There are many definitions for inbound marketing. Here’s mine:

Inbound marketing is the process of helping prospects find your company – often before they’re even looking – and then turning that early awareness into brand preference, leads and revenue.

Inbound marketing relies on relevant content to inform your potential prospects across multiple online channels so that you can begin to engage them. This is when their protective, anti-marketing shields are down. At this time you aren’t interrupting them, you’re entertaining them.

Content: An Inbound Marketing Pillar

To succeed at inbound marketing you need to create good content. That means knowing what’s relevant to your future customers and giving it to them in a way that’s easy to digest. The content must be easy to share and not too salesy. It can take many forms, including webinars, whitepapers, ebooks, videos, articles and more, and it can be posted on your site, shared via blogs, social media — wherever your target market might find you.

If you don’t have the time to create such content, you can turn to outside sources such as industry analysts, guest bloggers, private label rights (PLR) content and more. Doing so can even provide the added bonus of positioning you as a trusted resource, which can increase your credibility.

 Improve Inbound Marketing with SEO and Social

Since at its core inbound marketing is about making it easier for people to find you, it stands to reason that improving your search engine optimization and social media efforts will improve your inbound marketing returns. The higher your site ranks in organic search results, the more likely someone will be to find that rich content and share it via social media outlets. This is why it’s so important to have a steady stream of relevant content.

Force Multiplier Effect: Mix Inbound and Outbound for Better Results

Whereas inbound marketing is all about making it easier for people to find you online, outbound marketing is any paid marketing, be it online or offline, that is used to attract and acquire new leads. Examples of outbound marketing include more traditional tactics such as trade shows, pay-per-click advertising, direct mail and more. Paid advertisements  can help you further share that content, creating a force multiplier effect to dramatically increase the number of potential customers viewing your content.

Joe Franklin is a marketing communications consultant and brand strategist who helps emerging and evolving companies solve their business problems. He lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The Best Inbound Links Are Found on Well-traveled Roads

Inbound links, also known as backlinks, are links outside of your site that drive to your website or one of your web pages. Inbound links are extremely important for web purposes because they tell search engines how popular you are, and therefore how high you should rank in search results.

The more inbound links you have from highly trafficked sites, the more site visits you’ll receive from referring sites, and the better your search engine rankings will be. It’s like a popularity contest with three main benefits:

• Brand awareness
• Increased traffic
• Improved search engine rankings

All three of these relate to increased leads and selling opportunities. With a little resourcefulness and know-how you can encourage others to link to your site without spending a dime. How can you build more inbound links? Read on.

Tip #1: Become a Guest Blogger

It’s no secret that quality content drives traffic. With guest blogging you ask, or are invited to write blog entries on someone else’s site in exchange for a link that drives traffic back to your site. This is often in the form of an author bio at the end. Just make sure to bring your best stuff and choose sites that are relevant to your audience.

Tip#2: Submit to Local Directories

Search engines give special consideration to inbound links that come from third-party websites such as local directories. In addition to improving your searchability, submitting to sites like Yelp!,  CitySearch, alumni websites, and local and industry directories is like fishing with more lines in the water. Just make sure that you bait your hook well with quality information about your business. And if you can control the anchor text, which is the actual term(s) or image text that is hyperlinked to your website, try to do so with descriptive words and phrases that align with your keyword strategy.

Tip#3: Evangelize Your Thinking

Nobody gets noticed by following the status quo. If you have an original thought, big or small, telling the world about it can make you an authority and your website a highly cited source. Tweetups weren’t in-person meetings organized via Twitter until Scott Motty started calling them that in a blog post back in 2007. PCs weren’t personal computers until Henry Edward Roberts started called his Altair 8800 that in a 1975 print ad.

Tip#4: Be Active In Online Industry Forums

Nearly every industry has an online forum where professionals go to share ideas. Well-attended forums, those with page rankings of P5 and higher, can be great traffic generators to your site. Find the forums that are relevant to your line of work and start providing thoughtful answers and opinions to relevant threads. If you can, try to find sites that allow you to create a user profile, including automated links to your site, whenever you post a response.

