-loop analytics to identify the close rates of each of the conversion events you offer on your website. Next, compare the close rates with one another. You'll want to identify which conversion events had the highest close rates as well as which activities led to those conversion events. (Note: This blog post can help you with this analysis.) Here's a sampling of the different criteria you should evaluate.

Types of Interest:

Requested a demo or specific information
Viewed a certain type of product page
Top-of-the funnel interests (e.g. content downloads like ebooks and webinars) vs. more qualified middle-of-the-funnel interests (e.g. product content like pricing pages or a free trial)

The last thing to consider is the activity level of a lead before he/she becomes a customer. How much, at what frequency, and within what span of time does an MQL typically engage with your website before converting into a customer? For example, you'll want to consider...

Activity Level:

Number of Web Pages Viewed
Number of Forms Completed (Content Downloaded or Inquiries Made)
The Typical Sales Cycle (How long before a lead will never buy?)

Set and Assign Point Values

Now that you've identified and, with your sales organization, agreed on which criteria make for a marketing qualified lead, you can come up with a points system and start assigning point values to each criterion. You can set any point value you’d like, but typically, you'll want to stick to a 0 to 100 scale and weigh the points in relation to how telling they are about a lead’s readiness to talk to a sales rep -- and buy.

Let's say, for example, your ideal lead is a decision maker at a mid- to large- sized company (500 to 1,500 employees). And maybe in the past, you've found that before buying, leads have typically visited at least five pages of your website, viewed the pricing page, and downloaded some top-of-the-funnel content. In other words, they’ve done enough research to talk through a decision. Depending on what you've discovered through your MQL analysis, you would weigh each of these qualifications or activities more heavily than others.

A company with 800 employees might get ten points, whereas a company with 20 would get one, and a lead that lists “student” might get negative points. Same goes for someone who has downloaded multiple ebooks vs. none. All of a lead's points get added up to determine their individual lead score.

Determine What Score Makes a Lead Sales-Ready

Remember, the point of lead scoring is two-fold:

To avoid harassing leads with contact from Sales before they’re ready to buy and to identify leads who need to be touched with more lead nurturing first
To maximize the efficiency of your sales team so they can easily identify and work only the leads who are sales-ready

Once you've set point values for each of the lead qualification categories listed above, decide at which point a total score would validate sending a lead to your sales team for a conversation. It helps to look at past lead activity when determining this figure, so you know what has historically led to sales conversions.

It's important to remember that, because a lead's activity can change from day to day, a lead's individual score will also change over time. For this reason, lead scoring isn't something easily done manually. As mentioned above, you'll need lead management software that enables you to set your lead scoring criteria and auto-score and re-score your leads in real time. For HubSpot customers, the Lead Management Tool and the Lead Grader App makes this a snap. And depending on your CRM, you could then set up alerts based on your custom lead score to notify your sales team when leads have reached that critical score that makes them sales-ready.

Has your business implemented a lead scoring system? How has it improved your marketing and sales processes?

Image Credit: Julie Rybarczyk

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A Marketer's Complete Guide to Launching Mobile Apps

Corey Eridon — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 18:02:00 GMT

According to former CEO of AppVee and AndroidApps Alex Ahlund, the average cost to develop a mobile app is $6,453 -- and the cost can skyrocket to as much as $150,000 depending on the complexity of the app. Wherever you fall on that spectrum, the money and resources you dedicate to conceptualizing and developing a truly great mobile app can all be put to waste if you don't orchestrate a proper mobile app launch.

In fact, in December 2011, the 1 millionth mobile app was pushed to market. To give you an idea of just how quickly these mobile apps are being released, at the end of 2010, there were 300,000 mobile apps. That's a 233% increase in just 12 months. In other words, that's a lot of clutter in mobile app stores (and we won't even get into the fact that 1 in 4 apps, once downloaded, are never used again.)

For the purposes of this post, we're assuming you've already created a great mobile app that will yield active users, and you're interested in making sure people know about it when it is released. Luckily, using inbound marketing, you can pull off a successful mobile app launch that costs more in time and planning than it does additional budget, and that will ensure your audience knows about your new mobile app and incites downloads.

Step 1: Define Success

If you're aiming for a successful mobile app launch, you need to define what success looks like. Set some measurable goals around your launch. I recommend measuring success around your active install rate -- this tells you retention rate, or the number of people who install your app and then don't uninstall it -- the number of ratings you receive, your average rating in the app marketplace, and if you're selling your app, revenue generated from your app. To help you set some benchmarks, most free mobile apps have a higher active install rate during the first month, usually around 50%, after which it levels off around 30%. The average app store rating is a 3 (out of 5), for which you should certainly strive much higher to maintain a healthy active install rate.

Step 2: Claim Your Social Media Accounts

Pre-launch, claim your accounts in social media, and use them actively to generate interest like Android Photobooth did on Twitter. You can use your social media accounts to showcase the app while it's in development and solicit feedback and ideas from your future users. When your app launches, though, be sure to change the link in your Twitter bio to direct to the app store. Remember, your goal isn't site traffic; you want to drive downloads.

And don't discount newer social networks like Pinterest for launching your mobile app -- the highly visual social network is the ideal place to show other mobile app developers your product in its final stages who may have some great suggestions for UI/UX improvements. Unless, of course, you're trying to beat a competitor to market!

Finally, if you're a HubSpot customer, you can leverage another app -- the Facebook Welcome app in HubSpot's app marketplace -- to help with your mobile app launch on Facebook. Generate some pre-release buzz by customizing a page that lets people sign up for an alert when the app launches. We'll get into some fun pre-launch deals that will generate buzz around your app that you can associate with this email alert in Step 11.

Step 3: Create Content

Spend time creating content that clearly explains how to use your mobile app. This content should include blog posts, press releases, social media content, website copy, and email marketing copy. You can pre-schedule all of this to go live on your launch day, though you should check in periodically on social media during launch week to provide real-time updates that pertain to support issues, reviews, and respond to user recommendations.

