Inbound Marketing and Technology Blog

The Friday Five: Goodbye Websites, Google+ Changes, and the Maturing of Email Marketing

Ron Mattocks — Fri, 17 May 2013 15:33:00 GMT

Friday is once again upon us and so too is the latest edition of The Friday 5: Five Headlines from Social Media, Inbound Marketing, SEO, and Web Design, a weekly roundup for ideas and news that you can use. This is what we have for you this week:

Say Bye to the Traditional Website
Google+ New Look
New Google AdWords Features
Email Marketing Matures
Solving Your Biggest Content Challenges

1. Is it Time to Say Good-bye to the Traditional Website?

(Business 2 Community) Thankfully, since its origins as a convenient way for the US military to share information, the internet has moved on. Whilst in the good old days of web 1.0 we were used to static websites – and having to search them and the content they contained out for ourselves – times have changed, and the world of web 2.0 saw the web become social and start distributing content all over the place. And the new world of multi-screen, wearable technology and augmented looks set to change our experience even further. So where does that leave the humble website?

2. Google ratchets up social networking chase with Google+ changes

(SFGate/The Tech Chronicles) Google is making its strongest push yet to go after Facebook by revamping its Google+ social network with dozens of new features and enhancements, including self-editing photos, automatic hashtags and improved messaging. The changes, which were announced at Google’s developer conference Wednesday morning and began rolling out later in the day, show how Google is trying to use all of its technological heft against Facebook.

3. 5 Kickin’ New Google AdWords Features to Try

(Search Engine Watch) A whirlwind of upgrades, information, and new features have been spilling out of Google AdWords of late. Consider these five new features that will have advertisers and PPC managers excited about the progress.

4. BtoB study: Email marketing matures, driven by content, mobile

(B2B) New York—Email marketing, while virtually a legacy channel, continues to adapt—slowly—to content and mobile marketing, according to a new study by BtoB. According to “Email Marketing: An Established Channel Evolves,” content that inspires registration is the most common trigger for an email campaign: 63% of respondents reported that event and trade show registrations provide leads for email marketing campaigns, with 62% saying that form registration for webinars and white papers also trigger an email. No other customer activity—requests for demos (36%), website behavior (32%) or call center interaction (17%)—came close.

5. B2B Marketing: 9 Ideas for Solving Your Biggest Content Challenges

(Content Marketing Institute) Last week, when we published findings from our study, B2B Small Business Content Marketing: 2013 Benchmarks, Budget, and Trends – North America (sponsored by Outbrain), reader Andy Detweiler posed a great question in our comments section: “Any insight on how small B2B companies plan on solving the problems listed? Would be curious to understand what they see as potential solutions versus a larger enterprise.”

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6 Life-Altering Questions Marketing Should Ask Sales [Video]

Rachel Ergo — Thu, 16 May 2013 21:54:00 GMT

The age old battle between sales and marketing may not be entirely over, but we have come a long way. I'll admit to playing into the friendly banter with my sales counterparts from time-to-time. But in all seriousness, can you imagine what would happen to a sales director if they stood up at a company meeting and said:

No, we didn't hit our sales quota this quarter, but we were doing some A/B testing on our pitch?"

In Sales, there's not much wiggle room to get away with a "didn't meet quota" type of response. With so much riding on their success, can we really blame salespeople for prematurely jumping on our whitepaper leads, or not giving our campaigns enough time before declaring them a failure? If your marketing isn't keeping your salespeople busy closing sales, don't expect them to wait around a long time for the marketing to start "to work."

Ask any successful B2B marketer, and they'll tell you it is their job is to make the salespeople as successful as possible. That's because high-performance marketing departments have discovered a valuable secret -- that, when marketing and sales work together to reach a common goal, improved marketing ROI, sales productivity, and bottom-line growth are sure to follow.

Marketing can have a direct impact on sales performance by:

Identifying new buyers, influencers, and markets
Increasing the quality and quantity of leads
Nurturing the leads who are not qualified
Finding opportunities to shorten the sales cycle
Providing effective sales messaging and tools

6 Questions to Start Engaging Sales

For marketing to effectively support sales, there has to be communication and transparency between the two departments. Marketers can make the first move by interviewing their salespeople. Here are 6 of our favorite questions to get the conversation started:

What does an ideal buyer profile look like to you?
What gets prospects excited the most with our service/product?
What are the top objections you hear from prospects?
How long does the average sale take to close?
May I listen in on a sales call?
How can I support your goals better?

Your sales experts will provide valuable marketing insight that you can readily use in your marketing and lead nurturing campaigns.

Using HubSpot With Your Existing WordPress Website

Samantha Schultz — Wed, 15 May 2013 17:14:00 GMT

Did you know WordPress has a HubSpot plugin? WordPress - the open source content management system platform used by millions of individuals and businesses, can integrate with HubSpot - the inbound marketing platform with blogging, landing page, contacts management, email and marketing automation functions. If you're sold on HubSpot but don't want to give up your existing WordPress site, you can do incredible things using the HubSpot for WordPress plugin.

WordPress: Open source CMS, wide range of plugins for fast web development

Business managers know that Wordpress has a large collective of developers dedicated to giving advanced functionality that is literally plug and play – making the platform a powerful tool for professional websites.

HubSpot: Easy marketing tools to convert your website into a sales engine

HubSpot makes marketing automation easy. For example the HubSPot contacts module lets you collect real time website interaction for users who have filled out your forms, received your emails and visited your website. HubSpot administrators can also set up call to action buttons, emails and landing pages in minutes, making online marketing easy (finally!).

5 Ways to Use WordPress and HubSpot Together

1) Track viewing activity for your plugin content

Do you offer database driven content (real estate listings, products, etc.) using WordPress plugins? Keep your front-end interface and add HubSpot to track which listings are popular, which listings lead to conversions, and which listings might not be effective enough.

My contact record showing individual page history:

2) Enhance your interaction with users

Having trouble getting users to come back to your site? Add HubSpot forms to your WordPress site to start collecting priceless data from your contacts. Then offer advanced content to increase engagement with email! Best in class email templates are already loaded into HubSpot accounts or you can add your own.

Email setup and reporting is easy:

3) Plug in to CTA messaging that works with HubSpot CTA tracking

Use the HubSpot CTA tracking module on your WordPress website to quickly set up buttons. Track click-throughs on these buttons with your contacts. Even better – create a list of users that have clicked your CTA to follow up with them (with similar CTA messaging) by email if they don’t convert.

4) Optimize your content with HubSpot Page Performance tools

Unsure why your WordPress website isn’t driving SEO success? Websites that have HubSpot tracking tags are automatically audited in HubSpot’s website optimizer reporting. Review frequently to improve your rankings:

5) Test and Optimize using inbound marketing techniques

Are you new to inbound marketing but eager to get sales-ready leads? Set up a HubSpot landing page to collect new contacts – then set up a workflow that sends emails or sends them into your favorite CRM for your sales team!

Amplifying your WordPress website through HubSpot is a powerful way to attract leads and determine which leads are the most qualified.

Need some help figuring all this out. Just give us a call.

Is Your Content Marketing Broken?

Ron Mattocks — Tue, 14 May 2013 20:18:00 GMT

Of the things I despise doing such as mowing the lawn and doing my taxes, returning broken items to the store ranks near the top. I once tried to return a new laptop because the screen didn’t work. My high expectations as I pulled it out of the box turned to immediate frustration as I tapped at random keys in the hopes the screen would light up. This frustration followed me as I walked up to the customer service desk and pushed the computer across the counter. About the only thing worse than this feeling of frustration is feeling like an idiot which is what happened next after a scrawny tech guy did a quick inspection of my “broken” laptop.

“Yeah, you have to flip off the screen lock switch right here,” he pointed out as if, duh, how you not known this.

I walked away red-faced.

