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Jean-Marie Bonthous, Seamless Social

Content marketing will rule
Prospective attendees will expect more communication with event organizers, speakers, and sponsors and other attendees. They will want more quality content, relevant to their interests, delivered at the right time, and on the right platforms. We will see better tools for content curation and the rise of new channels: Google+, due to its integration with the world’s leading search engine. The call for better targeting and sharper segmentation will grow ever louder: those event marketers who understand their current and potential markets better will have an edge over those who only master social technologies. While the idea of content marketing is an easy sell, marketers will be challenged by the effort that is required. They are not prepared to function as publishers. They will need to build skills and resources to generate the mighty flow of targeted, high-value content that is necessary to satisfy the needs of customers and to compel them to share this content with others.

Marketing automation will support targeting and content distribution efforts
Most of all it’s the change in buyer behaviors that drives the need for marketing automation. Attendees no longer follow a linear purchasing process and you need marketing automation to identify what the buyers know and what stage of the process they may be entering (or coming out of). Attendees expect immediate, relevant information unique to their situation. Something which it is not possible to deliver without marketing automation. The tools to enable marketing and sales to automate and streamline communications and the distribution of strategically selected content to targeted audiences have been available for almost two decades. The emergence of content marketing and the fact that these tools are available as SaaS and integrate email marketing and social media marketing makes them a must-have.

Social media for events will move beyond just shiny objects, fan pages and followers
Marketers with a real interest in revenue generation will go way beyond “lets open a page on Facebook events, LinkedIn Events and lets get a hash tag”. The approach to social media will become more strategic. We will see more and more substantive multichannel campaigns, with higher investments and talent trained to operate them. A digital divide will grow very large between those event marketers who are able to conceive and implement integrated, multichannel campaigns closely aligned with revenue generation, and those still focusing on isolated tools, who will continue to reap only limited, anecdotic successes.

Event marketers will evolve into revenue drivers
We will see a rise of the event marketer as a contributor to marketing ROI.
Event organizers will realize that digital and social technologies are not solutions, but rather important marketing tools that allow driving revenues if you know how to align them properly with this goal. Such alignment is easier said than done, and requires skills, clean marketing and sales processes. There will be a steep learning curve, in particular around redesigning organizational processes to accommodate the new, and around building the skills necessary to master tools like marketing automation and in the related analytics.

Gamification will become serious business
There is a rise in a new breed of connected customer, which expects a greater level of experience and engagement in online interactions. They expect value, rewards for engagement. They want to be the ones—not the event organizer- at the center of their own online experience, and they want to be rewarded for participating. The role of gamification in attendee recruitment and involvement during events will rise. And they want the experience to be fun, too. Gamification will need to become embedded in the fabric of event marketing. We will see more badges, more loyalty programs. Watch what the Super Bowl will do this year. They will likely establish a new benchmark for gamification in multichannel marketing, and many event organizers will inspire themselves from their example in years to come.

Big data will be in big demand
The increase in cloud computing, usage of apps, and of the related analytics, plus the fact that customers can now access information any time and anywhere on multiple platforms will feed the abundance of big data. Event marketers will strive to process these data, make sense of them to generate singular views of the consumer, understand for where ROI comes from and how to improve it. Better technologies to visualize data will help sell big data and BI to upper management, and spread the trend throughout the industry. Paradoxically, with the increase in data and analytics, comes a temptation to get fascinated by revenue-driving numbers and to forget about the customer. There will be a need to balance “What” the big data focus on and to make the focus on the customer a permanent priority.

Customer will expect ral-time response to real-time feedback
As content marketers learns how to reach the right prospects and customers at the right time and through the right media, more and more conversations will get woven across multiple touchpoints, and prospects will be ushered more and more predictably through the sales funnel. As these prospects come at critical crossroads in their decision-making journey, they will come to prefer those marketers that are there for them in real time, able to answer their questions and address their concerns promptly and effectively.

Event marketers will feel the limitation of culture and internal systems
To be able to grow in the new role that is asked from them, event marketers will need new political and marketing skills. , they will need new mandates from their CMOs. In order to implement the new possibilities that they see within reach, event marketers will have to become change agents, ushering a new level of focus on customer centricity. Event marketers will be frustrated by organizational resistance, and their inability to deliver on customers’ expectations, as they would like to.