Step 4: Record a Demo

Create a video that shows how to use your mobile app -- you can easily do this with a user-friendly program like Camtasia that allows screen capture and voiceover recording. Clearly explain what the app does and why it is useful in real-life scenarios in this video. Again, there are so many mobile apps out there, that differentiating yours will come down to clear communication in all of your marketing materials. A short video demo is one of the easiest ways to display the value of your mobile app. For an example of a fantastic mobile app demo, see Salesforce Chatter's mobile app demo video, which shows how the app works on the iPhone, iPad, and BlackBerry.

Step 5: Launch a Dedicated Site or Page

You can launch either a dedicated website for your app -- more appropriate if your mobile app is a business in its own right -- or simply create a page for your mobile app on your website. The latter is what most companies who launch a mobile app choose to do. To complement your social media efforts, you should launch these pages even if your app hasn't yet hit the market. Direct users to this page of your site, let them view your demo video, and encourage them to sign up for a download alert email once your mobile app goes to market.

Step 6: Choose an App Store

Mashable recommends choosing just one app store in which to launch your mobile app at first. This should help you get the highest concentration of users and ratings possible. Additionally, you'll be making lots of changes and improvements to your app during those first few weeks after launch, and having your app in just one store will help you streamline those updates as they roll out. Once your app is more established, feel free to expand it to more app stores.

The most common app stores are the Android Market and the Apple App Store, though there are many other app stores out there (even HubSpot has its own App Marketplace!).

Step 7: Network With Other App Developers

Reach out to other app developers that have created an app that could be complementary to yours, and whose users might also like to use your app. You could set up a mutually beneficial co-marketing opportunity that helps you both increase your install rates. Just be sure to select developers who have great ratings in the app store; you don't want to associate your app with a bad product.

Step 8: Pitch Your App

Pitch your story to tech, mobile, and industry journalists and bloggers. Be armed with the video demo you recorded, and be prepared to give them a free download of your app so they can get to know the interface and your app's capabilities. Make yourself readily available to them to answer any of their questions, and consider them another test group who can find bugs and make UX/UI recommendations.

You should start pitching at least a few weeks in advance so they have time to experiment with your app and write a compelling story without being rushed. Plus, the more time they have, the more likely they can fit you into their editorial calendar.

Step 9: Tap Your Network for Buzz

Reach out to your business network and ask them to share your content about the app's impending release socially. Send your network a sneak preview email with a link to your demo video so they can see how your app works, and include social sharing buttons to make sharing your content simply.

This is also a great recourse for bloggers and journalists you've contacted who aren't willing to publish long-form content about your app; you can ask them if they'd be willing to tweet a blog post you've written about your app instead.

Step 10: Set Up Paid Advertising

Because of the Google algorithm's freshness update, you might gain some organic search tractions at your mobile app launch. Complement that search presence with some paid advertising during launch week. You can also set up paid, targeted ads on Facebook to drive users to your Facebook fan page, where they'll be greeted with your welcome screen encouraging them to sign up for your mobile app (see Step 2).

Step 11: Launch an Invite-Only Beta

Before you take your mobile app live to the public, consider an invite-only beta launch. Websites Spotify, Google+, and Pinterest have used this tactic with great success. It not only creates an air of exclusivity that generates buzz around your product, but it also lets you get feedback from a trusted network so you can fix bugs and UX/UI problems before rolling your app out full scale.

You can use the email list referenced in Step 2 as your pre-launch beta test group, and supplement it with an email marketing send to a segment of your current customer list that would benefit from using your mobile app. You can position the launch as free, exclusive access to your mobile app before it launches, and even ask them to write a review of your app in exchange for that free, exclusive access.

Step 12: Put Download Links Everywhere

This step is for when you're ready to go live to the public. Put links to download your mobile app on your blog, your website's home page, in your marketing emails, and on your social media accounts -- you can even add a mobile tab to your Facebook page. Take a look at Zappos' mobile app page below, which includes three calls-to-action on just one page, all of which are to download its mobile app.

Step 13: Monitor Feedback and Encourage Reviews

Finally, monitor peoples' feedback about your app, and strongly encourage users to post reviews. It's not just that the apps with the best reviews get the most visibility and downloads; this process helps you identify bugs you wouldn't otherwise know about and make quick changes to improve the user experience and make your app stickier. Keep users updated on your progress as you make it so they know you're listening and responding to their feedback.

For two examples of mobile apps taking the feedback and review process seriously, take a look at Zappos and Salesforce. Salesforce includes user reviews not only in the app store, but also on its website. This review shows a real-life application of its mobile app helping a customer.

Zappos takes encouraging feedback seriously -- the copy on the mobile app page of its website asks people to tweet at them on their mobile-dedicated Twitter account with recommendations to improve the app. Plus, Zappos' tagline says it all: "Try it. Rate it. We Love You."

Are you creating a mobile app, or have you successfully launched a mobile app before? Share your tips below!

Image Credit: Christiano Betta

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How to Attract the RIGHT Social Media Followers for Your Business

Meghan Keaney Anderson — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 14:00:00 GMT

The benefits of an extensive social reach are clear, but how do you attract the right followers for your company? As with most inbound marketing, relevancy can make or break the effectiveness of your strategy. So to ensure you have a social media following that helps you advance your marketing objectives, start by identifying a set of core topics that reflect the interests of people who typically become your customers.

If you're a HubSpot customer, you can use the Keywords App and the Social Media Prospects App to help with this. For example, we at HubSpot would choose the terms inbound marketing, social media, marketing automation, and so on to help identify the most appropriate followers. Getting your keywords right from the onset will make it significantly easier to find the most productive connections across social media sites. From there, it's just a matter of navigating your way through each social network. To make your job easier, let's break down what to look for on the four major social networks: Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Finding the Right Connections on Google+

When you first sign up, Google+ automatically scans your existing connections to see if any of them are using Google+ and invites you to connect with them by placing them in one of your Google+ Circles. While this isn't a bad way to make sure you’re staying engaged with your current audience, it doesn’t really expand your reach or introduce you to new people. To do that, you'll need to submit your keywords for a more detailed Google+ search.