Tip #5: Engage in Article Marketing

Sort of like guest blogging, article marketing sites like ezinearticles.com allow you to repost articles you’ve already posted on your blog for public consumption. Other directories include Alltop, Technorati, SocialMediaToday and the list goes on and on. You can also make deals with other blogs to publish their best content on your site and vice versa.

Joe Franklin is a marketing communications consultant who helps emerging and evolving companies solve their business problems. He lives and works in Oakland, Calif.

How Facebook Ads Work

Sample Facebook ad.

You’ve no doubt seen Facebook ads like the one on the left on your news feed, events page, and even your timeline. If you’ve also noticed that they seem oddly relevant to you that’s because the ads are targeted to your geographic area or interests based on the information you provided to Facebook when you filled out your profile.

Facebook ads operate on the bid auction system that many other paid search advertising providers such as Google AdWords use. You list how much you’re willing to pay per click and then pay that amount, up to a certain amount per day, which you also specify.

Facebook ads have one major difference between them and other paid search options—with Facebook ads rather than choosing keywords, you target the likes and interests of other Facebook users. This is the information they provided when filling out their profiles. For those that chose not to list such information, Facebook defaults to the pages that person has Liked as an indication of their interests.

When placing a Facebook ad you can drive traffic to your business page, or to an event, place, application or external website. The choice is up to you.

Create Killer Facebook Ads

Now that you understand how Facebook ads work, how do you use that information to advertise on Facebook? In other words, how do you create killer Facebook ads?

To begin, titles are limited to just 25 characters. To maximize space, make sure your headline, body text, URL and photo are working as hard as they can. Below is a sample of a Facebook ad that I created to advertise my own services.

The Facebook ad creation interface.

You’ll see that I began by choosing my website as my destination URL rather than my Facebook page. This is a matter of personal preference; you can drive traffic to your Facebook page, or to an event, application, etc. Next, I wrote a descriptive title that explains the service I provide, chose a relevant image and wrote copy that visually reinforced that image. I also narrowed my demographic to cities within 10 miles of San Francisco since those are the responses that I believe will be the most relevant to me, and filtered my demographic further to Facebook users between the ages of 23-65.

Next you list the interests of the people you’d like to target. I’m going to keep a close eye on this area because I realize I might be better off targeting those interested in business practices, business plans, and other niche business-related interests. This is where Facebook’s robust ad campaign and analytical software come in handy, but you need to develop results to analyze first.

In a future blog post I’ll cover the ins and outs of how to analyze your campaign results to make your Facebook ad an even sharper marketing weapon.

Joe Franklin is a marketing communications consultant who helps emerging and evolving companies solve their business problems. He lives and works in Oakland, Calif.

Is the long tail keyword strategy right for your business?

Whether you’re a large corporation or a single-person start-up, one of the best search engine marketing strategies you can employ is the long tail keyword strategy (if you haven’t already). It works well both to improve paid search results and to improve organic search results.

The long tail keyword strategy is what you probably think it is: a longer, more specific keyword phrase. It’s like fishing with a hook instead of throwing a wide net. If this doesn’t sound attractive to you read on, because the long tail keyword strategy really does work.

The term long tail was originally coined by Chris Anderson of Wired Magazine, who noticed that Amazon.com was making the majority of its revenue by selling niche titles. While each niche title sold only a small fraction of what the best sellers sold, the sum of all those small fractions far surpassed the sum of all the best sellers.

The same is probably true of your marketplace, which can be broken down into multiple subcategories or specialty areas. For example, if you’re in the dry cleaning business you might have specialty business in fine garments, the size of the garments, the time it takes to clean the items, etc. All of these specialty areas can be affixed to the general “dry cleaning” search term to produce additional results.

Improve Paid Search Results

Let’s use an example that’s close to home for me and say your business is providing art classes and camps to kids in Oakland, Calif. (which is what my wife does). Entering the following phrases into Google AdWords yields the following results:

Keyword Phrase                               Local Monthly Searches                  Competition

art classes                                         450,000                                              High

art classes kids                                  2,737                                                  High

art classes oakland                            480                                                     Medium

childrens art classes oakland             27,100                                                Low

This is a very simple example that illustrates that by lengthening your keyword phrase, you reduce the amount of competition for that phrase and increase the likelihood that you will appear higher in search terms. If you’re conducting a pay-per-click campaign, you’ll also be paying less for each click (say $0.30 instead of $3.00) an improve the quality of traffic that clicks through to your site.