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Photo courtesy of Rumpleteaser, via Flickr’s Creative Commons

Event Marketing: 7 Trends for 2012 is a post from: Seamless Social

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Jean-Marie Bonthous, Seamless Social

A/B testing, split testing, bucket testing, multivariate testing
A/B testing is a great way to improve the effectiveness of your marketing. A/B testing, also called split testing or bucket testing is a way to test marketing by comparing a baseline control with a variety of single-variable test samples, to improve response rates. A/B testing was born as a direct mail tactic, and has been adopted within the interactive space to test banner ads, emails, calls to action and landing pages. It takes the guesswork out of optimization. By testing your changes before implementing them you get quantitative answers about what approaches create positive results. By constantly testing and optimizing you can increase revenue, leads, signups, downloads, or whatever else your objective is. A/B testing differs from multivariate testing, which applies statistical modeling by which a tester can try multiple variables within the samples distributed.

A/B testing for those of us who don’t write code
A/B testing online used to require extensive coding skills. Not anymore. We, at Seamless Social use HubSpot. This enables us to do easy and affective A/B testing for event marketing and other projects. If you do not use HubSpot or some other inbound marketing or marketing automation platform, Optimizely allows you to create a test at low cost, in minutes with no coding or engineering required. A/B tests will help you convert your website visitors into customers and earn more revenue.

Optimizely: a cost-effective solution for A/B testing
With Optimizely (which starts at $17 a month), you just need to paste one line of JavaScript into every page you want to test or measure and then test all you want. You can make visual changes quickly and easily: click on some text to change copy, add new images your page, and drag page elements around to try new layouts. Optimizely begins collecting data as soon as you start your experiment and their dashboard is updated in real-time.

There’s no need to set up goals before starting an experiment. Just make sure your Optimizely snippet appears on every page you want to measure (or just paste it into your site wrapper). You can test different decisions, images, layouts, and copy without touching code–you don’t need to know HTML. Their point-and-click interface makes it easy to create and run tests in minutes. Just make sure your Optimizely snippet is on each page, and Optimizely will automatically track page views for your experiment subjects.

Optimizely can be integrated with third party analytics services such as Google Analytics and Adobe Omniture SiteCatalyst. Additionally, with the API, Optimizely can be integrated with just about any analytics service or homegrown data store.

Optimizely uses both first and third party cookies to uniquely identify visitors. When a new visitor comes to a page where you are testing, they get bucketed into one of the active variations and a tracking beacon is set. The data are then logged, statistically interpreted, and presented on the results page.

The importance of measurable outcomes and adequate samples
A/B tests should have a measurable outcome, e.g. number of sales made, click-rate conversion, number of people registering for an event, etc.

For the testing to be effective, you also need to reach an audience large enough to detect meaningful differences. Sample size affects two key variables called “confidence interval” and “confidence level.” The confidence interval (“margin of error”) is the plus-or-minus figure usually used for poll results. If you use a confidence interval of 4 and 47% percent of your sample picks an answer you can be “sure” that if you had asked the question of the entire relevant population between 43% (47-4) and 51% (47+4) would have picked that answer.

The confidence level tells you how sure you can be. It represents how often the true percentage of the population who would pick an answer lies within the confidence interval. 95% confidence means you can be 95% certain. Most researchers use the 95% confidence level. You may want to use a sample size calculator, here is one that is free.

What has been your experience with A/B testing without extensive coding skills? I would love to hear from you.

Photo courtesy of Peter Dane via Flickr’s Creative Commons

A/B Testing for Event Marketing with Optimizely is a post from: Seamless Social

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Jean-Marie Bonthous, Seamless Social

Video SEO is 5300% more likely than articles to get you first page on Google
A study by Forrester Research indicated that videos, if properly submitted to search engines (and more often than not, they are not properly submitted) are 53 times more likely to rank you on Google’s first page than traditional SEO techniques.
Video SEO, if properly done, is a great way to attract visitors to your web site.
Video, when published and promoted property, are a great way to boost your content marketing ROI.

According to another story by eMarketer, 40% of viewers discover videos through search engines. By 2015, 76% of internet users will watch video online. In the same period, online video advertising spending will surge from $1.97 billion to $5.71 billion.