Companies can feel the same frustration with their content marketing programs. “Why isn’t this working?” they wonder after investing all sorts of time and resources into a marketing initiative that’s failing to produce the results they anticipated.

Indeed many companies are putting their weight behind content marketing. The Content Marketing Institute reported that B2B marketers are allocating 33% of their budgets to content marketing, an increase of 26% over last year, and, furthermore, 54% claim they to intend to up their spend in 2014. That’s a considerable amount of money being spent to churn out blogs posts, ebooks, videos, articles, etc. The problem then isn’t in the effort but rather in the execution.

Companies that believe their content marketing programs are broken may want take into account these four considerations to assess fi this is really the case.

1) Lack of Focus: Many times companies start off by producing gobs of content without any focus or direction behind it. The better way to begin, however, is to take the time to do some up-front work. It is best to determine what you want your content to achieve (awareness, leads, sales), how it will support your larger marketing objectives, and which metrics will help verify overall success. Knowing where you are headed with your content is essential to its effectiveness.

2) Clear Path to Conversion: You may have objectives and KPI in place but have you determined a clear path to conversion? Have you built detailed buyer personas that represent your ideal client? Personas help in determining your target audience and in understanding the questions they might be asking through the buying cycle. Hint: These questions are what your content should address at all stages of the buying cycle, leading clients along a clear path to eventually convert into leads and sales. If this path is not clear to you then it’s not going to clear to others either.

3) Passion and Substance: Here’s where companies can do everything right and still not see results. Why? There are a number of reasons—it’s too keyword focused, it’s salesy and overly promotional, it sounds canned, or it just lacks passion. People’s time is limited so successful content has to be creative, entertaining, useful, and authentic. These elements foster a potential client’s trust in your company, which in turn increases the likelihood they will choose you over the competition.

4) Not Being Heard: Again, this is an area where efforts are stymied. Content that’s not being heard from out of the crowd is worthless even it’s the best thing since the invention of the wheel. This is where marketers must take into account how their content will be distributed. There are a number of tactics including posting through social media channels, syndicating regular content to other sites, taking advantage of guest posting opportunities, and even using paid ads tied to premier pieces of content. Don’t expect people to find your content just because you wrote it; get it out there where it can be consumed and shared.

Content marketing programs can’t be returned like a busted computer, but they can be shut down before they have even proved their worth, especially if management sees it as being broken. But it might not be. Compare your efforts against these considerations, make adjustments where they’re needed, and prove that content marketing works.

Inbound Marketing Secrets - Setting Up A Great Landing Page

Virginia Bussey — Mon, 13 May 2013 21:09:00 GMT

Effective landing pages are great assets for any online marketer. They are a means to prove your company is a thought leader, capture visitors’ contact information, and begin to create a longer term relationship with those visitors.

Having a successful landing page takes more than just throwing content on a page, though. In order to create a great landing page, you must ensure it is user friendly, converts leads, and is search engine optimized. Accomplishing these tasks is harder than you may think.

Consider the following items when setting up your landing pages:

Landing Page Goal

Most people start by thinking of the content for their landing page, but the best place to start is with the goal for your landing page. Having no goal, or too many goals, can set you up for failure. Pick one primary goal for your landing page.

Everything you focus on while creating the landing page should be aligned with your goal. An example goal might be: “Capture marketing qualified lead information by supplying visitors with whitepaper A, that offers actionable information on a key topic in their industry.” For example, if you're in the priniting business a whitepaper may focus on ways small businesses can utilize 3-D printing technology today.

Keyword Focused

Once you have your goal established, you will need to identify the keyword you would like to focus on. This is one of the easiest things to forget and forgetting this step consistently with each landing page can really be detrimental to your website SEO.

Select a keyword that directly relates to the offering or information you want to share on your landing page. Once you have this keyword determined, make sure it's included in the page title, URL, meta keywords, and meta description. You will also need to include this keyword in the content you create.

Content

Your next step is creating content for your landing page. This step is where I see most companies fail. Landing page content can easily turn lengthy and unfocused.

When writing your landing page copy, be sure to keep your overall goal in mind and to include your keyword. Your content should be short and to the point and clearly explain what a visitor will receive when converting on your landing page, what the value of that offer is, and what the visitor should do next.

Layout

This is the final step in setting up your landing page and despite having done all the previous steps correctly, this step can really affect its performance. The easiest way to get off track with your layout is to lose sight of your goal, causing the page to be confusing, cluttered, and inconsistent with your message.

When it comes to layout, use the acronym K.I.S.S. or Keep It Simple Stupid (yes, that's a highly technical term). Don’t overthink it. Make your layout simple and to the point and keep your content above the fold. Your visitor should be able to clearly see what this page is about and the value of the content the page is offering within 10-20 seconds.

If you follow these steps and keep in mind each of these elements, you can absolutely create a great landing page that is user friendly, search engine optimized, and conversion focused.

The Friday Five: The Future of Social Selling, Small Businesses Love Inbound, and LinkedIn’s Portfolios

Ron Mattocks — Fri, 10 May 2013 16:21:00 GMT

Howdy! Yes, Friday is on us once again. Be honest—are you looking to fill the hours before heading home for the weekend? We’ve got something to keep you occupied for a few minutes. It’s a new edition of The Friday 5: Five Headlines from Social Media, Inbound Marketing, SEO, and Web Design, a weekly roundup for ideas and news that you can use. This is what’s on tap for this week:

LinkedIn’s New Multi-Media Portfolio
The Future of Social Selling
10 Design Tips for E-Commerce Sites
Small Businesses Love Inbound Marketing
Drive Demand with Optimized, Socialized Content

1. LinkedIn Now Offers Multi-Media Portfolios

(PSFK) LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional online network with over 2million users in 200 countries worldwide has had a makeover. The site now allows users to upload videos, images and presentations amongst other rich media to showcase their work and skills. The new ‘LinkedIn Professional Portfolio’ helps to turn the previously text-only resume site into a portfolio platform with interactive features such as a like button and comment boxes. Users can upload visual content to the ‘Summary,’ ‘Experience’ and ‘Education’ sections to sit alongside fewer more concise words.

2. Study: The Future of Social Selling

(CMO.com) Sales professionals see the value of social media, but are still in the early stages of measuring ROI, according to a report conducted by Forrester Research and commissioned by Hearsay Social. Using social media, 80 percent of customers discover new brands, products, and services through family and friends, while 36 percent rely on salespeople, the researchers found.

3. Top 10 Best Tips for Designing a Fabulous Ecommerce Website

(Dezine Robotics) Sometimes, ecommerce web designers often create blunders with their designs or missing some important elements an ecommerce website design must have. We are living in an era where everything can be sold or purchased online. From pin to Porsche, ecommerce has solved the issue of hitting marketplaces to find a suitable product with its brilliant features and benefits. Now, the success of online stores depends on the design up to a great extent as it’s the design that makes an e-store user-friendly.

4. Why Small Businesses Love Inbound Marketing

(Heidi Cohen) Inbound marketing entails helping potential customers and influencers find your company by building your audience and attracting their attention. in the words of Marketo CMO Jon Miller. Inbound marketing gets its power from the combination of social media, blogging, content marketing, email and search optimization.

5. Drive More Demand for Your B2B Business with Optimized & Socialized Content Marketing

(TopRank) With 9 out of 10 B2B marketers using content marketing, competition for attention is more fierce than ever. The constant battle with Google algorithm and indexing updates and the masking of useful data against which to optimize has caused many ambiguities when it comes to implementing traditional SEO advice.

