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Jean-Marie Bonthous, Seamless Social

Content optimization in the cloud, for free
Inbound writer delivers real-time search and social intelligence to help improve your reach and engagement. It is a -of-a-kind content optimization application for writers and online marketers which lets you create and manage all your content securely within the comfort of your workflow and from the freedom of any browser, with real-time access to search and social media intelligence about your target audience. InboundWriter is also available as a WordPress plugin.

The InboundWriter application for content optimization is an easy to use cloud-based solution enabling you to securely access and manage all of your content from any web browser. With InboundWriter, you can now manage and write compelling content and access automated keyword research anytime, anywhere. The cloud-based offering also includes daily back-ups of all your documents, giving you one less thing to worry about. And making your content optimization and content marketing strategy implementation seamless.

Research and obtain insights
The InboundWriter application for content optimization helps you identify popular topics from social media networks and performs automated keyword research. The application extracts key chatter, articles, influencers and content marketing opportunities across hundreds of sources on the web, including social media. Now with one tool you can monitor topics for ongoing trends to help keep your content strategy on target.

Create and optimize content
The application’s built-in topic and keyword research features automatically identify the keywords and phrases with the most impact based on your selected content marketing strategy. Think of it as your own writing coach, helping you follow content optimization best practices through an easy to use tool and helpful tips for word choices, content structure and other criteria. It will even rate your effectiveness as you write with real-time content scoring. Best of all it fits within common editorial workflows, there is no technology involvement required.

Fuel your content marketing strategy
InboundWriter discovers relevant content marketing opportunities through easy access to keyword research and relevant social media data such as Twitter chatter, influencers and hashtags for each piece of content. Now writers and bloggers can leverage real time search and social media intelligence to easily create or improve online content that is both more discoverable and more engaging, and even optimize directly within the most popular content management system (CMS), WordPress.

InboundWriter’s TopicBuzz for Twitter
InboundWriter also has a Twitter content analysis feature called Topic Buzz, which enables writers of all types — online marketers, digital journalists, PR pros, social media managers, and anyone else who writes for a living — to leverage Twitter for the research phase of the writing process. Most importantly, it does so in a way that’s specific to what the InboundWriter user typically writes about.

Here’s how it works: The Topic Buzz module mines Twitter for popular articles that are being circulated, honing in on the ones that are expressly related to the user’s documents, which are saved in InboundWriter. It then reports back on the article, link, hashtags, popularity rating, and the Twitter handle and Klout score of the person promoting the article. This information (which is automatically refreshed once a day) is then available in the InboundWriter web application, under a new tab called Buzz.

With Twitter currently serving as the world’s de facto buzz barometer, Topic Buzz is a great new way to do topic research. For writers, this new feature is important because it eliminates chatter and gets into actual reading material recommendations. According to our VP of Marketing, Jay McCarthy, “Twitter and other social feeds largely focus on what your connections are sharing with you. By showing other content related to what you write about – not necessarily found in your Twitter circle – InboundWriter creates a very unique view of social sharing activity around content.”
At present, Topic Buzz is available as a feature of the InboundWriter web application. It is not available as part of their WordPress plug-in.

Streamline your workflows
InboundWriter was designed to reduce the typical back and forth between content creators and content optimization teams. By empowering your content creators to optimize content with relevant topic and keyword research as content is created, you can bring out the best in your team by giving them the tool they need to succeed as one. Content approval cycles can be reduced and a balance achieved between content integrity and content optimization. Plus, your team will find more time to focus on strategy and technical aspects of distribution.

A free version
With the free version, you can create up to 8 documents per month. That’s enough if you blog twice a week. You have limited Twitter monitoring, but have access to the topic and keyword research functionality. You also can do search engine optimization, and ad revenue optimization.

Photo courtesy of Ludalmg90 via Flickr Creative Commons.

Content Marketing: InboundWriter, a Free, Powerful Content Optimizer is a post from: Seamless Social

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Negative SEO is not a new concept but it is one that has recently become more mainstream. These are underhanded tactics where companies do SEO activity for their competitors so it appears that they are breaching Google’s guidelines and they get penalized.

This SEO campaign then ruins the competitor’s organic rankings in order to improve their own rankings. The most common practice is to build low quality, anchor text links to a specific domain in order to trigger a Google penalty for that site or specific page.