Top Influencers: You can find and search a list of top influencers through SocialStatistics.com's Google+ statistics. Narrow down the top influencers by location -- a feature that is particularly useful for local businesses. For example, a local business in our neck of the woods could narrow down their search to the top Google+ users in Boston.

Targeted Connections: Following top influencers alone, however, may not extend your reach very much, since top users often get too many requests to reciprocate. To achieve a broader reach, use Google+ search with the keywords you established to find other individuals who are interested in the things that matter to your company. HINT: When using Google+ search, you can get even more specific by enclosing terms in quotes -- like "market research" -- or excluding terms with a minus sign -- like “market research” –stocks.

Keyword-Driven Circles: When you find people discussing your keywords, selectively add them to your Circles. Think about naming Circles based on the shared interest area so your overlapping focus area is clear. To keep new connections engaged, just add a "+" or "@" in front of their name to tag them in a future post.

Finding the Right Connections on LinkedIn

Some people conduct a people search in LinkedIn for job titles, but this often casts too large a net for productive connections. Instead, try using the keywords you’ve identified to help you find connections through some of the subgroups and topic threads on LinkedIn.

Groups and Answers: LinkedIn Groups and LinkedIn Answers both provide great opportunities to find the right connections for your business. You don't need to start a group to get the full benefit of LinkedIn Groups; in fact, you should start out by searching for and joining groups that are relevant to your business, and then connecting with group contributors. You can use the same approach with LinkedIn Answers. Connect with people who are already talking about your core topics, and pose your own questions and connect with the respondents. The trick to making connections on LinkedIn is to avoid cold connections. Make sure you contribute to the group or comment on an Answers post before trying to connect with the individual who placed it.

NEW! Connect via Skills & Expertise: In beta right now, LinkedIn has a new tool called Skills & Expertise that enables you to search for individuals and companies based on the skills and interests they list. Let's say you want to connect with people who are interested in market research or have a background in it. You can search LinkedIn Skills & Expertise to find groups, companies, and individuals associated with that topic.

Finding the Right Connections on Twitter

Top Influencers: Much like Google+, it's fairly easy to find top influencers for a given topic on Twitter. You can find them by taking a look at Twitter's recommended lists of who to follow for the topics you've selected, or by searching Tweet Grader's Twitter Elite or Klout for top users. Again, remember to balance these "top tweeters" with more targeted tweeters who match your interests, despite their audience size.

Targeted Connections: Once you get past the big influencers in your space, take a look at the lists of people who follow them. Or, search Twitter for mentions of your keywords and follow individuals who talk about those topics frequently. Sometimes connections with lower follower rates can actually be better influencers for your company, particularly if they display a meaningful connection to your company and will become enthusiastic brand advocates online.

Beware of Auto-Follows: There are a lot of third-party Twitter applications that promise to rapidly scale up your followers by auto-following. Not only does Twitter actively discourage and remove you from search results when you use these apps, but this type of automation is also not a productive practice for your company either. Don't get mixed up with followers that use these applications.

Finding the Right Connections on Facebook

Making brand new connections on Facebook can be a little bit trickier because it doesn't have the culture of business networking that LinkedIn does, nor does it have the non-reciprocal follow expectations as Twitter and Google+. Still, there are a couple of good tactics for making relevant connections to your Facebook business page.

Leverage Your Existing Fans: Whether you start off with 12 fans or 200, it's worth engaging your existing fans in the effort to grow your page's reach. Give your fans content that is worth sharing; as each successive fan shares your content, your page's exposure will grow. A referral from a friend can be far more effective and targeted than any other outreach you do on your own.

Facebook Ads: If you've determined that Facebook is the right channel for your company and you have the budget to put toward paid promotion, you can use Facebook's advertising center to zero in on the right audience and promote your page. If you're promoting a page, target your ad to a very specific segment of viewers and ask them to Like your page right in the ad. For more on this, take a look at HubSpot' free ebook on getting Facebook advertising right.

Use the Right Incentives: Holding a sexy giveaway promotion may get you a lot of Likes, but it may not be the right types of people doing the Liking. Facebook page incentives can come in many forms; make sure you're deploying one that reflects the interests of your core audience. For example, if your company builds custom closets, you may want to give away a tip sheet on getting organized to anyone who likes your page. HINT: HubSpot customers should check out the Facebook Welcome App, an add-on tool that helps you set up incentives like these on your page.

Doing This All in a Scalable Way

When you're first getting started, growing your social media community can seem like a daunting task. The best way to tackle it is to dedicate ten minutes a day -- no more, no less -- to finding people online that would add value to your community and, in turn, get value from connecting with you.

Set small goals. Aim to add ten new followers to your networks a day and keep them engaged by scheduling interesting posts throughout the week. HubSpot users should take a look at the new Social Media Publishing App to streamline this even further.

Finally, use analytics to keep track of how your efforts are affecting your reach, website traffic, and lead totals so you can adjust your efforts accordingly. In the end, social media outreach isn't all that different than making connections in the real world; be friendly, persistent, and intentional.

How do you choose who to follow on your company's social media accounts?

Photo by: Luc Legay

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Why User-Generated Content Is More Important Than You Think

Corey Eridon — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 19:33:00 GMT

A certain group of consumers has been gaining attention from marketers recently, because of the strong role they play in the purchasing decision; these power purchasers are known as Generation Y. Whether they're part of the target audience to which you sell or not, this group is worth considering as part of your inbound marketing strategy because there's a strong likelihood they either will become part of your target audience in the future, or because they already influence your target audience now.

Let's break down who these power purchasers are, some of the interesting demographics and inclinations research has uncovered about their role in the buying process, and see how we can align our marketing strategy to better leverage their influence.

Generation Y as a Power Purchaser

Also known as Millennials, this group refers to those born between 1977 and 1994, and it accounts for 25% of the US population. That may not seem like a lot (or maybe it does), but Generation Y is estimated to be the largest consumer group in US history. According to MarketingProfs via a Bazaarvoice survey, Millennials' annual spending power of over $200 billion will eclipse Baby Boomers' by 2017. With that kind of purchasing power, what should we as marketers know about this huge demographic of power purchasers, and how do we alter our marketing strategy to align with their purchasing habits?