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Best Practices for Designing and Developing HubSpot Forms

Samantha Schultz — Thu, 09 May 2013 18:56:00 GMT

The HubSpot 3 platform allows for much more control over form functions. Forms are a powerful way to understand and qualify leads and pass them along to your sales team. Here are some ways to use forms and the data collected from these forms:

Collect new information from returning visitors – avoid asking for their name and email more than once.
Build extensive profiles of users by collecting, segmenting, and organizing contact information over a series of forms using the HubSpot Contacts database.
Trigger personalized follow-up emails based on information you collect.
Set up forms with various fields – everything from text fields to dropdowns to file uploads.
Connect data within your forms to third party CRM platforms.

Successfully implemented forms can greatly improve lead generation efforts. Here are a few pointers to getting started with designing and developing the HubSpot 3 forms.

Plan, Plan, Plan!

If you're a project manager, you'll need to be sure all your team resources - designers, developers, content creators - are on the same page relative to your client's or department's main business objectives and goals. You may even want to bring them up to speed using a HubSpot trial portal so they are familiar with the platform (if they aren't yet). Here are some other key items to plan for:

Connectors – setting up a data connector between HubSpot and a CRM can run alongside any design and development work. Get that started ASAP so you can test it sooner rather than later.
Workflow – are you setting up one form, multiple forms, emails, form notifications? Be sure to notify your team so they know what to test.
Brand guidelines – do you have a recent style guide to share with your team?

Design

Form design is critical. You need to capture useful information while not discouraging a website visitor from converting to a lead. Review the design with your developer to address any technical/implementation concerns they may have. Some additional tips:

Keep it simple! Have a form headline, and field labels at the top of the fields that identify the fields, along with a straight forward submit button.
One column forms are recommended.
Avoid background images - they might necessitate some additional Javascript trickery.
Try to minimize the need for unique form designs to keep the form setup simple, fast, and efficient.

Development

Once you’ve set up the form and inserted it into your landing page, you’re ready to style it. Here are a few tips to keep the forms error free and tips for testing.

Keep your CSS general and flexible. Trying to manage a dozen specific fields will become a chore down the road.
Avoid visual wrappers for forms that also include extra HTML elements, like descriptive text or images. It’s simple enough to put a content module above a form; it’s a pain to get an editable content area inside a form without some ugly scripts.
Make sure your form height is flexible so new fields added or removed (with the progressive profiling setup) do not break the form.
Cross-browser test. Test submitting the form to make sure the Thank You messaging and/or redirects are working the way you intended them to work.

Don't Go Solo

Don’t have an in-house or agency designer or developer? You can still make easy color/style adjustments with HubSpot. Use the standard form look/feel and make simple adjustments to get started in minutes. If you need inspiration, take a look at these templates.

H/T to Ian Mcnair who also contributed to this post.

Photo Credit: EricGjerde via Compfight cc

HubSpot’s Social Inbox Puts the "Social" Back in Social Media

Ron Mattocks — Wed, 08 May 2013 14:22:00 GMT

Face it, even though we talk about social media being about interacting with individuals, many companies have turned it into a channel for dumping information and broadcasting their messaging. What happened to the love? What happened to the engagement? Wasn’t that what was supposed to be so great about social media in the first place—the ability for companies to connect on a personal level?

Despite the many companies out there who do not get this concept, there are many more who are committed to engaging with their followers in order to make social media a successful part of their inbound marketing program. The problem, however, is that with all the chatter in the social world, these companies miss tons of opportunities to engage in meaningful and personal ways.

Enter HubSpot’s Social Inbox, a new app that merges your contact database of leads, opportunities, and customers with social interactions.

Cross-Department Functionality

The functionality of Social Inbox, which is set to roll out in June, is such that it allows companies to use the tool in various ways. For marketers, it not only helps in filtering out the noise, but it also provides information from social interactions that marketers can use to create highly targeted, personal messaging.

Likewise, sales teams can monitor topics and conversations for opportunities to engage potential clients, or if an opportunity mentions a product or competitor, a sales manager can notify a rep so he or she can respond to that mention.

Finally, for customer service departments, should a current client mention a need for help, a department rep would receive an immediate alert for them to jump into action and even conduct follow up engagements later on.

Best of all, these interactions can happen in real time meaning the potential for no more missed opportunities!

A Host of Features

Does Social Inbox allow for better monitoring of keywords and twitter lists? Yes.

Can you monitor your smart lists, like viewing only your qualified leads on Twitter? Yes you can.

What about email alerts for when a lead, customer or other targeted contact mentions a certain keyword or a competitor? Absolutely.

Is there a "Contact match" search feature to help you find the Twitter handles of more contacts? There is.

Is it possible to assign or forward a tweet for response, and also see a history of responses? You bet.

How about seeing the lifecycle stage and Salesforce owner of each social contact, with an option to click through and see the full profile. You can do this.

Will you be able to do social media monitoring and publishing in the iPhone and Android App? You most certainly will.

Want More?

Want to learn more? Watch the Social Inbox video from HubSpot

Currently Social Inbox is in beta, but HubSpot users who would like to try it out early can request access. Expect to hear more about this app once it hits the streets. This is a phenominal tool for companies to capitalize on putting the “social” back into social media.

Designing a Website Built for Leads

Jason Kosarek — Tue, 07 May 2013 12:15:00 GMT

You’ve been working your tail off using the best marketing tools and techniques HubSpot has to offer. Emails, PPC, blogging - you have it all down, but your website still isn't converting your visitors to leads. It’s time for your website to start working for you. It's time for your website to become your virtual sales engine.

The single most important element to having more visitors convert to leads on your website is what you say and the way you say it. You must have a content strategy. And the starting point from which to build this strategy is answering the three questions below from your existing customers' perspectives:

How can you help me?

Potential customers can find your website in many ways. They may come from organic search, email marketing, referrals, a TV commercial, or a variety of other sources. Regardless of where your visitors come from, they need to know what you can do to help them the moment they land on your website. Think of your website as your company's virtual elevator speech.

What can I do here?

Potential customers can likely do a number of things on your website. They can download a whitepaper, read an ebook, view your previous work, or read your blog. Don't put obstacles in the way of these valuable actions. Industry jargon, too many clicks, cluttered design - these are all mistakes that convolute a potential customer's understanding of what they can do on your site. Keep your message clear. Use terminology that is easy to understand and organize your website in a way that makes sense to potential customers, not to people within your organization who are intimately familiar with your products and services.

Why should I do it?

Potential customers need a reason. They need to know how you are going to make their lives better. That is the only reason they are going to download your whitepaper or request a quote. As soon as potential customers don’t find value in your site, they leave. Give them an incentive. Paint them a picture showing how you will improve their life and solve their business problems.

A visitor will only convert to a lead if they have found sufficient answers to these questions. Develop a content strategy focused on your existing customers that will help you design a website built for leads.

How to Build a HubSpot Microsite in a Day

Ian McNair — Mon, 06 May 2013 21:22:00 GMT

HubSpot's landing pages have long been a preferred method for marketers to create effective pages that capture and convert leads. For developers, the responsive, grid-based CSS framework the landing pages are built on makes creating new layouts a snap (the CSS is mobile friendly, too). Users get instant previews of their pages as they edit, and developers can build highly customized layouts. With powerful backend features like global modules and sitemaps, creating a microsite or full-fledged website using HubSpot3 landing pages is beautifully simple. HubSpot3 landing pages are the best option for small lead generation websites or microsites.

Building your Microsite

If you're already familiar with HubSpot landing pages, then you know how to build landing pages for lead generation. You might wonder, “why would I need to build a site using landing pages?” Consider the myriad of possibilities...

Launch a new product or service - a few pages in the microsite’s menu helps the visitor learn more without becoming distracted by your broader website menu.
Expand your landing page into sections for buyer personas or job functions - if you sell IT security products, you might offer content specifically targeted to IT or to business users.
Maximize conversions on paid search campaigns - if you’re having trouble reaching optimum conversion rates on a single landing page, consider testing a small microsite to offer additional conversion paths for prospects.