Improve Organic Search Results

If you have a blog you can improve organic search results by employing the phrase “after school children’s art classes in Oakland, Calif.” in an article, and then write another article about, “summer art camps for children in Oakland”. It’s also worth noting that Google does its best to delivers results based on location, so it isn’t always necessary to list your city name, even if you’re a small business that caters to a local clientele.

Notice also that the number of searches doesn’t always directly correlate to the competition for those search terms. Sometimes it can be a sound plan to advertise to a niche that’s just outside of yours and work to sell them when they contact you. As an alternative, you might discover untapped ways to expand your services and satisfy a market need.

Summary

Employing the long tail keyword strategy is one of the best search engine marketing strategies you’ll find. It takes a bit of extra work, but can save you money in your PPC campaigns and significantly improve organic search results.

Joe Franklin is a marketing communications consultant who helps emerging and evolving companies solve their business problems. He lives and works in Oakland, Calif.

Your marketing plan is your roadmap to marketing success.

Marketing plans are one of the most important documents you’ll create for your business, right behind your business plan. While business plans define the goals and objectives of your business, marketing plans are your roadmap for how you’ll get there.

In this entry I’ll explain the benefits of a well-written marketing plan and the elements that go into creating it. In future entries I’ll explain how to go about fleshing out those individual elements.

Large corporations have marketing plans that can take months to create and that can total over a hundred pages, while small businesses can develop a plan in just a few hours and that total less than 10 pages. The amount of detail that’s right for you will probably fall somewhere in between.

Marketing Plan Benefits

The benefits of a good marketing plan are multiple. Here are a few:

• Market insight: Creating a marketing plan is the heavy lifting of marketing. You’ll need to do research on your competitive landscape and overall market. This research should provide clarity on how you stack up against the competition, and identify any gaps or new opportunities within your market that you can exploit.
• Roadmap for success: You might think you know your customers and the market; your marketing plan will bring it all into focus, providing you with a roadmap for how to achieve your goals. With this information you can put your foot on the gas and move confidently forward, without detours.
• Standard operating instructions: That new armoire you bought at Ikea came with instructions on how to put it together, and it wasn’t nearly as important as the health of your organization. Your marketing plan will provide the step-by-step details you need, including a sales forecast, marketing expense budget, key marketing metrics, and gap dashboard to do the job right.
• Captured thinking: Employees come and go, memories falter, markets change and new technology comes along and changes everything. These are just some of the reasons that its good to have a written document that lays out your marketing plan.
• Big picture analysis: It’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day minutiae of running a business. Referring to your marketing plan takes you back to the big picture and reminds you of the road your travelling on.

Marketing Plan Outline

Whether you’re marketing plan is 10 pages or 100, there are certain elements that need to be in it. Those elements include:

1. Executive summary: This is where you state your company’s mission statement (your reason for being in business). It should be no more than a couple of sentences.
2. Introduction: Identify the product or service to be sold, how they fit into the marketing, challenges to success, pricing, weaknesses, and so on.
3. Situational analysis: Identify and define your target market in detail by using demographics, geography, lifestyle, etc. This is also where you’ll need to conduct a SWOT analysis define the competition, marketplace trends, and more.
4. Goals: What do you want to achieve? Put it down in writing so you know what you’re shooting for. Be ambitious, but realistic.
5. Marketing action plan: This is where it starts to get fun. Describe your marketing mix and strategies you’ll use to promote your business based off the information you’ve learned so far.
6. Budget: Now that defined your strategies and tactics, how much will it cost? Outline your budgetary parameters and revenue forecasts.
7. Analysis: Evaluate progress and measure the success of the business.

It can seem like a lot of work to research and write a full marketing plan, and it is, but it will save you time and money in the long run. When you’re done you’ll have the information you need narrow down your target markets, set a price point for your product or service, enable you to know your customers better, and how to serve their needs better to increase sales.