We asked some SEO experts in the UK and US their opinions on negative SEO, what techniques are being used and how you can prevent it from happening to you.

How much truth is there that negative SEO exists or is being used?

Kevin Gibbons, SEOptimise

It’s actually pretty scary at the moment – as there is truth in negative SEO working effectively, see posts like this one from Aaron Wall.

To read the original article, click here

Negative SEO: Is Competitor Ranking Destruction on the Rise? is a post from: Seamless Social

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According to Focus Research, less than 25% of companies with marketing automation use them to their full potential. With all the money and time being spent in choosing and implementing these systems, we need to ask ourselves why that percentage is so low. What we continue to hear from our customers and prospects is they see two reasons.

First we hear about the over-complicated, feature hyped software. It seems to be the same software feature war that was also part of the overly complicated initial CRM market. Software vendors continue to build features that they think are fantastic regardless of whether the user values or needs them. These features provide a differentiator for selling to the media and marketplace – keeping that software vendor out in “front.” What about the user and what their needs? Do all marketers have the same needs – regardless of size and/or type of business? What about ease-of- use? Feature on top of feature is great, assuming that the user can actually understand and get them to work with minimal effort.

To read Original Article, click here.

Marketing Automation: Overpromising but Under-Delivering? is a post from: Seamless Social

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Jean-Marie Bonthous, Seamless Social
“The new tools of social marketing, combined with the death of the TV industrial complex have completely changed the rules and created opportunities for everyone to make an impact”. Seth Godin.

As consumers have increasingly turned their attention to the Internet and the global online marketplace, the success of traditional marketing strategies such as cold calling, TV commercials, trade shows and print advertising has seen a rapid decline. Conversely, there has been a corresponding shift toward using inbound marketing techniques as a viable way to generate leads and ultimately increase revenue.

Inbound marketing is a new, web-enabled way to get found by people on the web. Based on Seth Godin’s earlier concept of permission-based marketing, the term inbound marketing was first coined by Brian Halligan from HubSpot. It centers on the delivery of anticipated and relevant messages to an audience that actually wants to get them. The practice takes SEO, content strategy, social media participation and conversion rate optimization; wrapping them up into a comprehensive suite of marketing techniques that serve to nurture lead generation.

Inbound marketing is a powerful approach to attract visitors to your web site, and to convert visitors into leads.

Inbound Marketing Techniques

Successful inbound marketing strategies ignores the practice of interruption marketing and instead focuses on helping customers find a product or service by providing value. Popular techniques include:

- Organic search engine optimization and pay-per-click management

- Maintaining an optimized blog and/or site, preferably using a content management system

- Social media participation on several platforms including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn

- Content marketing including white papers, eBooks and webinars

- Branding, PR and generally offering a consistent message

While inbound marketing helps you generate leads, it is demanding, as it is fueled by content. You will need to create content that sells. And you will need a lot of content.

The Benefits of Inbound Marketing

- Cost Savings: Inbound marketing offers a low cost strategy for lead generation. The 2012 State of Inbound Marketing, a report from HubSpot, found that the average cost per lead for organizations focused on inbound marketing techniques was 61% lower than the costs faced by outbound-marketing organizations. That’s a significant cost saving for tech startups with limited budgets.

- Promotes Customer Engagement: Increasingly, consumers expect to interact with brands on social media platforms. The Power of Like, a 2011 report from comScore, discusses the importance of a branded presence on Facebook. The report found that branded content was up to 150 times more likely to be consumed in the Newsfeed feature as opposed to the fan page. With tech startups in particular, there will be a certain level of expectation from consumers that there will be a strong social media presence and consistent interaction.

- Efficient Use of Resources: The nature of inbound marketing makes it incredibly easy to track results through several programs that analyze performance. In turn, this means that startups can focus their marketing resources to generate the maximum return on investment. If a particular technique is found to be underperforming, it’s easy for startups to identify why this is occurring and tweak the approach accordingly.

- Improved Leads: Mashable featured an infographic from Voltier Digital that provided some favorable statistics in relation to lead generation, reporting that 57% of customers have acquired a new customer from their blog. The figures are equally impressive on other channels with 67% and 42% of companies having acquired a customer through Facebook and Twitter respectively. Also worth noting is that lead generation through these various interactive platforms result in a higher conversion rate because the leads are already warm.