You don’t need to hack anything in HubSpot to build your microsite -- all the tools are built right into the Landing Pages tool. You can build as many microsites as you want, and they'll all be hosted on the same domain.

Our friends launching a surfing gear startup brand needed to move their website to HubSpot within a few days to prep for their Kickstarter project. As a small and simple starter site, we knew Landing Pages would be a perfect fit to build the site.

How to build your microsite

First, add your logo and favicon in the Content Settings page (found under the Content dropdown menu). Keep the content settings page open--it makes a good hub when you're setting everything up.
Create a custom style in the Style Manager (also found on the content settings page). Colors, fonts, and a few other appearance options are in your control right from the menu. You can use any valid color values, such as transparent, RGBA or HSL color, and you can define your own fonts and even font stacks. Both developers and marketers alike will be in harmony with how easily styles are managed in the CMS.
If you're a CSS coder, you can also add your own CSS in the advanced tab (or import it from a file). Hubspot will even minify it for you! (Highly recommended in order to keep a fast loading speed.)
Optionally, you can set your new style as the default style under content settings. Remember, this will affect any existing landing pages that are using the default style. You have the option to set specific styles for use on each page.
Create your layouts in the template builder, which you can access from the content settings page. The site we built required a unique template for each page, but if you can you'll want to minimize the number of templates you make. That'll keep things simple for later.

HubSpot has a useful video explaining the template system in the top right — give that a watch before you do anything.
You can start by cloning one of HubSpot's default modules (since you'll probably want a menu, "2 Column Web Page" or "2 Column With Header Navigation" are both good places to start). The system has an intuitive interface, and creating a layout is as easy as clicking and dragging modules. Each module becomes editable when a new landing page is created.
Global modules are a handy feature that makes sitewide updates a snap. You can place a global module on any page and edits will be published to all modules automatically. On this site, we used global modules for footer content and custom social media icons.
If you've defined any of your own CSS classes, you can make use of those in your templates as well. You can add a custom CSS class on any module, and you can group modules together to create a wrapper.
Go to the Landing Pages manager and start making pages based on your templates. This is where you populate content and settings for all the modules on a template. Assign your new landing pages to a campaign--this will help you organize your microsite pages separately from other landing pages.
Finally, create a sitemap for all your pages in the microsite. Sitemaps are found under content settings. Put every page you want in your navigation in here by clicking "Add a page." You can define a page hierarchy by using parent pages. You just need to know your page URLs and managing your sitemap is a snap. Because you can make as many sitemaps as you want, it’s possible to display a different menu at the top, side, or bottom of a page.
Publish your pages! That’s really all you need to build your landing pages microsite.

If you have additional creative ways to generate leads through HubSpot’s Landing Pages tool, tell us all about it in the comments. Or if you would like us to build a microsite for you - just let us know.

The Friday Five: Awesome Frickin’ Content, Data That Will Get You Fired, and Alternatives to PPC

Ron Mattocks — Fri, 03 May 2013 17:14:00 GMT

It’s Friday? Already? Hey, we’re not complaining, and we’re betting you feel the same. But, until the whistle blows and you punch out we’ve got a new edition of The Friday 5: Five Headlines from Social Media, Inbound Marketing, SEO, and Web Design, a weekly roundup for ideas and news that you can use. (Hey! That rhymes.) This is what’s on tap for this week:

Why Facebook is Blue
Awesome Frickin’ Content
Data Myths that Will Get You Fired
Alternative to PPC (Good article!)
A Social Media Workflow [Infographic]

1. Why Facebook is blue: The science of colors in marketing

(Buffer) Why is Facebook blue? According to The New Yorker, the reason is simple. It’s because Mark Zuckerberg is red-green colorblind. This means that blue is the color Mark can see the best. In his own words Zuck says, “Blue is the richest color for me I can see all of blue.” Not highly scientific right? Well, although in the case of Facebook, that isn’t the case, there are some amazing examples of how colors actually affect our purchasing decisions.

2. Awesome Frickin’ Content

(Search Engine Watch) A couple of years ago, Scott Stratten of "Unmarketing" book fame (a great read) was asked his best SEO tip. His answer: write "awesome frickin' content"! Since then Panda iterations have had SEO practitioners reinforcing similar "content is king" mantras, and have had SEO doomsayers laughing maniacally at how SEO is dead (once again!). While Google's Panda updates did help define "better content" through a user-focused lens, with Panda's future as part of Google's primary algorithm, it seems an opportune time to help redefine exactly what is "awesome frickin' content."

3. Eight Silly Data Myths Marketing People Believe That Get Them Fired

(Occam’s Razor) It turns out that Marketers, especially Digital Marketers, make really silly mistakes when it comes to data. Big data. Small data. Any data. In the last couple months I've spent a lot of time with senior level marketers on three different continents. Some of them are quite successful, but sadly many of them were not. In the latter group I discovered two common themes:

4. Small Players Seek an Alternative to the Expense of Pay-Per-Click

(New York Times) When Tom Telford helped found a vacation rental management company, Blue Creek Cabins, in 2001, he wanted a quick and easy way to connect with people looking to rent the 20 cabins he and his partner managed in and around the mountains of picturesque Helen, Ga. That is when he heard about a program called AdWords being offered by a new company, Google. Finding the system relatively easy to use, Mr. Telford selected a few keywords, like “Helen GA cabin rentals,” and agreed to pay Google 60 cents every time someone performed a search and clicked on his ad.

5. Social Media Workflow [INFOGRAPHIC]

(Social Media Today) Ever wonder how much time you should devote to social media each week? While there is no set formula, this infographic breaks down the components of maintaining and measuring a social media strategy, based on a 40 hour work week. Maintaining a social media strategy is not only about scheduling tweets and replying to mentions. Rather, social media marketing is a living process in which each component is connected to the others. From content creation, to post scheduling, to campaign development, to analytics reporting, social media is an ongoing process. The social media work flow infographic below assigns time benchmarks for eleven components of a strong social media strategy:

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Ship Your Pants - With a Little Inbound Marketing

Roman Kniahynyckyj — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 18:25:00 GMT

Kmart's latest marketing video has gone viral. The video features a humorous (some might say sophomoric) play on the word 'ship' while highlighting the millions of products Kmart has available online that can be shipped for free. Take a look:

Although your business offering may not lend itself to something as humorous as the video above, it's important to remember the value of video in your inbound marketing mix. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video may be worth a million. Video's are a powerful way to highlight your brand whether they are explainer videos or interviews with your CEO.

The Kmart video works on a number of different levels:

It's Funny - sometimes a little low brow humor just helps you forget about life for awhile. If the Kmart brand can flip the laughing switch in your brain - that's not at all bad.
It Speaks to Kmart's Demographics - highlighting parents, kids, and grandparents all shipping their pants (and drawers) underscores the breadth of Kmart's products.
It Earned Media - Time, Huffington Post, and USA Today all ran articles about Kmart's Ship Your Pants ad.
It was Shared - a lot. I first saw the video in my Facebook feed, and after watching it 3 times and almost shipping my own pants, I shared it with my friends. The video has almost 16 million views on YouTube.

There have been critics - mostly focusing on the low level humor employed in the video. The Ship My Pants video also doesn't seem to be part of any broader marketing campaign or theme like the Geico Happy Than... videos, for example. So it remains to be seen whether Kmart has broader plans for this theme.

Clearly, it's important to include video in your inbound marketing tool kit. Think about how video can best meet your lead generation and traffic goals. If if you need some help just let us know.