Many marketers think the recommendation of a friend or family member is the ultimate green light for consumers, but it turns out that Gen Y cares about recommendations from strangers more. More than 8 in 10 say user-generated content from people they don't know influences what they buy and indicates brand quality, while 51% say it is actually more important than the opinions of their friends and family, and far more trustworthy than website content.

So what are Millennials buying based off all this user-generated content? The top purchases they will not make without first consulting others' opinions run the gamut:

How to Target the Largest Consumer Group Ever in the US

Knowing user-generated content is important to Millennials, what should marketers be doing to align our strategies with the way they prefer to research and execute purchases?

65% of users aged 18-24 considered information shared on social networks when making a purchasing decision (source: eMarketer). On top of that, 2/3 of consumers use search engines to help them research and make purchase decisions (source: eConsultancy). So if you haven't already, get your brand visibility in the social sphere and in search engines, and get control over your online reputation.

When you consider how much more closely social media and search have been aligning over the past year, it makes sense that integrating them both in your marketing strategy will help you achieve more visibility with this crowd that cares what others have to say about you more than what you have to say about you. In fact, Socialnomics reports that if you take a look at the world's largest brands, 25% of their search results return user-generated content from review sites, blogs, and social media updates. Millennials have integrated social media into their day to day lives, making access to the opinions of others easier than ever. With so much knowledge at their hands, you need to ensure information about your business is easy to find -- whether from you, their network, or total strangers.

Getting Started With User-Generated Content

It's strange to say you need to get started with user-generated content...it's your users that need to get started, right? Well, you have to make it easy for them to do, and sometimes a little nudge in the right direction on top of ease of use doesn't hurt, either. Here's the secret sauce for getting your customers, fans, and followers to sing your praises online so you can get the kind of influence you need over Gen Y -- whether they're your target customer today or years down the road.

1.) Make reviews easy to give on your website. 73% of Millennials say that consumers care more about customer opinions than companies themselves do. They also think companies don't offer enough ways to share feedback. Be the company that proves them wrong and gives them what they want. Enable comment functions, provide star rating systems for your products, and create forums for people to easily discuss what they love about your company. Moderate these areas of your site so when issues crop up, you're able to provide a timely response to problems that might otherwise harm your reputation.

2.) Take control over your online reputation. Speaking of harming your reputation, people are probably talking about you online in places other than your website. Namely, their own blogs and online review sites. You can't ask people to take down a negative blog post about you, but you can take control of online review sites that frequently rank in the top of search engine results pages anyway. Claim your listing on review sites, determine whether your presence is positive, negative, or absent, and become an active participant in guiding a positive conversation about your brand on those sites. Our next tip will tell you how.

3.) Solicit reviews from your best customers. You can make your presence on online review sites and your own website positive by soliciting positive reviews from your best customers. There's nothing wrong with asking happy customers to write a review. Think about getting customer reviews like getting inbound links: you can't pay for it, but there's nothing wrong with asking for one from the appropriate people. Consider adding a request for reviews in the bottom of your email marketing messages targeted at current customers. Get your sales and support team in in the action, too -- as the front lines of your organization, they are poised to identify those who are willing to evangelize your brand. Incentivize them to solicit positive reviews whenever they're speaking to a happy customer, making their volume of positive reviews part of a bonus program.

4.) Create case studies. Case studies are an ideal content format to supplement user-generated content, because it highlights a customer's opinion like Millennials love but gives you control over how the information is presented. This content can also take on multiple formats -- video, PDF, slideshow, blog post -- all of which are easy to share and disseminate online.

5.) Encourage social discussion. Social posts are showing up in search results, so use your social media presence to encourage discussion from your fans and followers. Ask for their opinion about your products and services, highlight customer success stories, and ask them to share their experiences using your products or services. Whether these posts are indexed or not, many Millennials will visit your social media accounts to assess how much they like and trust you while they make a purchasing decision. Seeing your social network engaging with you on those accounts will paint you in a very positive light.

Sometimes marketers are reticent of pursuing user-generated content because it forces them to relinquish control. But remember that Millennials have spent the better part of their lives on the internet and were the first wave of blogging and social media adopters. As such, they are better at parsing through fluff on the web and can distinguish between critical content and that which is an unfounded rant or rave. That means content you publish, content you solicit from others, reviews posted to blogs and review sites, and social media comments all go through a sniff test that's ingrained in how Gen Y consumes information online. If the content being published by you -- or by others about you -- isn't quality, these folks are good at filtering it out of their purchase decision-making process.

How important is Gen Y to your marketing? Do you target them directly, or as influencers of your target audience?

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How to Create Marketing Offers That Don't Fall Flat

Pamela Vaughan — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 14:16:00 GMT

In marketing, offers are the gateways to lead generation. Without them, site visitors have no way of getting converted into leads. They are also a critical tool for nurturing existing leads into a position that makes them more sales-ready. But gosh, isn't the word 'offer' so utterly vague and abstract? What the heck is a marketing offer, and what are the qualities of a good one?

Because we see so many marketers get tripped up on this concept, let's discuss exactly what a marketing offer can be, highlight the characteristics of an effective offer, and explain how you can start using them the right way.

What an Offer Isn't

Sometimes the best way to explain what something is, is to first identify what it isn't. Unfortunately, many of the things marketers sometimes consider to be marketing offers aren't actually offers at all. First, let's clarify. What marketers should classify as an offer is something of value that a website visitor must complete a form to get access to. And yeah, sure -- you can put just about anything behind a form. But there are certain things that, when put behind a form, just won't contribute much of anything for your lead gen or lead nurturing initiatives. We're not saying you shouldn't bother with these types of content. What we're saying is that you shouldn't put them behind forms or rely on them to effectively generate and nurture leads.