Effective Marketing for Tech Startups

It’s clear that inbound marketing represents a strategy that savvy startups can’t afford to ignore. The tried and tested tactics associated with this marketing technique have provided a clear road map to success with none of the pitfalls associated with traditional and costly outbound strategies. The trend toward content marketing, social media participation and the resulting benefits is something that technology startups should be keen to take advantage of.

However inbound marketing is not enough. It needs to be complemented with outbound marketing and corporate communications.

Inbound marketing for technology startups is a post from: Seamless Social

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Jean-Marie Bonthous, Seamless Social
The new, free Yahoo! Marketing Dashboard serves as a command center for monitoring and analyzing your marketing efforts, building your reputation, and discovering new opportunities. On a single page you can view:
• Business listings – Find out how many search engines and directories include your business and discover new listing opportunities you may be missing.
• Online business reputation – Learn what customers are saying about you across the Web, so you can be responsive to their needs and provide better customer service.
• Web site traffic – Discover how many people are visiting your site and where they are coming from by viewing Yahoo! Web Hosting, Yahoo! Merchant Solutions, or Google Analytics site traffic reports.
• Marketing campaigns – Track key metrics from email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), and pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, so you know what is working.
• Online sales – Know how your daily sales are doing with order and revenue reporting from your Yahoo! Merchant Solutions online store1.
• Marketing ideas - Learn about new marketing approaches and leading marketing service providers who can help your business grow.

The Marketing Dashboard is specifically designed for small business owners, not marketing experts. Content is presented through colorful charts and graphs so you can quickly and easily get the information you need to grow your business. How-to videos help guide you as you use the Marketing Dashboard.

Reputation Tracker
The Reputation Tracker page of your Marketing Dashboard is where you can view online reviews, ratings, and mentions of your business collected from up to 8,000 sources across the Web. Reputation Tracker is divided into a Reviews section and a Mentions section.
You can use the free Reputation Tracker service, or upgrade to Reputation Tracker Pro. With the free version, you can see the two most recent reviews and mentions of your business, your details, trends, and sources for reviews, ratings, and mentions,
as well as words commonly used in reviews and mentions.

With Reputation Tracker Pro, you can access additional online reviews, ratings, and mentions of your business from up to 8,000 sources, in one place. You can also compare your online reviews, ratings, and mentions with those of your competitors. You can share reviews through email, Twitter, Facebook, and more, and set up email alerts to be notified about new reviews. You can see your details, trends, and sources for reviews, ratings, and mentions as well as words commonly used in reviews and mentions.

Site Traffic
Your site traffic provider is the source of data used for your Site Traffic summary on the Overview page of your Dashboard, and for the data used for your Site Traffic page. Your Manage Services (Marketing Dashboard Services) page will list one or more of the following Site Traffic providers for your Dashboard: Yahoo! Web Hosting, Yahoo! Merchant Solutions and Google Analytics.
If the domain you’ve created your Dashboard for belongs to a Yahoo! Web Hosting account, you have the option of using Yahoo! Web Hosting as your site traffic data source. If the domain you’ve created your Dashboard for belongs to a Yahoo! Merchant Solutions account, you have the option of using Yahoo! Merchant Solutions as your site traffic data source.

Google Analytics
All Dashboard accounts list Google Analytics as a potential provider of your site traffic data. In order to use Google Analytics as the source of site traffic data, you must have a Google Analytics account and be tracking your site data using Google Analytics.
If you have a Google Analytics account you wish to retrieve data from, you must authorize Yahoo! to access this data.

Managed SEO and PPC
If you have managed search engine optimization (SEO) or managed pay-per-click (PPC) marketing campaigns with OrangeSoda, you can keep track of your managed SEO and/or managed PPC campaign performance right from your Yahoo! Marketing Dashboard.

Managed SEO
Search engine optimization helps optimize your site with the aim of attaining a higher position in organic (unpaid) search engine results. The higher your site ranks in search results for your desired keywords, the more traffic you are likely to get from search results when users perform searches using these keywords and click through to your site from the returned search results. When you have managed SEO services with OrangeSoda, you can view a summary of your SEO performance on the Overview page of your Marketing Dashboard, and see detailed information about key site traffic performance metrics and keyword performance metrics on your Managed Search Engine Optimization page.