Let’s look at the 7 prevailing myths about SEO marketing, and at what the facts really are. Social media optimization helps people want to share your content.

Myth #1: It is important to generate search results in the “video” section
The video section is considerably less valuable than the default “web” section of search engines, as it generates a lot less search volume and click-through. It is important to appear in the blended search section. I will explain later (Secret #1) why and how this happens.

Myth #2: Search engines recognize video content easily
Their bots and crawlers have difficulties recognizing Flash content. For the content to be served, they need to be submitted and you need to follow the XML-serialization of each search engines.

Myth #3: Video publishing automatically provides strong SEO benefits
If you publish on YouTube and embed the code on your on other web sites, the viewers will be directed to YouTube, not to the sites where the code has been embedded.

Myth #4: There is no downside to posting a video on YouTube
YouTube belongs to Google, and when you sign up with YouTube, you agree that any content you upload on YouTube now belongs to Google, to whom you are relinquishing all copyright.

Myth #5 If you submit an XML feed to a search engine, it’s good for other search engines
How you configure the XML feed (“Serialization”) is different for each search engine. What you do for Google will not make your video more prominent on Bing and vice-versa. You need to ask each search engine for their specific guidelines on submission. For your videos to appear, you may need to adjust the pagination, the feed size, and more.

Myth #6: Search engines do not discriminate between types of content
Search engines give a higher ranking to video content than to other forms of content. This enables them to keep serving searches that are a well-balanced blend of different media. What works for you is that there is a plethora of word content, but little video. So if you publish videos, your chance of being served by the search engines is high, providing you are properly indexed.

Myth #7: You need to submit the page where your video is displayed, or the vide itself.
You need to do both. Many sites make the mistake or submitting either the page, or the video. Few submit both. Do this the property way: use a permalink sitemap mirroring your XML feed. And make sure that the title tags on your permalink pages are the same as in the video title, in order to achieve the highest possible rank scoring. It is crucial to make sure that the links point back to your site, so that traffic reaches where you want it to go. Both the permalink pages and the videos should be indexed, and you also need to have the correct robots.txt files. Last but not least you will need to include on your site a piece of code that will enable redirected content from your video provider.

Does video SEO sound overly complicated? There is an easier way. I found two tools.
On the affordable side ($19.90 a month), Smart-Video is a great tool to quickly and cost effectively get video thumbs to appear along side your most valuable listings in Google blended searches and to allow easy sharing of video content in Facebook. They offer a 30-day trial.
On the more upscale end of the spectrum, Fliquz offers unlimited submission to search engines, video upload and management and unlimited transfer up to 1TB, all this for HQ. 16:9. This service is available for $99/month to their Silver of Gold customers

Are you using another platform for video SEO? What have you learned? We would love to hear from you.

Video courtesy of Search Engine People’s Blog via Flickr and Creative Commons

7 Myths of Video SEO is a post from: Seamless Social

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Jean-Marie Bonthous, Seamless Social

I attended a presentation by Clara Shih CEO of Hearsay Social, and author of the 2007 bestselling book The Facebook Era. Here are some highlights from her presentation about success factors for Facebook marketers.

Facebook: the rise of personalization in online experiences
On Facebook, you are asked when you sign up to share a lot of information: political views, religious views. Before Facebook it could be years before people would share this. But now people share it right away, and with people they don’t know. There are implications on a personal and professional level. The sharing is accelerating relationships. Soon after we connect with someone we are able to determine if we want to engage them or not. Before we had to wait until after meeting #5

This information in profiles also means that marketers have a lot of information to better segment and target. If you sell golf clubs, instead of spending money blindly on broadcast advertising, if Facebook tells you who is into golf, this dramatically changes the cost and effectiveness of brand advertising. And this information extends across 800 million subscribers.

Facebook: the rise of trust by proxy
I’m trying to breach Bill but I don’t know him, and he will not read my emails. But if I find out that we both know and trust Rob, Bill is more ready to transitionally trust me
Before Facebook, I was not able to know whom we knew in common, and it was not possible to tap. What we see here is the rise of “transitional trust”, i.e. trust by proxy.