The Friday Five: Leveraging Facebook Ads, New LinkedIn Feature, Bad Website Directions, and More

Ron Mattocks — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 15:15:00 GMT

Happy Birthday to us! Our weekly blog post roundup is a year old today! Now we’re ready for year number two, so let us get started with The Friday 5: Five Headlines from Social Media, Inbound Marketing, SEO, and Web Design, the weekly roundup for keeping you current with the latest news, trends and tips that affect us all. In this this edition:

Leveraging Facebook Advertising
LinkedIn’s new Contacts feature
Improve your Social Media CTA’s
Six Layers of Customer Engagement
Bad directions on your website

1. Leveraging the Power of Facebook Advertising: Three Things to Know

(All Facebook) We know that brands will only see meaningful engagement when they put people at the center of their Facebook strategies. But even with insightful, brilliant creative ideas executed perfectly, it’s still highly unlikely that most fans will see a given post. In fact, you may have heard the dreaded 16 percent statistic: the maximum percentage of users expected to see a page’s post.

2. 'LinkedIn Contacts' Helps You Build, Maintain Important Relationship

(Mashable) LinkedIn launched LinkedIn Contacts Thursday, a new mobile and web solution for building and maintaining relationships that are important to you. “All of us know that professional networking is so important to all of our jobs and careers. The relationships that we keep become so important throughout our careers, but it’s really a daunting path to actually keep track of your relationships and keep up with them.” Sachin Rekhi, Product lead for Contacts at LinkedIn, told a small group of reporters Wednesday. Contacts attempts to make keeping up with those relationships a little easier.

3. How to Improve Your Social Media Calls to Action

(Social Media Examiner) Is your audience responding to your social activities? Have you integrated the right calls to action into your social media strategy? A call to action is a way for you to entice your social media audience to focus their attention on the next action you want them to take. Here are seven steps for crafting calls to action to get your social community to do what you’d like them to and transform your social media marketing to get the results you want.

4. The Future of Business: Six Layers of Customer Engagement

(Business2Community) Over the past few years I have been giving a speech about the “six layers” of customer engagement. It has been a hit with my audiences and it occurred to me that I have never shared this idea with you. So, let’s change that. We are in the process of creating increasingly complex layers of digital distance between our companies and our customers. Mastering these six layers represent both enormous challenges and opportunities

5. Are Bad Directions Leaving Web Visitors Stranded?

(TopRank) At some point, most of us have been lost. We know our ultimate destination, but either through a wrong turn or poor directions we find ourselves in the wrong place and likely very frustrated. Without landing page optimization, your visitors may have this same lost feeling when they arrive on your website. Whether the content was written 10 days or 10 months ago, it’s easy to make assumptions about your website visitors and assume the directions (read: content and calls to action) you are providing make sense.

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Our Go-To Inbound Marketing Checklist

Virginia Bussey — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 17:30:00 GMT

Recently in the LyntonWeb office, there have been a lot of discussions about checklists and how they help make us more efficient and effective. As a team, we’ve been reading the book, “Checklist Manifesto,” which discusses in depth the use of checklists across industries.

The concept of checklists is that by writing out procedures or necessary aspects of a project, you can eliminate small errors and even avoid large disasters. I’ve found that especially with simple or straightforward tasks, it can become easy to take shortcuts or skip steps. Checklists eliminate this urge, helping us to be more accurate. Checklists can also create consistency across a department or organization.

Mistakes like forgetting to insert a Call-to-Action, not optimizing a URL, or writing content unrelated to your service or product offerings really add up when it comes to the overall effectiveness and success of your inbound marketing. And no matter how well versed you are in inbound marketing and SEO best practices, it is easy to forget steps. So after seeing mistakes and skipped steps across industries’ marketing efforts, I decided it’s time for a checklist. Not to mention, I personally LOVE them. Come on, who doesn’t feel better when crossing things off a list?

Whether you are an inbound marketing and SEO beginner or master, you can use this checklist when making new blog posts, web pages, landing pages, thank you pages, or any sort of content that lives on the web.

This Inbound Marketing Checklist includes steps for an initial marketing program setup and the essential steps in your daily inbound marketing work. Checklist items include:

Buyer Personas
Keywords
Links
Calls-to-Action
Social Sharing

Download your free copy of the Inbound Marketing Checklist today.

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Your Content Management System Was Hacked - Now What?

Brad Decker — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 21:15:00 GMT

Content Management Systems (CMS), like Wordpress and Joomla, are amazing tools that make truly dynamic web pages possible without having to learn a lot of code. Because these Content Management Systems are extremely popular there are, unfortunately, a number of malicious individuals out there looking to take advantage of loopholes within these systems. For example, if you are using a stock installation of a CMS you might even have a “generator” meta tag in your site’s source code that tells the whole world what CMS and what version of it you are using. Armed with this information, an unscrupulous website visitor knows exactly which vulnerabilities to test to get access to your website files and even your databases.

Don't be lulled into a false sense of security even if you have a site without sign-in or membership options. Some of the nastiest hacks of Content Management Systems have involved Black Hat SEO tricks that take advantage of smaller sites that might not have the resources to deal with hack removal. The Pharma Hack, as it's been called by many in then CMS community, involves hacking the source code of a CMS so that it displays different information to Google Spiders than it does to everyone else! When Google visits an infected page it is served a version of that page that has been artificially stuffed with keywords and links that build up the reputation for other sites (unrelated to your website) at your site’s expense.

Fortunately, there are some easy things that you can do to keep yourself safe and handle your website security in a preventative fashion.

A Solid CMS Foundation - The First Step in Avoiding CMS Hacks

CMS companies release lots of versions and updates to their software - not just because they are enhancing the features - but also because they are addressing security holes that are being discovered. Your number one concern when designing a website should be doing so in such a way that allows you to easily update your core CMS without overwriting your design changes. If you aren’t a designer but rather just a site administrator, you should double check with the designer or developer who worked on your site to make sure that you can easily update your site’s core technology.

Any plugins, extensions or other third party software that is being utilized by your CMS might also have vulnerabilities. These too are often addressed in updates. Make sure that you are using the latest version of all of your tools and check for updates regularly. It helps if you stick to only popular and well maintained plugins. Most Content Management Systems will maintain a web page full of known plugins that open up vulnerabilities. Staying away from these plugins (until they fix the issues) is advised.

You should also invest in a security tool of some sort. I recommend Better Wordpress Security for Wordpress and Admin Tools Pro for Joomla. Both of these tools require a good deal of understanding to enable so if you aren’t comfortable doing this yourself you should reach out to a professional or try it on a new, fresh install of the CMS so you can practice what works and what doesn’t. Always keep the documentation handy as a guide to what you should be doing to be sure your security settings are configured properly.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, use secure passwords! Try to utilize the rule of 1 upper case, 1 lower case, 1 number and 1 special character in each password. This provides the maximum variance to avoid brute force hacks (bots that just type in random combinations of key presses until they get a correct response). You should also avoid key patterns in your passwords such as a number of keys in a row followed by the same keys while holding shift (qwertyQWERTY). Don't make it easy for the hackers.

How To Confirm Your Website Has Been Hacked

Every hack is going be a little bit different. If you been attacked by the Pharma hack, for examply, you will probably not notice that you’ve been attacked until you start seeing results for “Pay Day Loans”, “Car Credit” or similar “spammy” links that have nothing to do with your site in your search results.

To see why the pages are showing bad information to Google you have to use the Google Webmaster tools Fetch as Google tool. Go into your webmaster tools account and on the left slide click the Fetch as Google link. Then, when you get to the page, type in a link to a page that has been infected then click fetch. Once you get the “success” message click on the word success and it will show you the code that Google was able to pull. If you have been infected, you will see paragraphs of text relating to pay day loans or whatever flavor of keywords the hack has chosen to use.

There are also tools that can change your user agent in your browser to that of Google Bots so that you can view your site live and see the infected keywords on the page itself. This is handy for navigating many different pages to see where the infection has occurred. However, you may run into a case where the hack is on every single page because it is injecting itself into the CMS source code.