Managed PPC
Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing campaigns can help you reach more customers. PPC marketing places paid links to your web site in paid link areas of search engine results. “Pay-per-click,” also known as “cost-per-click,” means that you pay a fee when a user clicks through to your site from your paid link. The keywords you use for your PPC campaigns and your keyword spend can help determine where your paid link is positioned among other paid links. The higher your position, the more traffic you are likely to get from clicks on your paid link. When you have managed PPC services with OrangeSoda, you can view a summary of your PPC campaign performance on the Overview page of your Marketing Dashboard, and see detailed information about key campaign performance metrics and keyword performance metrics on your Managed Pay-Per-Click Campaigns page.

Email Campaigns
If you run email marketing campaigns through an account with Constant Contact, you can easily keep track of key campaign performance data right from your Yahoo! Marketing Dashboard. When you sign up for an account with Constant Contact and authorize Yahoo! to retrieve this data for use with the Marketing Dashboard, and then use your Constant Contact account for one or more email marketing campaigns, you will be able to view the following information in the Email section of your Dashboard’s Campaigns tab:
1. A summary of key metrics for your Constant Contact email campaigns. This includes:
• The number of emails sent, opened, and forwarded, and the number of click-throughs from opened emails, as well as the number of opt-out requests, bounced emails, and spam reports.?
2. Detailed information about individual campaigns, including:
• The name of your email campaign, and the date and time it was created.
• The total number of emails sent for this campaign during the selected time period.
• The total number of sent emails belonging to this campaign that were opened during this time period.
• The total number of click-throughs from opened emails belonging to this campaign during the selected time period.
• The total number of emails belonging to this campaign that were forwarded during the selected time period.
• The total number of recipient opt-out requests received from this campaign during the selected time period.
• The total number of sent emails belonging to this campaign that were undeliverable, or “bounced,” during the selected time period.
• The total number of sent emails belonging to this campaign that were reported as spam during the selected time period.

All Dashboard accounts list Google Analytics as a potential provider of your site traffic data. In order to use Google Analytics as the source of your site traffic data, you must have a Google Analytics account and be tracking your site data using Google Analytics.
If you have a Google Analytics account you wish to retrieve data from, you must authorize Yahoo! to access this data.
selected.

Local Visibility
The Local Visibility page of your Marketing Dashboard lets you review your business information on Yahoo! Local and other search engines and directories, as well as your listing sources and other listing opportunities, all in one place. Business information that is potentially incorrect is also highlighted on this page, so you can easily identify errors in your listings.
Yahoo! Small Business provides your Local Visibility service. You have the option of using the free Local Visibility service, or upgrading to Local Visibility Pro.

With the free version of Local Visibility, you can:
• View your listing information on search engines and directories
• Edit your listing information on individual search engines and directories
• See additional listing opportunities
• See listing information that may be incorrect

With Local Visibility Pro, you can:
• Submit your business information to more than 100 directories at once, which can
• help you reach more customers and boost your online visibility
• Submit updates and corrections to business information to more than 100 directories
• at once
• View your listing information on search engines and directories
• Edit your listing information on individual search engines and directories
• See additional listing opportunities
• See listing information that may be incorrect

For many small businesses, nothing beats a free marketing dashboard. With HubSpot, for $750 and up each month, and with a one-year commitment, you get superior functionality: lead tracking, lead nurturing and conversion. And you always have a great view of your marketing funnel.

What do you think about the tradeoff: free versus more functionality? I would love to hear from you.

Photo courtesy of Dawnhops, via Flickr’s Creative Commons

New, Free Yahoo Marketing Dashboard: Free Inbound Marketing Tool? is a post from: Seamless Social

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Jean-Marie Bonthous, Seamless Social
The journey from inefficient marketing to efficient marketing began with a departure from mass marketing and is headed towards personalized marketing. This road is not easy one to journey on.

To personalize your engagement online, you need to provide content that informs, educates and inspires. To deliver the right content to the right prospect at the right stage in the funnel, cookies are used, that tie user sessions to web content management or marketing automation systems. The technologies under the hood of these systems can assess a visitor’s propensity to make a purchase decision by analyzing company or personal profile data (when available), and their online browsing behavior. The personal profile data may include their past purchase history, psychographic attributes and geo-demographic information.