Seven habits of successful Facebook marketers

1) Target your message
Use profile based targeting. If you like Sushi and are in San Francisco, you will get targeted by Sushi restaurants in that city. They know if you are single, age, language, etc.. whatever information you share. Do like them.

2) Understand the advantages of Facebook
Facebook pages are becoming the new websites.
If you have a small business with a limited marketing budget, rather than hiring a developer, use a customizable Facebook page, easy to update and it comes with free SEO. You may not have full control of the Facebook format, but you also do not have to understand the more complicated tools of a web site. Brands like Dunkin Donuts, Best Buy, are now using FB as a supplementary site, a for audiences who otherwise would not go to their web site. They create communities distinct from their web sites. And they often will run multivariate tests on Facebook and then roll out the campaigns nationally.

3) Be human, authentic
Social media can be a great opportunity to present a human voice and face that resonates with customer that makes them feel good about your brand and Facebook, in particular, lends itself to a more relaxed of communication. Use this to your advantage, to build relationships with your audience.

4) Invest in killer content
Think first about who is your audience, and what they want to hear. Talk about you and your brand no more than 1 in 5 posts. Think about what your business is, and how you can appeal in a manner that is more broad than your products or services.
Have an aspirational umbrella theme that coalesces everything you write, and appeals to all your readers. Protecting people’s families, protecting their future, encouraging safer driving habits, planning for your financial future. When you deal with these topics you reach people high up in the funnel and build credibility.

5) Apply the right metrics, test and track
New media require new metrics. 15 years ago click thru rates did not exist.
Same with social engagement, retweets, “likes”. What are the new metrics for social media that make sense for you to drive your sales, customer service, etc..? You have to select these.

The first era of online marketing was very focused on click-through rate. The way Facebook changes metrics is that they allow us to take a more long-term view. We do not just aim for a single click today. We understand that people may convert tomorrow.
A call to action may just be about following on Twitter, etc. as we reach people really high in the funnel.
Go further than that, and look at social customer lifetime value. And evolve from traditional CLV to Social CLV. In a social network ecosystem could far exceed traditional CLV. If a person has 25K followers on Twitter if he has a strong network he could be a valuable influencer. If he starts to help answer questions for your customers, his value increases way beyond what he purchases from you, even if he is not influential or has no money. So there are many opportunities to generate cost savings from customer engagement.

6) Find partners, do not try to go alone
There are so many aspects to Social media, from legal to SEO, content to technology and a lot more. Make sure you surround yourself with partners who can complement your skills.

7) Have fun and keep learning
Farmers insurance has 15,000 insurance agent. Many had created pages, but not much was happening on these pages. Farmers asked: “How do we drive brand awareness through social media?” They started looking at how people use Facebook. A big chunk is social games. When Farmers saw that the people they were marketing to spent 22 minutes a day planting blueberries in virtual farms, it became obvious that Farmers is about protecting your family and your farm. They made a graphic of the Farmers Blimp, and now if you put it inside the field, it will prevent freeze for you for three years. Their follower count on Facebook rapidly increased from 300,000 to 22 million.

Or all these reasons, most businesses need to be active on Facebook. What has been your experiences with Facebook marketing success? We would love to hear your comments and stories.

Photo courtesy of mr.smashy via Flickr and Creative Commons.

7 Habits of Successful Facebook Marketers is a post from: Seamless Social

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Jean-Marie Bonthous, Seamless Social

I attended at HUGS2011 a presentation by HubSpot’s Jonas Lopin, VP of Customer Success at HubSpot, and Joshua Porter Director of UX also at HubSpot. They presented several interested really interesting case studies on how some companies have leveraged inbound marketing to increase their conversion ratios, both for visitor to lead and lead to customer. Here are highlights from their presentation.

Diteba Research Laboratories sell services and software in the bio-analytics and chemistry industry. Things looked pretty for them, until they looked a bit deeper into the funnel. Their “visit-to-lead” conversion index was only 0.5%. Also, their visit-to-conversion ratio was declining. They formulated with a two-prong strategy to win the B2B marketing race: more middle of the funnel content: case studies, eBooks. Content that would push people down the funnel. And also more email marketing. Soon they saw a 3x increase in conversion rate. They doubled the number of their leads, and their visit to lead conversion is now exceeding 1%.