Here are some great examples of things you should never consider to be a marketing offer:

'Contact Us!' Okay, so you can put this one behind a form if it's one that allows site visitors to email you. But this will never bring in leads as effectively as true offers will.
Product-Centric Content: We're talking brochures, product videos, etc. Yes, these can be great tools to introduce to leads who are close to making a purchasing decision, but there's no reason they should be gated behind a form. You should want your site visitors to be able to access this type of content freely and frictionlessly. And if site visitors are looking at this type of content, they're likely already in your sales funnel and much closer to making a purchasing decision.
Customer Case Studies: Just like product-centric content, customer case studies are likely something you want to make it very easy for visitors to access. Making a visitor or lead fill out a form is unnecessary.
Fact Sheets: Simply put, fact sheets and other company-focused content is not lead generation material.

What an Offer Is

The good news is, you have quite a few great options at your disposal in terms of the types of offers you can, well, offer your target audience...

Ebooks
Guides
Webinars (Live & Archived)
Slideshows
Kits
Industry Case Studies
New Industry Research
Templates
Free Tools
Free Trials
Product Demos
Consultations
Coupons

What Makes an Offer a Good One?

While the types of offers we mentioned above are all great options for marketing offers, there are a number of qualities that an offer should possess in order for it to be effective for lead generation and nurturing. Here are our top three:

1. Is High Quality/Premium and Valuable to Your Target Audience

The important thing to remember is that, if you're requiring a site visitor to complete a form in order to obtain your offer, the value of that offer needs to be compelling enough to convince those visitors to fill out the form. People don't like to give up their contact information freely, and your lead-capture form will create some friction. So if you start putting mediocre, low-value offers behind your forms, your business will start to get known for bad offers that aren't worth the form completion, seriously hurting your lead generation and nurturing goals.

In the simplest sense, an offer is valuable if it addresses the problems, needs, and interests of your target audience. This value could also mean different things for offers used in different stages of the sales process. For example, an offer you're promoting to generate net new leads at the top of your funnel (like, say, an educational ebook or a webinar) is likely valuable because it educates your prospects and fulfills a need. A free product trial, on the other hand, may not be as educational in nature, but it's still a very valuable offer for existing leads you're trying to nurture and who are closer to making a purchasing decision.

2. Aligns With Your Business and the Products/Services You Offer

A great marketing offer complements the products and services your business sells. That educational ebook is probably not very focused on how awesome your products and services are, but it should address concepts that align with your paid offerings. For example, HubSpot sells inbound marketing software, so our offers focus on helping prospects with their marketing challenges. These offers help set HubSpot apart as an industry thought leader and educate prospects about the problems our software helps to solve.

3. Targeted to the Right Buyer Persona at the Right Time

As we hinted at before, a truly great marketing offer also takes into account a person's point in the sales process as well as that buyer persona's specific interests and needs. How this really comes into play is in lead nurturing campaigns and how you decide which calls-to-action (CTAs) to place where on your website.

If you use lead management software, you can easily collect key pieces of information (AKA lead intelligence) about your prospects that will help you segment your leads into nurturing campaigns based on their buyer persona, their point in the sales process, and what you can determine their interests are based on their activity on your website. Sending them offers that appeal to those interests as well as how close they are to making a purchasing decision can help you better qualify a lead before he/she gets handed off to sales. For example, if your business is in plumbing and a first-time visitor comes to your site and downloads an ebook on how to unclog a minor plumbing backup, you might enter them into a lead nurturing campaign that then invites them to also attend a webinar about common plumbing problems and how to fix them. As they move further through the sales cycle, you could then offer them a coupon that discounts your services for that (apparently) not-so-minor drain problem they're having.

The same concept applies to how you choose which calls-to-action should be placed on different pages of your website. For example, if you conduct analysis that shows that your blog is typically how new visitors find you (whether through social media, search engines, or another referrer), you can infer that many people who land on your blog are first-time visitors to your website. Therefore, on your blog, you should probably place CTAs for offers that appeal to people who are just entering the top of your funnel and know little about your company (like an educational webinar, ebook, or kit, for example). On the other hand, a visitor on something like a product page probably indicates someone who is much closer to a purchasing decision. What might be more valuable to those types of visitors is a CTA for something like a free product trial, or a demo if you're a software vendor.

How to Leverage Your Offers Effectively

Now that you have a much clearer understanding of what makes a good marketing offer (and what doesn't), let's dive into some offer best practices. After all, you can create a ton of great offers, but if you're not using them to your best advantage, they're not going to do much good to generate and nurture leads.

1. Create a lot of targeted offers. First things first. With all that talk about targeting and segmenting the right offers to the right buyer persona (at the right time), you can probably guess that what all that translates to is a need for a variety of offers. Building up an arsenal of offers is the toughest part of the whole process, but it can mean the difference between good results and awesome results. Create a spreadsheet that allows you to list the offers you currently have, highlight the holes in your group of offers (for what topic are you missing an offer that your audience would appreciate?), and map offers to the various points in your business' sales process. Then slowly work through your offer to-do list, gradually filling in those gaps.

2. Put offers behind lead-capture forms. If offers are the gateways to lead generation, lead-capture forms (AKA conversion forms) are the gateways to your offers. Always place your offers on landing pages, gated by forms. This allows you to collect information that helps you qualify a new or reconverting lead and track what they've downloaded from you throughout the sales cycle.

3. Create calls-to-action, and place them appropriately. We mentioned this above, but it's an important one. Create CTAs for each of your offers, and align them with the pages on your website. In other words, if you're that plumber we mentioned above and you just wrote a blog post about the best and worst products to unclog a drain, you might place a CTA for your free guide to the best plumbing products of 2012. Once you have created awesome-looking CTA buttons for your site and you're moving onto ninja status, you can also test different versions of your CTAs to determine which ones generate the best click-through rate.

4. Create blog content around your offers. Take that last best practice one step further, and create content specifically around your new offers to help launch and promote them. So if you just created that 'Best Plumbing Products of 2012' guide, why not write a blog article that highlights the top 5 products mentioned in the guide and couple that with your CTA, explaining that readers can learn more by downloading the new guide? Excerpts make for easy blog content, so you'll be killing two birds with one stone!