Marketing personalization started with self-selection and click content navigation. There was no dynamic web content generation. It was up to the visitors to find and browse relevant content. Then came the era of cookies-based browsing sessions. Cookies were used from previous user sessions to serve targeted content. This was used for retargeting campaigns on third-party websites.

IP address mapping-based technology: a new tool for B2B marketers.
Then came location-based content versioning. Through IP lookup, geo-targeting became possible. Technology is now available to identify the affiliation of a website visitor or company affiliation the moment they enter the company’s web site. New IP address-mapping technology presents the visitor with text, video and other rich media that matches their company’s profile and predicted needs.

The copy on your web site can reference the name of this company, and serve the visitors the right content based on which segment they belong to, and what step your engine understands they are in the buyer’s funnel. Depending on these positions, different content, or examples, may be presented. If the company is a franchise, examples from other franchises maybe served. If they are a pharmaceutical company, examples from this industry may be presented. And localized content can be dynamically generated based on the visitors’ location (down to the zip code).

Real-time web site content versioning: the next step in personalization
RTWC builds on IP lookup mapping for specific targeting purposes, and generates content based on the visitors’ company and industry, augmented with internally specified account information. When content with that level of relevant personalization is served, people stay longer on the pages, and come back more often. And more people from the targeted companies visit your site. The underlying assumptions is that more time spent more often on your site by more people in your target companies will convert into more leads and sales.

Marketing automation systems make your prospects’ journeys visible for you
Systems like HubSpot, Marketo, Eloqua, will show you which people in which company spent what time on which page in your web site, which calls to action they clicked on and which free materials they downloaded. They know these companies by name, and evaluate in real-time the level of interest of the visitors to score their level of readiness to buy, and how to best usher them to the next stage of the funnel. Whenever a visitor “trips a wire” in the system by responding to a call to action, they are invited to share their contact information, and select from topics that interest them. This information then helps further personalize the content that will be served to them during their next visit.

B2B marketers need to identify more of their web site visitors
According to the analysts at Sirius Decisions, 75% of the B2B buying process now takes place online: prospects do research and due diligence and engage with sales very late in the funnel. But only 1% of visitors engage in a call-to-action that allows the company to capture their information and get insights into their intentions. Some information about their intention can be gained by tracking the browsing behavior or responses to call-to-actions. New technology that identifies the visitors’ companies even though they submit a personal email allows marketers to increase personalization.

Retargeting: displaying follow-up ads across multiple websites
Follow up ads can increase brand awareness, but they can also unnerve the visitors who may feel that they are being followed.

Creating targeted content: the challenging part
Before you create targeted content, you need to segment your prospects. Then you need to create buyers’ personas, that identify their needs, pains and buying processes. And you need to map their possible journeys through the funnel. That is a lot of work. And then you need to create interesting content and repurpose content for each segment and stage of the funnel.

Over-personalization: attractive, or spooky?
While early adopters may enjoy the relevance of the content, some may be intimidated by too much personalization and decide to clear their cookies.

What level of personalization will we see, and how soon?
If done right, personalization reduces the amount of searching and navigation required to arrive at the right content. The system anticipates what the visitor wants to see, and serves it in real-time. We will likely see a lot of progress in this area, and also in the development of metrics to assess the ROI of personalization.

I wish to thank Gleanster, whose white paper about website personalization inspired this article.

What has been your experience with content personalization? I would love to hear your comments?

Photo courtesy of GenBug, via Flickr Creative Commons

Generate More Leads through Web Site Personalization is a post from: Seamless Social

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Jean-Marie Bonthous, Seamless Social

Facebook advertising has impressive functionalities. You can target your prospects by gender, age, location, keywords in the profile and more. You can link to landing pages inside or outside Facebook. If created property, your ads will get you visitors when you need traffic. With the proper spend, you may get top placements. Organic advertising can take very long. And if you find relevant, untapped keyword niches, Facebook advertising can be inexpensive and can help you generate leads. Small businesses on Facebook, and large businesses also, will benefit from applying these metrics.

Facebook advertising campaigns can be adjusted on the fly, based on results from A/B testing, or if your market conditions change. But to make effective adjustments in real-time, you need to use effective metrics.

Here are five types of metrics which need to be monitored, in order to effectively optimize your Facebook advertising campaigns.