Townsend security has built a successful business in the data encryption space. When they started creating landing pages, they had low conversion rates. They tested and tried to figure out how to improve. They created 200 landing pages, and identified 68 that worked. Many companies have only 3-4 landing pages. Why not have 50 or 500 landing pages? After they created these high performing landing pages, they created lead nurturing campaigns to maximize the results of these leads. They also decided to create Call to Action buttons and to put them in other places: blogs, site, in places where they were confident they would covert well. Already, they have increased their conversion rate from single digits to 30%.

RunKeeper is a rapidly growing software company selling iPhone apps. One allows the GPS in your iPhone to keep track of how far and how fast you ran. RunKeepers did not know why they were getting so many adoptions, and wanted to pinpoint what channels were feeding growth. They looked at referring domains, and saw that Facebook was where it was at. They saw that the social sharing there took place around some maps on their Facebook pate, and drove most of their traffic. They also looked at how to replicate this on other platforms like Google Plus and at how to build other products with the same potential. They are now on their way to replicating their Facebook traffic on other platforms. Many other small businesses have realized that they must be active on Facebook.

Quanticate, a company in the clinical research space, based in the US and UK, saw an opportunity to drive more leads and traffic through social media. They thought that because the conversion rate was pretty good: over 1%. But the traffic itself was relatively anemic. And it was all coming from Linkedin. They focused on Linkedin, posted more and better content there, used Answers and Groups, and achieved a 10x increase in traffic and a 10x increase in conversion: altogether a 100x increase in lead flow.

Boger Dental, a family-owned dental practice in Minnesota, they dug into their data and looked for an opportunity to improve. They found out that many visitors were returning patients already. The opportunity they saw was to increase the 52% conversion between leads and customers. Since the quality of leads was very high, they saw an opportunity to convert a lot more leads. Using a list segmentation tool, they starting to hyper-segment, focusing on leads that were not customers yet. They were able to isolate those that had not converted, because the tracking allowed to see those that had not yet become customers. They are on their way to increase lead-to-customer conversions to 80%.

Joyce Factory Direct sells directly a huge inventory of parts for porches. They had done a lot of paid traffic and were looking to drive more organic traffic. Using their keyword manager, they looked how many keywords were driving traffic versus branded keywords. About 50% were branded. They wanted to get organic traffic to drive more traffic. Blogging like crazy was the approach of choice. They have reached a 707% increase in organic traffic, just by blogging regularly. They created a blogging schedule and focused on the keywords in the industry.

Acton Toyota of Littleton CO wanted to get more out their blog and put their blog under a microscope. Using Blog analytics from HubSpot they looked for the articles that generated the most links from other web sites. They asked: “What are the common threads between these articles?” All these articles had one thing in common: they wrote about things that were new. So the blogging policy went to write articles about what’s new, and they achieved a #3 organic rank on Google and got 5x increase in retweets on their next blog articles.

Knewton sells software and training for people who are complete tests. They buy a lot of paid traffic. Not everyone who comes to their site converts rapidly. Their question was “What keywords leads to real revenues over time?” Using a Keyword ROI report, they saw the performance of each keyword and for each keyword, the initial conversion value. They also saw that the subsequent conversion value in the next week for the people who had come the week before. They were now able to attribute conversions to original keywords, even weeks or months down the line. Some of the biggest buyers would convert only several months after a specific keyword their first visit. This kind of analysis also allows weed out the value of keywords that have no staying power. Where Google Adwords will throw at you a 100 keywords, by looking at specific Keywords ROI analytics, you can be a lot more precise, and save a lot of money.

6 tips for boosting conversions

• Create a monthly marketing report and circulate it throughout the company. Ask everyone to review it and comment.
• Close the loop: make sure you have end to end data, and if you don’t have the data to do this, get them.
• Bookmark reports to save time. When you do your monthly report, you can find the same exact and report consistently over time.
• Leverage marketing events: what is it that drove a spike? Create marketing events in your inbound marketing platform, and notice what meaningful events drove performance. If you can correlate what you do with the results, you will be light years ahead.
• Benchmark yourself. Use the benchmark tools in your inbound platform and see how you stack up. And set goals for yourself and track progress over time. Check regularly where marketing stand compared to last month in terms of leads created and passed to sales.