Make sure you sign up to receive additional articles, which will detail how to go about filling in the individual elements of your marketing plan.

Joe Franklin is a marketing consultant and brand strategist who helps emerging and evolving companies solve their business problems. He lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Closed-loop marketing can be helpful in determining the ROI of revenue-generating email campaigns.

In part one of this series I discussed how to use analytics to improve your bounce rate and raise your overall delivery rate. In part two I explain how you can use actionable data to raise your list growth rate and click-through rate. In this post I cover how to improve your conversion rate and revenue per email sent.

Conversion Rate

Having a high click-through rate is great, but it doesn’t mean anything if you don’t also have a high conversion rate on the landing page that your email drives traffic to. Your landing page needs to be well optimized for the list segment that your email is sent to. If your list isn’t segmented and your driving all recipients to a generic landing page, your click-through rate won’t be very good.

For example, let’s say you have an offer and landing page for a webinar about centering clay on a ceramic wheel and creating a cylinder (a subject I happen to be interested in now). That email might go out to two list segments: students interested in learning how to center clay and raise it into a cylinder, and teachers interested in learning how to instruct students to do so.

You’d want to message those emails differently, and create separate landing pages for each as well. If you find that you have a high click-through rate but a low overall conversion rate, you know that your email is doing its job, and that you should improve that content, design, offer, etc. on the landing page.

If, on the other hand, you have a low click-through rate, consider A/B testing it with different offers, subject lines, CTAs, etc.

Revenue Per Email Sent

Closed-loop marketing data enables you to track leads from the moment they first land on your website until the moment they become a customer. This information enables you to see which marketing channels – e.g., email marketing, SEO, social media, etc. – provide the best marketing ROI.

Closed-loop analytics can be particularly helpful in calculating revenue per email sent in campaigns that are designed to directly sell products and generate revenue. To do so you will need to create a unique tracking URL in order to track clicks from a specific campaign.

If you employ this strategy and find that your email isn’t driving the revenue you’d hoped or thought it would, this may indicate that you need to shift gears and use email for lead nurturing instead of as a tool for direct sales.

Related articles:

• Optimize Email Campaigns with Analytics: Part I – Improving Bounce Rates and Delivery Rates
• Optimize Email Campaigns with Analytics: Part II – List Growth Rate and Click-through Rate
• How to Make Your Next Email Marketing Campaign a Success

Joe Franklin is a marketing consultant and brand strategist who helps emerging and evolving companies solve their business problems. He lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Use analytics to improve your open and click-through rates.

In part one of this series on using analytics to improve the ROI of your email campaigns I explained how you could dive into the data to reduce your bounce rate and raise your overall delivery rate. Here I’ll explain how you can use actionable data to raise your list growth rate and click-through rate.

List Growth Rate

Your list growth rate is a measurement of how fast your email list is growing. Now that you’ve improved your bounce rate by eliminating the email addresses that are no longer active, you might find that your list growth rate is decreasing. This isn’t such a bad thing, as left alone email lists tend to depreciate at a rate of about 25% a year. Your job as an email marketer is to continually restock your list with new contacts for nurturing.

Some of the ways that you can do this include:

• Effective opt-in strategies: make sure you’re giving visitors to your website ample opportunity to opt-in for offers and updates via sign-up forms prominently placed throughout your site.
• Better, more relevant offers: are your offers compelling enough for your email recipients to click on your call to action?
• Improved content: if you’re getting click-throughs to your landing pages but are failing to close the deal at a high percentage it could be that your content isn’t selling the benefits of you unique value proposition. Make sure that visitors know what’s in it for them when they get there.

Click-through Rate

Your click-through rate (CTR) is the proportion (usually expressed as a percentage) of recipients who clicked on one or more links in your email. Not to be confused with open-rate, which is often misreported because different analytic software have different criteria for what constitutes an “open”, click-through rates are strong indicators of how well your content and offer are resonating with your target audience.

There is no one number that you’re trying to hit here because different offers can have drastically different click-through rates. For example, an email offering a free whitepaper will likely have a higher click-through rate that one asking them to purchase something.