Repairing and Recovering From A Hack

Once you've confirmed a hack, your first instinct is going to be to search for malware or viruses on your server - which isn’t a bad thing - but in our example case of a Pharma Hack, the hack is hidden in your source code - your Base 64 encoding. Essentially there is one large file hidden somewhere in your directory that contains a bunch of random characters that means absolutely nothing to us. However if you were to run this code through a base 64 decoder it would contain all those paragraphs of infected text we saw when we fetched the page as Google. So now you are thinking okay, well I just have to find that file and delete it and that should be it, right? If you were to simply delete the hacked file you would find that your website no longer works! That’s because in your htaccess file there would be a redirect in place that actually runs the file. In some case that file could be “image.php” in a temp folder. In order to remove the infection, you simply need to remove this htaccess redirect. In fact, if you start by investigating the htaccess file you can learn a lot about the nature of the hack.

You’re not in the clear yet, unfortunately. Usually hackers gain access to your files by injecting a .php file into your site that they can run to scan for vulnerabilities. This file will be named in one of two ways. Either it will be a strange name like “underwater.php” or even “db.x.php”, or it will be an incredibly well camouflaged name like “joomla-repair.php." If you’re knowledgeable about Joomla you may notice the last file as a filename not appropriate for your root directory, but the average user might not. This file needs to be eliminated. Once that is eliminated you need to download a base 64 search tool (a .php script) and run it and find any instances of base64 encoding that are occuring in your root directory. Lots of files like copyright.php will contain a script at the top of them that adds that malicious file back into your directory. Be cautious though, because these files are actually good CMS files that have been infected. Removing the bits of base64 encoding text will keep the virus from returning.

After you’ve cleared your site of malicious code you can start to breath easier. Now you’ll want to change all of your ftp passwords just incase they were stolen. You will also want to update all of your tools and the core CMS. The hack is gone now but its effects linger on! Google still shows your page as having payday loans on it! This is because google caches websites for long periods of time before it refreshes its index. You'll want to go into webmaster tools and resubmit your index to Google to hopefully trigger a new cache.

Finally the last unfortunate bit of news. When your site was hacked the domain name was sent to a repository that these black hat hackers have been using to spam links to. You now have lots and lots of backlinks from horrible websites that have nothing to do with your content. This will also generate negative SEO for your site. Luckily, Google now has the Disavow Tool in Webmaster tools to disavow bad links. Just keep in mind that this process will take awhile to recover from but eventually you will be in the clear.

Simple, right? Of course, there is always the option of calling us or using a hosted platform like HubSpot so you can focus on the content of your website rather than the back end of your website.

Photo Credit: Difei Li via Compfight cc

After Multiple Hacks, Twitter Needs Two-Step Verification

Mike Rastiello — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 19:54:00 GMT

Earlier today, the official Twitter account of the Associate Press was hacked, and sent out tweets stating that there were explosions at the White House and that President Obama was injured. The report is not true, and the White House and President are fine.

That tweet did more damage than falsely report a possible attack at the White House, it caused the stock market to plummet when it was first posted. Luckily the stocks rebounded.

Twitter is not a game, nor is it only a fun social network any more. It is a serious tool used by millions of business people, journalists, and inbound marketing folks every day

Still uncovinced of Twitter's importance? Just look at last week in Boston. Twitter, for better or worse, is where news breaks first. It's no longer happening on the broadcast or cable news networks. Photos and videos of the bombing popped up on Twitter seconds after it happened. When all of Boston was in lockdown, residents updated the world with first hand tweets and photos of police officers searching the city and surrounding areas for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

Because of this, Twitter has a responsibility to step up and realize that they are a major player in the world and offer better security options. Twitter currently has very few requirements for passwords, that it be six characters or more, and that it not be "obvious" (It won't let you set 123456, for example). Those are the only vague requirements.

Twitter needs to roll out two-step verification quickly. Two-step verification is where you sign into a service with your normal password, but then have to authorize yourself with a second code, delivered by an app such as Google Authenticator, or SMS. We've talked about two-step verification before, and cannot recommend it enough.

It's true that security is only as strong as the weakest link, and it's usually the poor password choices. Twitter has an opportunity to help change the way people think about passwords. They should require a certain amount of letters, numbers and possibly even symbols to create passwords.

Gmail, Dropbox, Apple, Microsoft, Bitcoin, and Amazon Web Services, among others, all offer two-step verification. Evernote will be rolling it out shortly. It's time for Twitter to get on board.

Update: According to a new post on Wired, Twitter has been working on and testing two-step authentication internally. As of now there has been no word on when or how the new security feature would be rolled out.

LyntonWeb Enterprise Inbound Marketing Weekly Digest - Social, Roku and Paid Search

Roman Kniahynyckyj — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 17:30:00 GMT

Welcome to our Enterprise Inbound Marketing weekly digest - the fastest way to stay up to date on everything inbound marketing. Our most recent perspectives on inbound marketing and technology:

Paid Search Vs. Inbound Marketing - Creating a Happy Balance

It’s a fact; businesses love paid search. You hand over some money and BAM! you have increased traffic to your website. What many businesses don’t consider, however, is their long term plan when it comes to search and how it should fit into their enterprise inbound marketing strategy.

Roku Celebrates 5 Million Players - Releases...Advanced Content?

Roku, the video streaming device provider, recently reached the milestone of shipping 5 million units in the U.S. In celebration of this, they released a new Roku 3 player and, more importantly for us inbound marketing nerds, a very nice piece of advanced content in the form of an infographic. See five key marketing elements Roku addressed in its infographic.

Social - A Key Ingredient For Your Inbound Marketing Recipe

Social media is often a forgotten inbound marketing ingredient but it can be a major contributor to finding your inbound marketing success. See our 5 key reasons you should "bake-in" social in your inbound marketing recipe.

Photo Credit: Premshree Pillai via Compfight cc

Social - A Key Ingredient For Your Inbound Marketing Recipe

Virginia Bussey — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 12:30:00 GMT

When you hear Inbound Marketing, what do you think of first? Content, right? It is undeniable that content is a major ingredient for inbound marketing. It's easy to forget, though, that it is only ONE of many ingredients in the inbound marketing recipe for success.

There are many elements of an Inbound Marketing Recipe. For example, there are landing pages, calls-to-action, emails, social media, and many more. And just like any food recipe, when you forgo an ingredient, it tends to come out a little off or even worse - an utter failure. Social media is often that forgone inbound marketing ingredient but it is actually a major contributor to finding your inbound marketing success.

Below are 5 key reasons you should be sure to "bake-in" social in your inbound marketing recipe.

Do Something With Your Content

Think about the famous quote, "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" Ask yourself the same thing about your content. If you create content and no one is around to read it, does it exist?

Creating the content isn’t enough. You must share your content to ensure it gets found and read. It just so happens that social media is one of the easiest ways to share content across a large audience size. And even more so, it is one of the easiest ways for others to share your content, as well.

Provide a Source for Leads

Social media is one potential source for leads and additional traffic. By consistently and frequently providing these links, you give social media users the opportunity to convert into leads. Even more so, depending on your buyer personas, they can be very engaged leads.

It all starts with you sharing the content on your social media, though. Unless you tell them, prospective customers won’t know the delicious nuggets you have to share. So share to the masses and get some leads!

Be Engaging

Sharing content on social media isn’t just about getting leads, it can engage your current customers. Social media allows you to continue the conversation with them even when you aren’t on calls or providing them with your products.

Through social media you can give your customers great content and update them on any company or product news. Engaging your customers on your social media accounts doesn’t have to stop there. You can delight your customers with specials, prizes, or contests too. Any opportunity you have to turn your customers into company enthusiasts, you should take. Company enthusiasts often turn into additional referrals for your business.

Gain Authority on Search Engines

Using social media to share links to your blog articles, landing pages, and other website pages provides additional inbound links to your site. And do you know what inbound links mean for your website? You got it - more authority on search engines. And do you know what more authority on search engines means? Bingo - higher organic search rankings.