What is your experience leveraging inbound marketing to boost conversions? We would love to hear your feedback.

Download the free eBook: Lead Management & Marketing Automation

Photo courtesy of ahisgett via Creative Commons and Flickr.

Inbound Marketing: 9 Conversion Success Stories is a post from: Seamless Social

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Jean-Marie Bonthous, Seamless Social

73% of CEOS do not believe their marketers drive revenues. How can marketers fix this? By generating more leads is the most direct route. Here are some highlights from the presentation by HubSpot’s Kipp Bodnar at HUGS2011.

The touchstone in social media: landing pages
B2B companies have long sales cycles: it may take months before a client spends money. Marketers need leads as the initial proxy to show the lead to customer rate, and to predict how many revenues are being generated. Thinking of leads as proxy revenues also helps create a perception that revenue generation is at the center of the marketing agenda.

Can social media help with lead generation? Social media a way to communicate like email or search engine marketing. But Social revenue that does not revenue does not last. In social media, there is not a linear path to lead generation, but many possible routes, like: from Tweet to landing page to form to lead, or from Google + to call to action to landing page. These paths all have one thing in common: landing pages. You may have created an eBook, some awesome piece of information that would have sold as a book 10 years ago. Now all that you ask people is some information, and if they give it to you, you give them some content. A landing page is a part of the path toward making money through social media.

Here are 5 ways to generate leads through social media.

1) Grow your audience
You need visitors that will consume what you share. You need to build your reach. A group, a community of people. Inbound marketing is a great way to build reach. Share a lot of links. Research by hubSpot’s Dan Zarella shows that just replying does not create leads, but sharing information does. Every time you create a piece of valuable information, share it and expand your social media reach. Leverage your existing contacts. Send an email suggesting to your email contacts to follow you in social media. Email can be a powerful tool to increase your reach.

2) Put your content in front of many people
Get as many people as possible to see your content. You need to create regular content, share it consistently, dedicate time to monitoring how people are reacting to the content, re-sharing it or not.

Decide which of the people in your audience are worth your time to contact and engage them. Create a content calendar, decide how many blog posts and webinars for example you will create this month. It holds you honest and accountable. When you have it written down it’s a different kind of commitment. Take few minutes at the beginning of every month to decide what you will created.

Build your thank you pages for people who download your content and use them to spread the word via Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin And if they click on it, it says gives the link to the eBook. And this way the people will share it with people they know.
This will help you have more people share your content consistently.The same links should be in the eBooks. Every footer of the eBook should have “Tweet this eBook”

Don’t spend more than 20 minutes a day monitoring social media. Start small and scale up, rather than the opposite. Maybe 10 minutes on Twitter and Facebook, 10 minutes in Linkedin Answers/Groups, and 10 minute in Google Alerts to see what’s being said about you.

Most of all, share content that is fresh: people want fresh new content. Make sure you share it. And then monitor. Research by Bit.Ly shows that the shelf life of a social media link is only 3 hours. You will need to create content frequently. See your role as running an educational publishing company, the role of which is to generate leads.

3) Create opportunities for conversion, everywhere
The most important of the 5 recommendations outlined in this article is to put calls to action everywhere. Make the marketing math work for you: have many calls to action so that visitors come across them wherever they go. Calls to action (CTAs) will be different. If visitors are looking at your product page, they are more down the road in the funnel that when they are on the home page. HubSpot for example has a button that creates calls to action with a few clicks and you see how many clicks it gets, how many leads it generates, and more. And if you use the HubSpot CMS to blog, CTA creation buttons do pop up. You can have calls to action in emails. This transforms your 600 words blog post, from a primer, into something more substantive that enables readers to move further their interest for your product.

4) Test often and fail fast
CTAs are a catalyst for testing marketing effectiveness. But the more important part is the failing. Failing sucks in that no one wants to fail, but you cant win at everything. To win at some things, you have to fail at others. Testing allows you to fail and to improve over time. To make the most of testing, set a clear qualitative objective. Set a methodology for gathering data for success criteria, conduct an experiment retrospective and set actions items following the experiment. The most important thing that testing does is to stop you from doing things that do not work.