When analyzing click-through rates for specific campaigns, it’s a good idea to compare them to other campaigns with similar offers.

If your CTRs aren’t what you would like them to be, here are three ways you can seek to improve them:

1. List segmentation. According to MailChimp, segmenting your email lists can improve your click-through rates by over 14%.
2. Optimized emails and landing pages. Follow email best practices and ensure that your offer is both compelling, above the fold, and written with action-oriented copy. It can also help to make your offer time-sensitive, and to A/B test it with different subject lines, offers and visual layouts, both with the email and landing page.
3. Include social sharing options. Enabling recipients to forward your email with social sharing options is a quick and easy way to dramatically improve click-through rates. It can also work wonders for your list growth rate.

Make sure you sign up to receive additional articles in this series, which will include using analytics to improve conversion rate and overall ROI.

Related articles:

• Optimize Email Campaigns with Analytics: Part I – Improving Bounce Rates and Delivery Rates
• Optimize Email Campaigns with Analytics: Part III – Conversion Rate and Revenue per Email Sent
• How to Make Your Next Email Marketing Campaign a Success

Joe Franklin is a marketing communications consultant who helps emerging and evolving companies solve their business problems. He lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Use email analytics to optimize your next email campaign.

Successful marketers don’t make decisions based off of hunches. They make them based off of hard data gleaned from analytics. Crunching your email analytics and converting them into actionable data is what email marketing is all about.

This is part one in a three-part series on measuring key analytics to improve your email campaigns. Here I’ll cover how you can go about optimizing your bounce rates and delivery rates, and in future entries I’ll discuss how you can sift through analytics for actionable data that will enable you to improve list growth rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and overall email marketing ROI.

Bounce Rates and Delivery Rates

Of all your email marketing analytics, your bounce rate and delivery rate are the two most crucial to measure. A high bounce rate (the percentage of emails sent that failed to reach recipients’ inboxes) or a low delivery rate (the percentage of emails sent that successfully reached recipients’ inboxes) are clear symptoms of an unhealthy email marketing program.

Your email deliverability rate could be impacted by such factors as your email sending reputation, the health and segmentation of your list and content value.

Like a credit score, a sender score is an indication of the trustworthiness of an email source. SenderScore.org is a free email reputation service from ReturnPath that gives you access to free reports and tools to determine your trustworthiness.

If you’re experiencing a high bounce rate (above 5% of all emails sent), you risk ISPs beginning to list you as a spammer, in which case your sender score will begin to decline. Do your best to keep your sender score high by keeping your delivery rate above 95%. You can begin to do this by removing bad email addresses (those that bounce) from your list.

If most of your campaigns achieve at least a 95% delivery rate, but one is lower than average, check to see if you’ve somehow tripped a spam filter. Trigger words in the subject line like, “free”, “trial”, “quote”, “access”, and a host of others can send your spam score through the roof.

Bloomtools has a good list of other spam trigger words to avoid.

Make sure you sign up to receive additional articles in this series, which will include measuring analytics for: list growth rate, click-through rate, conversion rate, and overall ROI.

Related articles:

• How to Make Your Next Email Marketing Campaign a Success
• Optimize Email Campaigns with Analytics: Part II – List Growth Rate and Click-through Rate
• Optimize Email Campaigns with Analytics: Part III – Conversion Rate and Revenue per Email Sent

Joe Franklin is a marketing director and brand manager who helps emerging and evolving companies solve their business problems. He lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Hit a home run with your next paid search campaign.

If you’ve ever seen the movie Moneyball staring Brad Pitt, maybe you were struck, like me, by the similarities between what Billy Beane was trying to accomplish with the Oakland A’s and best practices for paid search advertising.

According to Beane’s philosophy, what matters most is getting on base; not how you get there. The same holds true with pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, where a click is a click.

It doesn’t matter if the arena you’re playing in belongs to Google or Lycos, or if the name on the back of your jersey is “World’s #1 Widget Manufacturer” or “Widget Manufacturer, Vacaville, CA.” Search engines are a commodity and what differentiates commodities is price. Carefully examine search engines to see which offers the cheapest price per click.