5. Promote your offers in social media. The promotion of your offers shouldn't have to remain on your website. Use social media as a promotional vehicle by sharing links to the landing pages for your offers and briefly explaining their value in your tweets, Facebook/Google+/LinkedIn posts. Spend some time to build your social media reach so you can expose your offers to as large an audience as possible.

6. Use them in email marketing and lead nurturing. As we mentioned above, offers are critical to a business' lead nurturing efforts, but you can also promote them using general email marketing as dedicated sends. Promote your new offer in a dedicated email send that only highlights that one offer and conveys its value. If it's a very general offer that every buyer persona in your audience would enjoy regardless of their point in the sales cycle, send it to your entire list. If it's a more targeted offer, segment your list, and send it only to the people to whom it will appeal.

7. Align offers with prospects' point in the sales process. This is another one we've already talked about, but it's worth emphasizing. Aligning the offers you use in your lead nurturing campaigns and in the CTAs on your website with a prospect's likely position in the sales cycle will not only help to better qualify a lead, but it may also shorten the sales cycle, as a prospect will be much closer to a purchasing decision with a ton of knowledge about your business before he/she even talks to a sales person.

8. Track performance with your analytics software. Measure the performance of your offers. This will help you identify which types and topics of offers are successful in generating leads and customers so you can create more offers around those topics or in those formats, helping you become a much more effective marketer. Do your prospects prefer webinars to ebooks? Do they only care about certain topics that your offers are addressing? Use what you know to improve your lead generation and lead nurturing efforts in the future.

How many offers are in your back pocket? How much do they factor into your business' lead generation and nurturing efforts?

Image Credit: Paul Tomlin

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The Simple Template for a Thorough Content Style Guide

Corey Eridon — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 17:10:00 GMT

Content creation is central to your inbound marketing success, but as your volume of written content increases, inconsistencies are also bound to arise. Whether due to lack of clarity in your own head about the style with which you want to write, or disjointed communication across the content creators in your organization, failure to decide upon and document accepted editorial guidelines is a recipe for inconsistent messaging and an incoherent brand experience.

That's why most companies that rely on content as a central part of their marketing strategy develop an editorial style guide. When creating an editorial style guide, you're not discussing the operations of content creation -- like editorial calendaring or search engine optimization of content -- nor are you going into the detail of a brand style guide like the nitty gritty on visual style and use of your logo. Rather, your editorial style guide will guide writers by providing a set of standards to which they must adhere when creating content for your website, eliminating confusion, guess work, and debates over what boils down to a matter of editorial opinion among grammar and content geeks.

By putting in time up front to writing this editorial style guide, you'll save time spent answering the same questions over and over; get new hires and guest contributors on the same page more quickly; and publish content that is consistent in tone, quality, and presentation, reflecting a more professional brand experience. Now let's break down, page by page, exactly what information to include in a comprehensive editorial style guide so you can go create one for your company.

Section 1: Grammar

Decide which established style manual you will follow. Most businesses adopt either the AP Stylebook, or the Chicago Manual of Style. You can purchase online subscriptions to these manuals for your employees to reference, the login for which you should also include in this section of the editorial style guide to make access simple. You might find employees are more likely to reference these tools when provided with an online subscription that contains a search function, instead of a paper book through which they have to flip to find their answers.

These style guides provide a good basis for basic grammar rules, but you'll also probably want to make some exceptions to the rules therein for the sake of branding and style. This is the section of your editorial style guide to outline those exceptions and also highlight some of the most rules that commonly arise when writing for your company that people should commit to memory (regardless of whether it is aligned with or against AP or Chicago style). For example:

What do you capitalize? Do you capitalize the name of your product, for example? Are there certain prepositions you want capitalized in your title despite your style book's recommendations?
What do you abbreviate? Would you type "a.k.a." or "aka"?
Do you use an Oxford comma?
How do you spell words in your industry that don't have a definitive spelling? Is it "ebook", "Ebook", or "e-book"? What about "website" versus "web site"?

Listing answers to common questions like these in the first part of your editorial style guide will give people an easy resource to reference that saves you time and encourages consistency. Feel free to continue adding to this list as more confusions arise and get resolved during the content creation process. You're creating your own style guide, so feel free to borrow different rules from different style guides. The important thing is that you use the same rules consistently throughout all the content you create.

Section 2: Style and Tone

This section of the editorial style guide should address something less concrete than grammar rules but arguably the most important content in your editorial style guide: how your content should sound to the reader. Can writers use the first person? How do you feel about the use of industry jargon? Think about the words you would use to describe your content in an ideal world. Which of these adjectives do you want your content to evoke?

Conversational
Educational
Academic
Funny
Controversial
Irreverent
Artistic
Objective
Sophisticated

You might think you want your content to be all of the above, but force yourself to prioritize just a few, explain why it's important to achieve this style and tone in your content, and provide examples of content (excerpts are fine) that are successful in doing so. If there are stylistic characteristics your content absolutely should not have, this is the section in which to include that information, too. When deciding on style and tone, be sure to consider your target audience and buyer personas in the process. Which style and tone would resonate best with them? Which brings us to our next page...

Section 3: Personas

This section occurs after the Style and Tone section of the editorial style guide, because understanding your target audience helps clarify for the writer the style and tone for which you're striving. The two are so intertwined that it would also be acceptable to place this as the second section in your editorial style guide, and move Style and Tone to page 3.

Whichever way you choose, know that the personas in your editorial style guide don't need to go as in depth as the personas you hand to your sales and marketing team. Those might include detailed information like objections that arise in the sales process and how to overcome them, and tips on identifying these personas "in the wild" or when you get them on the phone. These personas should be more brief, pulling out the highlights from your in-depth marketing personas that concisely explain who your target audience is, their pain points, the value your company provides, how they like to be communicated with, and a picture to give writers a visual to keep in mind when creating content.