I like to think of inbound links like an election. The more votes you have, the more likely you’ll win. Sharing links to your website through your company’s social media accounts will give your website additional inbound links. By doing so, it also gives you the opportunity to be recognized by other businesses and potentially get shared by them. These additional links mean even more inbound links, which in turn means a higher likelihood of improving your organic search engine rankings.

Consider your Reputation

And lastly, consider what it looks like to your potential and current customers for you to not be active on social media. Not being active could make your company look dated, apathetic, or even worse, closed.

If for no other reason, you should be active on Facebook to maintain and improve your company reputation and image.

Social media can be an important part to your inbound marketing plan. Social is like the sugar in a cake recipe.

How does your inbound marketing cake taste?

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The Friday 5: Five Headlines from Social Media, Inbound Marketing, SEO, and Web Design

Ron Mattocks — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 17:03:00 GMT

Hello! It’s time once again for The Friday 5: Five Headlines from Social Media, Inbound Marketing, SEO, and Web Design, the weekly roundup for keeping you current with the latest news, trends and tips that affect us all. In this this edition:

Content Marketing Disillusionment
Is Facebook Still Cool?
The Brand is the Story
Data Drives the Experience
Business Blogging Mean More Traffic [Infographic]

1. How to Survive the Disillusionment of Content Marketing

(Content Marketing Institute) A few days ago, Joe Pulizzi wrote a post, 4 Truths About Content Marketing Agencies. There, he outlined some of the agency trends and best practices that we at CMI have observed as the ideas around content marketing become more widespread — and as more companies join the “gold rush” of helping brands produce this content. As with most new approaches (think social media, or cloud services, or “big data”), we have seen clearly thought-out practices being evangelized right alongside the short-sighted strategies of trend-obsessed hangers-on. Naturally, this is resulting in ample frustration in our industry. You can see it in the conversations that are happening — the hype-posts; the content-marketing-is-overhyped counterpoint posts; the complete backlash posts; the sighing-in-disappointment posts — everywhere the trend is clear: Content marketing is now staring down a “Valley of Disillusionment.”

2. Is Facebook Still Cool (and Why Should Marketers Care)

(Heidi Cohen) 4 Facebook Related Actionable Marketing Tips [Research] At the core of Facebook’s target audience, Gen Z,tweens and teens born after 1995, are mobile mavericks who use social media to connect and communicate with each other. While overall social media usage is declining slightly in the United States, this behavior is more acute among Facebook participants especially teens.

3. The brand is a story. But it's a story about you, not about the brand.

(Seth Godin) Why prefer Coke over Pepsi or GE over Samsung or Ford over Chevy? In markets that aren't natural monopolies or where there are clear, agreed-upon metrics, how do we decide? Yes, every brand has a story—that's how it goes from being a logo and a name to a brand. The story includes expectations and history and promises and social cues and emotions. The story makes us say we "love Google" or "love Harley"... but what do we really love?

4. Designing Better Experiences Through Data

(UX Magazine) Access to big data is growing at an incredible pace. With increased information from various sources available on smartphones and tablets, many companies now realize winning services will be those that transform big data elements into personalized data experiences. As Fjord predicts in our 2013 Digital Trends report, the companies that can make sense of big data for the little guy will likely be the most successful. The key to creating great service experiences lies with uncovering data and using it in meaningful contexts that have real benefits to users. Recent advances in wearable tech, location-based data and sensors are driving greater interest by consumers in personalized data experiences. Google Glass and the Nike FuelBand are pushing boundaries on what users can expect inside the services of tomorrow.

5. How to Get Eyeballs on Your Business with a Blog [INFOGRAPHIC]

(Social Media Today) Blogging Increases Website Traffic: According to Hubspot.com, companies who create, optimize and promote their blogs get 55% more traffic and 70% more leads than those who don’t. As many say, content is king, but it’s what you do with it after that will make all the difference. Even if you have loyal followers, generating traffic to your blog will require some work on a consistent basis. To create visibility for your content, you’ll have to promote it after you click on the publish button.

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Roku Celebrates 5 Million Players - Releases...Advanced Content?

Roman Kniahynyckyj — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 17:20:00 GMT

Yes, you read that correctly inbound marketing friend. Roku, the video streaming device provider, recently reached the milestone of shipping 5 million units in the U.S. In celebration of this, they released a new Roku 3 player and, more importantly for us inbound marketing nerds, a very nice piece of advanced content in the form of an infographic.

Naturally, Roku expected to receive some earned media from news of its 5 millionth unit being shipped but it also provided a valuable infographic not only to news organizations reporting on this milestone, but also to its engaged Roku user community. Roku's infographic is helpful in many ways:

Links - Infographics are an excellent way to generate backlinks to your website or blog post
History - Roku uses its infographic to share it's company history and evolution by highlighting the partnerships it has built since the first Roku player launched in 2008.
Buyer Persona - The folks at Roku also give a nice nod to buyer personas by providing data on when, where and what types of streaming occur with their device
Testimonials - Quotes from happy customers are displayed on the infographic
Vision - Finally, the Roku folks do a very nice job of capturing their vision of the future of all TV being streamed (100% Roku) in their historical timeline at the top of the infographic

Roku does an excellent job of using visual advanced content to share their company story and celebrate a milestone.

How can your company use an infographic to build its brand and commemorate a special occassion? An accounting firm might identify the amount of tax returns filed and dollars and time saved for its customers. A home builder might show total square feet built and hours that builders and craftmen have spent on custom homes since the company started. These are just two quick examples but there are many ways an infographic can be beneficial to your company.

We Heart Boston

Roman Kniahynyckyj — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 19:18:00 GMT

Given the tragedy in Boston yesterday, I was struggling with an appropriate blog to post this morning. Being the dutiful inbound marketers that we are - we typically have a number of posts in the queue - one piece was funny, one informational, and the last one a bit tactical. None of them seemed to work for me this morning.

Just last month, I had the opportunity to be part of a LyntonWeb team headed up by our CEO, Daniel, that visited our friends at HubSpot and a client of ours in Boston. I hadn't been to Boston in a few years and was reminded what a majestic and proud city it is. Everywhere you turn, you're greeted by history and tradition and, well... accent. I kept wondering why the valet was asking about my khakis. Were they wrinkled? Dirty? Oh sorry, car keys - my error.

Normally, in this space, we focus on providing our friends and customers the best marketing advice we can and being the best partners possible. But for just a moment, I think it's useful to realize the partnership and camaraderie that endured through the tragedy in Boston yesterday. In business and marketing we highlight and reward collaboration, stewardship, and empathy within companies. Yesterday, all that (and much, much more) was on display in a true American city. And for that, Boston, we thank you.

We heart Boston, and we will make it through this - together.

Photo Credit: haydnseek via Compfight cc

The Friday 5: Five Headlines from Social Media, Inbound Marketing, SEO, and Web Design

Ron Mattocks — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 18:04:00 GMT

Howdy! It’s time once again for The Friday 5: Five Headlines from Social Media, Inbound Marketing, SEO, and Web Design, the weekly roundup for keeping you current with the latest news, trends and tips that affect us all. In this this edition:

Strategy is Not Enough
Tips to a First Blog
Ultimate Lead Capture Landing Page
SEO is Not Dead
Using SlideShare

1. Strategy Is Not Enough

(CMO.com) We all accept that strategy guides us in the development and execution of our marketing—or it should. Before we do anything else, we have to understand our current and potential customers, our competition, and the market conditions. In doing this, strategy explores the context within which we market and sell, and it hopefully reveals insights along the way that become the basis of a differentiating way to take our brand to market.