1) Impression metrics
Impressions
This tells you how many times your ad has been shown. If you experience a slowdown, it means your bid may be too low.

Unique impressions
This indicates how many times your ad was shown to a unique person, rather than how many times it was shown to the same person(s).

Social impressions
How often your ad has been shown to a person with information about a user’s friend who connected with your page, event or application. Social impressions are relevant for advertising within Facebook, like on fan pages, events, apps.

Social percentage
The ratio of social impressions to total impressions.

2) Click metrics
Clicks
Number of clicks on the ad. If someone “Likes” your fan page from the ad, it counts as a click.

Unique clicks
How many unique clicks the ad has received. This helps see if some people saw the ad and clicked on it more than once.

Click through rate
How many times people clicked on the ad, divided by impressions (the number of times the ad was shown).

Unique click through rate (CTR)
Unique clicks divided by unique impressions. If your unique
CTR is close to the regular CTR, it means that you don’t have people clicking several times, and that’s good.

Social clicks
How many clicks originated in a social context.

Social click through rate
The number of social clicks divided by the number of social impressions. This should be higher than the CTR, since these “social proof” ads, targeted at personal friends who had already liked the page.

3) Action metrics
Actions
Number of people who took the action you desired from inside the ad: “Liking” the fan page or responding to a call for action

Action rate
The number of actions divided by the number of impressions.

4) Conversion metrics
Conversions
How many people respond to the ad’s call to action. Actions are counted from the ad itself and include when someone visits your fan page and clicks “Like”.

New leads
How many people have converted on your offer and opted to continue their relationship with you.

New customers
To assess your ROI from Facebook advertising, compare your Facebook conversion rate from visitor to customer with the same metric on other social network where you also use PPC or CPM.

5) Cost metrics
Cost per click
Determine how much each click received has cost you. Even if you used cost per thousand (CPM) rather than pay-per-click (CPC), you can measure this.

Cost per thousand impressions
Even if you did not bid using the CPM you get this calculation. It will help decide whether CPC or CPM is better for you.

Cost per conversion
This metric shows you what a new fan, event RSVP, video viewing, etc..cost you.

Spent
Of course you want to know the total amount spent on your Facebook campaign, for the time summary in the report: day, week, month.

There are many other benefits from Facebook advertising, which cannot be quantified that directly. For example. If you are a PPC advertiser, there are tons of free impressions being generated because click-through rates are low and because pricing is cost per click. Arguably all these free advertising impressions generate valuable brand awareness. But these, impressions and the related ROI, are hard to quantify.

You may also want to read “7 Habits of Successful Facebook Marketers”
I wish to thank HubSpot, whose article “20 Facebook Advertising Metrics Every Marketer Should Know” inspired this article.

What has been your experience juggling Facebook metrics? I look forward to hearing from you.

Photo courtesy of Happy Via, through Flickr’s Creative Commons

Facebook Lead Generation: 5 Kinds of Metrics is a post from: Seamless Social

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Jean-Marie Bonthous, Seamless Social
Inbound marketing is an effective way for marketers to help prospects find their company, starting at the earliest stage in the funnel: when the prospect does not even know he is looking for a solution. Inbound marketing creates early awareness that can later convert into brand preference, leads and revenues.

Inbound marketing engages prospects when their defenses are down
• They are just browsing. Their “Don’t try to sell to me” guard is down. When done right, inbound marketing serves content that is useful, informative, educational, and even at times entertaining. Inbound marketing in the early stages of the funnel tends, if done skillfully, to produce results that are far superior to traditional marketing.

Content is the fuel of inbound marketing
• Because content is the currency of engagement with prospects, its quality needs to be high. It muse inform, educate, inspire, entertain, depending on what the particular prospects in the ecosystem need to become interested. The format in which this content is delivered can and needs to take many forms, depending on what the topic is, and what stage of the funnel the prospect is at.

Content needs to be delivered in a variety of media
• These include, blog posts, e-Books and books, brochures, case studies, demos, emails, free trials, images, information guides, live streamed events, manuals, media releases, micro-sites and web pages, online courses, podcasts and videocasts, presentations, product data sheets, reference guides, resource libraries, RSS/XML feeds, surveys, radio, TV and web TV, videos (including interviews, animated video explainers and more). Webinars and webcasts, white papers, widgets and workbooks. Since you likely neither the time, budget nor manpower to create unique elements of contents for several or all of these media, you will need to learn how to repurpose this content rapidly and effectively.