If your writers understand your target audience, many questions that would normally arise during content creation are easily answered with common sense based on their knowledge of your readers.

Section 4: Content Structure

Content can come in many structures, not all of which may be right for your audience; your editorial style guide should outline which are appropriate and encouraged for your website. This will be particularly important if you outsource content creation or rely on many contributors to keep your business blog running. Consider these possible content structures when deciding the acceptable forms your content can take:

How-To Guides
Top Lists
Debates Over Controversial Topics
Serialized Content
Data
News
Interviews
Infographics
Product, Service, or Content Reviews
Pro/Con lists
Video Content
Audio Content
Comics

As with the common grammatical errors and exceptions in the first section of your editorial style guide, you will probably encounter new content formats that you want to include on this list. Continue to edit this section as you understand which content formats perform well (or underperform) and are an important (or harmful) part of your content strategy.

Section 5: Graphics and Formatting

Like your personas, this section should be light in the editorial style guide; you can create a separate brand style guide that goes into more detail on the visual elements associated with your brand. You should, however, delineate visual details that are common to the content creation process.

Outline from where writers can source images and how to attribute that source within the content -- should they link to it at the bottom of their content, include an image caption, or work in the artist credit within the copy?
When should images align to the right, to the left, or in the center?
Should text wrap around images?
What are the RGB and hex codes for your text and headers?
What typeface should be used?
Can writers use italics, bolding, or underlining? If so, is usage limited to certain occasions, like bolding headings and hyperlinks?
What kind of bullets should be used -- square, round, or other -- and how do they align with the rest of your text?
How should numbered lists appear -- "1", "1." or "1.)"?

Many of these graphical elements can be preset in your content management system (CMS), but they can also be easily overridden when writers copy and paste content from elsewhere with formatting attached or by an overzealous writer with a flair for design. Outline these core expectations in your editorial style guide, and refer those with more advanced needs to your brand style guide.

Section 6: Approved and Unapproved Content

Great content often cites research and data from third party sources. Make your writer's job easier by providing approved industry resources from which they can draw, and even more importantly, resources from which they cannot draw. Break up this section of your editorial style guide into two sections: recommended and approved industry resources, and "do not mentions."

The information in the "do not mention" section should include competitors and unreliable resources, but it should also mention controversial topics and opinions that should be avoided at all costs. For example, many companies strictly prohibit any mention of politics or religion in their content or have provisions that explain when it is acceptable and how to frame the discussion. This is the section of your editorial style guide to explain the intricacies of such controversies as they relate to your brand so you can prevent reputation management catastrophes.

Section 7: Sourcing

With great research comes great responsibility...and unfortunately a lot of choices, too. Clear up the confusion around how to properly cite research by deciding on one methodology and documenting it in your editorial style guide. Explain how to create footnotes, references, links to external cites, or even bibliographies if they are relevant to your company. This section of your editorial style guide doesn't need to be long; just write down the rules, and provide some examples of proper citations so writers can easily attribute their sources properly.

Illustrating the Difference Between Right and Wrong

Every section of your editorial style guide can benefit from real life examples of the concepts you're explaining, whether you include those examples on the same page or as an appendix at the end of the guide. For example, when talking about proper formatting, include a visual example of a well-formatted blog post with call-outs that detail why the elements therein are successful. Or if you're discussing grammar usage, provide an incorrect example, then mark it up to show how a writer could fix it to align with your editorial style guide. Bridging your requirements with proper executions from your actual website will help illustrate these concepts more clearly and cut down on follow-up questions and instances of exceptions to the rules you've laid out.

Do you have an editorial style guide for your company? What else do you include in yours?

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Why You Need Social Media Followers Who Won't Ever Buy

Pamela Vaughan — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 14:00:00 GMT

Which is better? 50 qualified social media followers, or 1,000 followers, many of whom will never buy from you? The answer may surprise you.

In social media, reach is of critical importance. It directly impacts how much your content and messages get shared, it increases your business' ability to get found and generate leads, it can help extend your online footprint as a thought leader, and the list goes on. In other words, in an online world, social reach shouldn't be a trivial factor for businesses leveraging inbound marketing. So, have you figured out what the right answer to our first question is yet? If the title of this article wasn't enough of a hint, yes, more followers is always better.

It may seem obvious (more is always better....right?), but a lot of businesses fall into the trap of thinking fewer and more qualified is better. In this case, here's why it's not...

1. More followers means access to more followers' followers.

This concept, albeit simple, is pivotal to understanding the overall importance of reach, so here goes. Think about it: Every one of your fans/followers also has his/her own followers, be it 5, 500, or 5,000. Let's say that a follower who has 5,000 Twitter followers of his own shares one of your blog posts or retweets one of your tweets. Now, that content is getting exposed to 5,000 additional people who weren't directly following you. If you can understand that every one of your fans/followers might share your content with their friends and followers, now you can start understanding the awesome impact of reach. So even if that original follower of yours never becomes a customer himself, that doesn't mean one of his followers who saw your content because of him won't. Now that's some powerful stuff.

2. Influencers have, well, influence.

If you can build up a large following for your business in social media, you probably have a few influencers among the bunch. While these influencers may follow but never buy from you, remember that these people are called influencers for a reason. They can introduce you to co-marketing partnerships, put in a good word with investors, and provide introductions to other influencers, bloggers, and experts in your industry. For example, if you can solicit an introduction from an influencer to another industry blogger that you can contribute a guest blog post to, you'll probably benefit from a couple of inbound links. That follower may not have contributed any direct revenue to your business, but those inbound links are very valuable.

3. Followers who won't ever buy can still refer your business.

Indirect exposure to your followers' personal networks can be an invaluable source of business. Okay, so Frank the Facebook fan may never actually purchase your industrial vacuum cleaner for his teeny tiny small business office. But when his buddy, landlord Lenny, is searching for a new one for the apartment building he owns, Facebook fan Frank might just refer you some highly qualified business. Even if landlord Lenny isn't the type to participate in social media himself, his good buddy Frank is. Need I say more?