2. 11 Things I Wish I Knew Before I Started My First Blog

(QuickSprout) I don’t like bragging, but I have to say I’m a pretty good blogger. It’s not because I am smart or anything like that, it’s actually because I screwed up one too many times. After starting 4 blogs and making hundreds of mistakes over 7 years, you eventually figure out what to do,and what not to do. I just wish someone told me all of this before I started my first blog. Here are 11 things you should know before starting your first blog:

3. 15 Steps to the Ultimate Lead Capture Landing Page

(Unbounce) If you’re looking to build a lead capture landing page, it’s not just a matter of slapping a form on a page and driving traffic to it. Well, you could, but it wouldn’t perform well. Instead, follow these 15 steps and create a high performance landing page designed specifically for gathering leads. Read on and learn how to build the ultimate lead capture form, an example of which will be uncovered right at the end.

4. Why SEO is Not Dead: Recognizing its Evolutionary Nature

(Business2Community) In recent times, there has been increased discussion concerning SEO and its validity as a contemporary marketing tool. This has been triggered by a number of factors, but the most serious surrounds the perceived notion that Search Engine Optimization is no longer an effective way of achieving online visibility. This logic is flawed, however, as it does not take into account the evolutionary nature of SEO and the pace of advancement within the industry. With search engine leaders Google constantly shifting the boundaries of SEO and looking to improve the quality of web based content, it appears as though marketers are struggling to succeed with outdated techniques and inadequate, online tools.

5. SlideShare: How to Market Your Business With This Growing Platform

(Social Media Examiner) Do you use SlideShare? Are you looking for more leads? To learn how SlideShare can help marketers, I interview Todd Wheatland for this episode of the Social Media Marketing podcast. Also, read this presentation

SlideShare 101 from Amit Ranjan

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Is Enterprise Inbound Marketing An Unfortunate Term?

Roman Kniahynyckyj — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 05:35:00 GMT

There has been significant discussion in the area of 'enterprise inbound marketing,' recently. We've been talking about it (and using the term) for awhile here at the Lynton Corral. As marketing automation software, like HubSpot, has grown - we've seen an upward trajectory in the size of companies we provide our inbound marketing and integration services too. It's a natural path to follow - SAP and Salesforce are examples of companies that focused on smaller companies early on and then moved to enterprise level businesses as their offerings became more robust and sophisticated. Service oriented firms that helped configure or implement SAP and Salesforce moved alongside with them.

For software or Software As A Service entities, I think it makes sense from a pricing and features prospective to identify enterprise-level functionality, especially in anticipation of an increased and more vigorous user base. The concern I have is that from a services view, at least here at Lynton, we've always viewed inbound marketing as a very holistic process that touches many, if not all, parts of the enterprise from the CEO to sales, legal, training, and even HR departments. Certainly, many smaller companies do not have discrete departments, but neither do some larger or growing organizations. For example, many companies do not consider an in-house legal department unless they are contemplating becoming a publicly traded entity.

Lately, I've been thinking that using a term like 'enterprise inbound marketing' might be perceived as a disservice by some. I don't want any current or future client to think that we weren't thinking of inbound marketing broadly before. We always were. Regardless of the size of a company, processes like discovery, KPI identification, goal setting, website optimization, content creation and management, lead nurturing, paid media use and ROI determination are necessary if not critical for success. Of course, the scale, the resources required, and budgetary spends will differ, but it's our duty to adhere to a foundational inbound marketing methodology.

Inbound marketing should be a function that is naturally embedded into the enterprise. After all, do you submit your expense receipts your you Enterprise Accounting department or submit contracts to your Enterprise Legal department for review? Similarly, a firm like Ernst & Young provides advisory and tax services rather than enterprise advisory or enterprise tax services. Organizations understand that services like accounting are fundamentally interwoven into the fabric of their companies - whether they are provided by an internal or external team. They should feel the same way about their organization's enterprise inbound marketing efforts.

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You've Got Leads! Now What?! An Inbound Marketing Conundrum

Virginia Bussey — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 16:35:00 GMT

Congratulations, inbound marketing super hero! Your team has invested time and manpower into your enterprise inbound marketing efforts and you've been rewarded with a list of sales qualified leads. Way to go! Let’s do a quick review of the work that got you here:

Your team developed effective buyer personas
Your team identified keywords that help attract prospects to your website
You optimized your website landing pages to capture leads
You developed killer lead nurturing campaigns

You have the leads, so now you need the sale. This is where your sales team steps in. Consumers do a lot of research when deciding which products can best solve their problem or satisfy their needs. In most cases, the larger the purchase is for a person or company, the more questions they'll ask and the more research they'll do. If key questions and concerns are not addressed during the sales process then you are at risk of losing the sale.

Here are some tips to be mindful of as you work to convert leads into sales.

Know Your Potential Customer - capturing a lead through a marketing automation system like HubSpot will provide you with valuable info. You'll know what type of content the lead converted on and what they did while visiting your site. Don't stop there. Research a prospective client company or lead through LinkedIn and tools like PrepWork.
Be Responsive - communication and timing are essential. Reply to or address a question or concern as quickly as you can. A potential customer will automatically relate lags in response to a poor client experience with you. Even if you have to research the answer to a question, acknowledge receipt of a call or email with a promised follow-up time.
Overdeliver - Go above and beyond the expectations you set. Be helpful, genuine, and reliable. Let a lead know you're focused on delivering the best possible solution for them. Even if your lead never becomes a customer, they may recommend or refer you to others.
Say No - If you hear or identify red flags in sales conversations, don't discount them or think they'll be addressed once the lead becomes a customer. The hard work really begins after a sale. If your lead is singlemindedly focused on SEO or ranking on a particular term - they may not be not be a fit for inbound marketing services or they aren't as far down the sales funnel as you may have initially thought.

Remember, treat your lead just like an existing customer and that lead will become a customer.

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Paid Search Vs. Inbound Marketing - Creating a Happy Balance

Virginia Bussey — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 12:00:00 GMT

For years, businesses have continued to pour more and more money into their paid search advertising without a second thought or detailed analysis of PPC results. While paid search can be a successful part of a business’s marketing strategy, especially when marketing efforts are first ramping up, it shouldn’t be the biggest trick in your marketing playbook. When paid search becomes your main lead generator and a crucial part of your marketing plan, it is time to re-evaluate your strategy. Here's why:

Managing Paid Search Takes Time and Resources

Any marketing department and marketing budget has its limits when it comes to time and resources. While it might take less time to manage a paid search account than creating content, optimizing it, and promoting it, you don’t have much of anything to show for your time afterward, except for a bill from Google or Bing.

By focusing more of your time and resources on content creation and promotion you are able to to add fresh, valuable content to your website and your sales team will have additional resources and documents to further nurture leads into customers. Once you build a piece of content, it's yours to keep and use forever. It won't expire or end like a paid search campaign does.

Bottom line: don’t devote most of your time and resources on paid search.

Paid Search is an Expense That Doesn’t Provide Equity

Paid search can be very expensive, particularly when your target keywords are highly competitive. One of the best ways I’ve heard paid search and organic search explained is through the concept of renting a house versus owning one.

Paying for keywords is like renting a house or apartment. The more popular the area, the more expensive and harder it is to actually get a lease there. Once you get your apartment, you can use the space as long as you keep paying your landlord. Even after years of rent, you have no ownership of the property and no additional equity to your name. Renting is not your long-term strategy or goal, just a means to get what you want for the short-term. It provides you with a roof over your head until you are able to buy.

Organically showing up for keywords, on the other hand, is like owning a house. You own the space and you have additional equity to your name. It is yours long-term if you continue to provide valuable and relevant content. In organic search - you own your property and it can appreciate and improve over time through outstanding content.

Bottom line: paid search should only be a short term strategy while you improve your organic rankings.

Focus on the Big Picture

When it comes to your enterprise inbound marketing strategy, always remember the big picture and the long-term goal. Paid search can provide value but it should not be considered your ultimate go-to solution for marketing.

Bottom line: always keep the principles of inbound marketing in mind.

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