Content needs to travel far and have visibility
• By optimizing the ability of your web site to get found and to serve as a sharing platform, you will enable your content to travel further. If your web site ranks high in search engines, your content will be exposed to many people.
• And if your content is well optimized with the right keywords, keyword density, etc.. you will make it even more findable. “Sharing” is the magic wand of social media: if people find your content interesting and valuable, they will “Like” it or share it, whether its on LinkedIn, Stumble Upon, Digg, Delicious, or Twitter. This will introduce this content to their friends and networks with potentially exponential increases in reach.

9 reasons why inbound marketing is not enough
• 1) Inbound marketing casts a very wide net, hoping that you will find some edible fishes in the net. While you may catch some large fishes, the net may also get filled with many undersized fishes, i.e. “tire kickers”, or low-level leads. To mitigate your risk, you need, in parallel, to have a more focused marketing approach where you engage people in a targeted away using media like direct mail, email and phone.
• 2) People that don’t know of you may not find you. They may not know that you exist. And even if they feel the pain to which you have a solution, you may not register or you may not rank high enough on the keywords that they are using to search. If you talk about a solution, and they search about issues (as they usually do in the early stages of the funnel), their path and your path may not cross online.
• 3) Your content may be great, but it may not appear in the right format or location where the prospects hang out online at each step if the funnel.
• 4) Prospects may have misconceptions about you. They may have heard unfounded rumors or misinformation.
• 5) Those reading your content may not be the decision makers. Few CMOs or CEOs spend time online doing research. Make sure that you reach not just that like to read your content, but also those that authorize purchases.
• 6) Inbound marketing competes with ambient noise. I’m writing this post from the NAB, with 100,000 attendees tweeting. You can’t rely on your content getting noticed between as thousands of tweets fly by every hour. All you may be doing is adding to the noise. This may be a perfect moment to NOT engage in inbound marketing, and to use a radically contrasting medium.
• 7) Some communities are inbound-deaf. Some verticals are just not online. At the most the people there have a dead LinkedIn page. Creating a content engine for them may be a waste of resources.
• 8) Inbound marketing does not scale well, in terms of ROI. Going from 2 to 6 blog posts a week will likely not triple your leads. You need to carefully measure correlation between greater investment in content and greater ROI.
• 9) Inbound takes time. You may not have the time to wait. With outbound you take action quickly, With PPC you can get results in hours.

To complement inbound, leverage outbound marketing, marketing automation and corporate communications
• Outbound, both online and offline, is about paying to acquire new leads, whether it’s Google AdWords, Facebook ads, or having a booth at a trade show.
These outbound promotional tactics are a nice complement to the education- and thought leadership-focused tactics of inbound. And through outbound marketing you are sure to reach your target. You don’t wait for them to find you, which may never happen.
• Corporate communications brings a wide array of valuable tools: analysts reports, media releases, loyalty and upsell programs,
• Marketing automation allows you manage and automate the conversion of prospects into buyers and evangelists. As you automate the processes of generating demand, managing leads and align sales with marketing, you not only increase revenue generation but you can now score and nurture leads 24/7. You can track email open and click. Implement A/B testing, create landing pages on the fly, focus on the most promising leads, and deliver better leads to sales faster. And you can save resources by automating the scoring/nurturing cycle.

What has been your experience complementing inbound with outbound, marketing automation and corporate communications? I would love to hear from you.

I would like to thank HubSpot for their wonderful webinars, education and coaching about inbound marketing over the years, and Marketo for their great e-Books, in particular “Amplify Your Impact”, which inspired this post.

Photo courtesy of yann.co.nz via Flickr Creative Commons

9 Reasons Why Inbound Marketing Is Not Enough, and What To Do About It is a post from: Seamless Social

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Jean-Marie Bonthous, Seamless Social

For JM Bonthous, CEO of Seamless Social: MyChannl is an enterprise-grade, social media monitoring and market intelligence mobile application. It’s for executives and marketers who need to track in near-real-time what matters to them but don’t have the time to learn a complicated monitoring platform or don’t want to rely on analysts in their back office. With MyChannl they can monitor their brand, monitor influencers, and track competitors, from their smartphone, iPad or desktop with great depth and precision. The app is programmed remotely for them. All they do is to log in and read the feed with the latest news, there is no learning curve.
A client recently asked us: “I’d like a feed of everything that is published in blogs, twitter and forums about financial psychology, behavioral finance and neuroeconomics. I only want content published by high and medium-level influential sources in the US, and where the name of one of our 10 key competitors is mentioned.
How does it work? The clients tell us what combination of keywords they want us to track, what kind of sources (blogs, twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, forums, RSS feeds..) they want, the level of influence and relevance of the sources, and their geographical location.