4. Social shares impact SEO.

The impact social media is having on SEO is only increasing. Search engines are taking social cues like social media shares into account when they're ranking your content, which means the more people you can get to share your content in social media, the better.

Let's say you own a dog grooming business, and you and one of your competitors each wrote a blog article about how to take care of your dog's coat in between visits to the groomer. But let's also say your competitor has 10 times as many social media followers than you and his article got tweeted 50 times, generated 20 likes on Facebook, and got quite a few shares on LinkedIn and Google+, too. All of a sudden, your competitor has quite a leg up when it comes to getting his article ranked in search ahead of yours. In other words, because social shares are now one of the factors search engines take into consideration when ranking your content, it behooves you to build up your following and encourage those social shares. If you tweeted your article and you have 1,000 followers compared to your competitors' 50 followers, you have a much better chance of generating social shares and a much better chance of ranking in search. Those people who shared your content may never become customers of your dog grooming business themselves, but someone who finds your article in search because of them might.

5. Your followers might surprise you.

If you've been doing your research and spending time developing buyer personas, you likely have a pretty solid grasp on who your ideal customers are. That's all well and good, but if you have a very narrow-minded idea of who exactly will buy your products and services, you could actually miss out on a completely different set of people who might also buy from you.

To use a classic example, the makers of baking soda had a very specific use case in mind for their product: baking. But we all know that the uses for baking soda extend way beyond baking -- it can also be used to extinguish small electrical fires, for personal hygiene, and as a cleaning agent, to name a few. And you can bet that some people who buy baking soda never even use it for baking.

The lesson here is that building up a large following in social media could expose your brand and products to a group -- or groups -- of people you might never have thought would be interested in what you sell. Your product or service may not have completely different, original uses like baking soda does, but your followers could still surprise you. Just because a social media follower doesn't fall neatly into one of your cookie cutter buyer personas, doesn't necessarily mean he won't buy from you.

Always Be Working to Build Social Reach

The ultimate takeaway here is this: just because followers may not directly turn into customers doesn't mean they're not valuable. Social media reach can be a powerful thing for any business, and the ones who understand this know that continuing to build reach is a smart social media tactic.

If building reach isn't something you're consciously doing, you may want to start working to attract more fans and followers for your social media accounts. In this article, we've got some great tips for building reach that can help get you going. Doing so can greatly increase the impact and ROI of your social media efforts. And if you're having a tough time convincing your boss that building reach is important, share this article with them :)

In what ways are you working to regularly increase your business' social reach?

Image Credit: Caitlin Doe

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25 Things You Could Buy With a Super Bowl Ad Budget

Corey Eridon — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 20:30:00 GMT

A 30-second commercial advertisement for Super Bowl XLVI is going for $3.5 million. Can you imagine what you as a marketer could do for your company if you had that kind of budget? If you can't even fathom what you'd do with a marketing budget that big (and just think, this is just one of many campaigns they're running this year!), we've come up with some ideas for how you can better spend that chunk of change. And if you're thinking you'd spend it on a commercial during the Super Bowl, well, maybe these ideas will give you some perspective on just how far $3.5 million can go in the marketing world.

25 Ways to Spend the $3.5 Million Budget of a Super Bowl XLVI Commercial

1.) Buy 1,458 years of HubSpot Basic Inbound Marketing Software. Tweet This!

2.) Direct mail the entire country of Sweden. Tweet This!

3.) Hire someone to blog for you for the next 70 years. Tweet This!

4.) Put up a billboard along the highway from Boston to D.C. every one mile. Tweet This!

5.) Purchase 2,333 years of Salesforce Enterprise CRM. Tweet This!

6.) Buy inbound links from enough web pages to fill the Oxford English Dictionary 16 times. Tweet This!

7.) Use PPC to buy a search presence for 2,333,333 keywords after Google dings you for purchasing links. Tweet This!

8.) Give 2,060 employees their own personal version of the entire Adobe Creative Suite. Tweet This!

9.) Send those 2,060 employees to classes so they know how to use the entire Adobe Creative Suite. Tweet This!

10.) Buy the email list of the entire population of Chile and SPAM them; try to do it before your IP is blacklisted. Tweet This!

11.) Repair your company's spamtastic image by plastering your company logo and tagline across 35,000 park benches. Tweet This!

12.) Hire Al Gore to be your company's celebrity spokesperson for a full 24-hour day. Tweet This!

13.) Let everyone know Al Gore is your spokesperson by, ironically, printing enough flyers to stick to every single household door in the United Kingdom. Take that, environment. Tweet This!

14.) Buy the stamps to send out your 2012 holiday cards. Let's hope you have 7,777,777 customers. Tweet This!

15.) Purchase about 35,000 shares of Facebook after it IPOs. Tweet This!

16.) Keep a web designer on call 24 hours a day for 4 years to change your website whenever you want. Tweet This!

17.) Commission enough content from the Zerys Content Marketplace to post a new blog to your website every hour of every day for the next 26 years. Tweet This!

18.) Hire the entire graduating class of Emerson College's Masters of Marketing program to work in your department. Tweet This!

19.) Or, if you're happy with your current team, you could send 23 of them to get their MBAs. Tweet This!

20.) You should probably also buy them all brand new MacBook Airs for their studies; you'll have enough money left over to hoard 3,477 for yourself. What? Marketers love Apple products! Tweet This!

21.) Hire Lady Gaga to follow your CMO around all day, singing "Happy Birthday" on repeat, every year for the next 145 years. Tweet This!

22.) Develop 542 mobile apps. Because the other 541 just weren't good enough. Tweet This!

23.) Purchase enough color toner to print brochures that can span the Atlantic Ocean from Dublin to Boston. And then back again. Tweet This!

24.) Pay to rank for the rarely searched keyword phrase, "best company in the world" for 11,666 years. Tweet This!

25.) Air 17 regular commercials on network television any other time of the year. Tweet This!

Now just think of what you could do with the additional $1-2 million you'd spend actually producing the commercial...

If you had $3.5+ million to spend on marketing, how would you use the money?

Image credit: Images_of_Money

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