Paid search advertising can deliver one of the values of any source of online advertising, provided you understand some important things at the outset such as the keywords and phrases you would like to use, and the best engines for you to advertise with. Make the wrong decisions with these two choices and you’ll see your budget depleted very quickly with few tangible results.

PPC advertising works on a bidding model, with some general search terms costing considerably more than specific ones. Additionally, the same terms on different PPC engines can have substantially different winning bids. Because you’ll be paying for every click-through to your site, you want those that do click to be as targeted as possible.

PPC Tips:

1. Select relevant keywords. By increasing the number of keywords you target you can improve the quality of traffic you drive to your site. Think about what differentiates you from you competitors – geographic location, area of specialty, etc. – use those terms in your keyword selection to improve results.
2. Use direct URLs for each keyword. Instead of just linking to your home page,  link to the product or service described in the keyword.
3. Change the titles. Make sure each keyword you’re targeting is in each title. People want to see that you are offering what they are looking for.
4. Change the description. Remember that you don’t want visitors that aren’t likely to buy. Descriptions are where you should include things like prices or other qualifying elements to discourage casual surfers from clicking.
5. Bid management. Visit your host regularly to view statistics for each keyword, bid, etc., and adjust your bids and add new terms as necessary.

Choosing PPC Services

There are a lot of resources available online that will aid you in choosing the pay-per-click service that’s right for you. For starters, PayPerClickSerchEngines.com provides a directory and review of the many PPC choices. Meanwhile, SpyFu let’s you see what keywords your competitors are using, tells you the current bid on any search term on a variety of PPC search engines, and lots more.

There are considerable differences in the administrative consoles for the various PPC engines. Make sure the engines you are signing up with have a reasonable reporting capability that’s easy to use. Google has the best distribution, with Yahoo! in second.

Summary

Pay-per-click (PPC) search engines deliver one of the best online advertising ROIs out there, and your success with will depend on what engines you select, your keywords, titles, descriptions and the amounts you bid. For the best results, track your results plan and track your results carefully, and experiment with different engines, keywords, titles and descriptions.

Joe Franklin is a marketing director and brand strategist who helps emerging and evolving companies solve their business problems. He lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Don't be afraid. Website marketing is not rocket science.

Being a marketing manager in charge of a website is kind of like being in charge of a space mission at mission control (stay with me here); you don’t need to know how to program the rocket, but it’s still your job to make sure it makes it to outer space.

You should also have some knowledge of how the rockets work, and how to direct the people that build and program them.

Where marketers see opportunity, web programmers often see constraint, expense and headaches. It’s common for large organizations to overhaul their websites every few years when new functionalities become available, and to update content almost continually. If you’re a small business owner and like to do things yourself, it’s your job to design your own site, and then to hire the programmer yourself.

Whichever the case may be, here are some five guidelines that can help bridge the gap between IT and marketing.

1. Do the research. Whether you’re a small businessman or part of a large organization, and whether your plan to do a lot of the work yourself or hire someone to do it for you, you’ll need to do a lot of studying. From carousels to shopping carts to content management systems, and… the list goes on and on. Website trends and functionalities are constantly changing and it pays to know what you want.
2. Make the right hire. Once you’ve decided what you want, make sure that the people who actually upload your site have experience in creating, for example, HTML pages, forms, rich media, CGI scripts, and other components essential to your organization’s marketing objectives. If you use a third-party web designer to do your site, research their capabilities and references thoroughly.
3. Build strong bridges. You’re going to need your technicians, designers and so on so make them a part of the initial process.
4. Lay it out for them. IT folks love facts, statistics, bullet points, project management charts and all that fun stuff. Take the time to lay it out for them in a way they can understand and they’ll “get it” faster. Terminology is important; agree on what words mean.
5. Lock down the “what” and the “why”. Web developers and other techies love to figure out “how to do it”, so get them involved after you’ve figured out what to do and why to do it. They’ll sidetrack marketers with the “how” if you get them in too early and you’ll sidetrack them with the “why” if you don’t get out of the way and let them get things done.

Joe Franklin is a branding expert, marketing manager and freelance copywriter who helps emerging and evolving companies solve their business problems. He lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area.