We program their apps remotely. Our analytical platform scans hundreds of thousands of sources, including blogs, forums, Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook and a lot more. The users receive a custom feed delivering to them just the content they need, as it gets published. All they need to do is login on their smartphone, iPad or desktop, and scroll the feed. Our algorithms do the monitoring and analytical work for them in the background. There is no learning curve.
MyChannl scans online sources worldwide in twelve languages. The app works on iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, Android, Samsung, most smartphones, and desktops. MyChannl is available by subscription, on a month-to-month basis. Users may cancel at any time. A limited number of free trial subscriptions is available.

MyChannl, A Powerful, Easy to Use Mobile Market Intelligence App is a post from: Seamless Social

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Jean-Marie Bonthous, Seamless Social

When I mention “SlideShare” clients often ask “What for?”. SlideShare is often seen as just a place to upload your presentations. Like a static, online repository where presentations go to die or rarely be viewed, after they have been shown to a client.

There is a lot more to SlideShare. We have identified 12 remarkable benefits:

1) You piggyback on SlideShare’s domain authority. A SlideShare presentation is a much easier to get to a high search engine ranking than your blog. And you can target the same keyword as your blog.

2) SlideShare transcribes the text in your presentation and Google reads it.

And SlideShare indexes super fast. Last week we uploaded a presentation for a client, 5 minutes later it was on Google page 1 for the right keyword. SlideShare maximized the results of the content marketing campaign we were running for the client.

3) When you fill in your information, you can use the text for account, title, description, tags, and category for your SEO. Their categories of info (tags, titles..) align with search engines.

4) SlideShare allows you to embed a playlist of your presentations into your site or blog, LinkedIn and Facebook .And your SlideShare presentations can automatically be posted on your Linkedin and Facebook account when people arrive.

5) You can upload videos on SlideShare, including HD, and a lot more than presentations: media kits, etc..

6) Great analytics dashboard: you get stats on viewers, referrers, search keywords and more. With the “Buzz Tracking” feature, you can see who is sharing your uploads on Twitter and Facebook.

7) The free basic gives you unlimited public uploads (up to 10MB each).

8) Slideshare embeds a lead generation form inside your presentation, in the middle or at the end (your choice). If you use the basic, you get up to 30 leads a month but you can’t customize the form. The “LeadShare” lead capture tool is but throttled in the Pro account. However. for $19, you get unlimited uploads, private uploads, analytics, buzz tracking, no ads on your content, 30 leads per month and LinkedIn extras. With the Pay-Per-Lead option, there is no limit. There is a case study of Personal Medicine, a start up which now relies 100% on SlideShare for lead generation, and claims a 100% close rate on leads from LeadShare.

9) Google+ Hangouts and SlideShare. Google+ Hangouts are a great place for people to connect online. Now, sharing slides live is possible with the Google+ Hangouts SlideShare App. Whether you’re in a conference presentation or collaborating with a group, with this new app you and your friends & colleagues around the world can present and discuss SlideShare content in real time.

10) SlideShare is a social network where you can connect with people. You can see who has favorited your presentation, or embedded it. You can view their profile and their slides, send them a personal message asking to connect. You can search for keywords for your topics of interest, post thoughtful comments and offer feedback

11) SlideShare allows you to create branded networks. This gives you a way to curate content from your employees and partners on one branded page.

12) SlideShare integrates with SalesForce and Eloqua, it captures the profile of visitors and imports them into your CRM platform.

Do you see other benefits in using SlideShare to strengthen your online footprint and influence? We would love to hear from you.

Download the free eBook: Lead Management & Marketing Automation

Photo courtesy of Hallvard E. via Flick’s Creative Commons

Lead Generation: 12 Reasons to Use SlideShare is a post from: Seamless Social