5) Optimize to maximize leads
You have 2 levers to do that: traffic and conversion rates. You can get more people to the web site, or convert more of the people coming to your web site. These are the 2 levers. Social media followers convert slightly less than targeted PPC and slightly less than email, but a lot more than referrals, organic or direct. Hence the important to tap social for lead generation. Make sure you follow your visitor to lead rate, and your lead to customer rate. And see if this lead rate is in line with your industry. Many inbound marketing or marketing automation platforms will allow you do find this out with one click. If you have guest bloggers, check which bloggers have the highest visitor to lead conversion ratios, and promote them.

Conduct radical tests: too often tests assume that you have a general idea of what people want and then based on your assumption you end up with a product in the middle, but based on and limited by your assumptions.

If you want more traffic from social media, create more content. Repurposing existing content is a great way to maintain a steady publishing flow. Chris Brogan once said that if you want to maintain your readership, you need to publish three times a week. But if you want to increase it, you need to publish 2-3 times a day. Similarly, if you want to increase your lead generation machine, you need to increase your content publishing pace and you need to make sure that your content is optimized for sharing. And remember, online video is a great way to boost your content marketing ROI.

Recent research by HuSpot shows that 73% of CEOs think that their marketers to not contribute to lead generation. By applying the 5 principles above and generating more quality leads, you will stand a good chance to change this perception.

What has been your experience with generating leads? We would love to hear your experience.

Photo courtesy of nchosquealº via Flickr and Creative Commons

Download the free eBook: Lead Management & Marketing Automation

5 Ways to Generate More Leads Online is a post from: Seamless Social

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Jean-Marie Bonthous, Seamless Social

Content marketing has become to fuel that sustains lead generation for B2B businesses.
Having a clear content strategy, an editorial calendar, and a solid content production capacity have become prerequisites for building relationships with prospects and customers online.

I attended at the Inbound Marketing Summit 2011 in Boston the presentation by Barry Libert, co-founder of Mzinga and was inspired to share some of his recommendations for developing a stream of quality content.

1) Story trumps all else
Stories are greater than the sums of the facts that they contain. But most organizations have become apt at communication through product talk. “We have a product for you.” Their message is: “what can I sell you.” They don’t know how to tell stories. Where there is no story, there is no authenticity. Customer story is what paves the way for trust-based interaction with your prospects.

2) Prospect-to-prospect sharing trumps business-to-prospect sharing
Many companies are focused on counting views, traffic, but they fail to remember that every fan has 10, 100, 1000 friends. How to crate campaigns that get shaped and shared further, that is the question, rather than campaigns that only get shared one on one.
Make the content super easy to share, embed. Social media optimization is a great way to create content sharing opportunities. It’s all about sharing, not just about views.

3) The medium is not the message
When you say “I love you,” the message used to deliver this message is less important
than the message and the tone. The medium, you actually need be agnostic to. But the message, you have to care all the time, and the message has to be: “I care about you.”
Your employees and customers will understand when the message is not authentic and when it is authentic, they will sense it, also

4) Community creates commerce, not the other way around
You may have a users group, but its really community that creates opportunities to have discussions where products are sold. Communities of shared interest
Why is Trip Advisor so popular: you go there because there are reviews. It’s all user-generated content. And, over time it has morphed into a social commerce site. People there create slide shows, video logs, etc.. TripAdvisor offers tools for people to create more content, which in turn creates more community. And then, in this virtuous cycle, this community becomes the source of the next round of content.

5) Before you start publishing, know your social assets
Your content capital is made of your content assets, and your abilities to curate, program and distribute. Most companies do not know all their assets. They don’t know all the people they touched, the last time they touched them, what they know about them. And they don’t know their content assets: who knows about what and what materials exist that could be repurposed. Companies need to be able to repurpose content in order to maintain the constant stream of interesting of useful information that is necessary to grow traffic.

They are rushing to Facebook and Twitter without knowing the people who are their customers, friends, influencers, and advocates. And many companies are unable to adequately tap the knowledge and relationships assets within their walls and within their ecosystem of partners and suppliers.

When the capital is customers and relationships, not knowing their names, skills, knowledge, connections, preferences, when you last you contacted them, and when you need to rely on them to share the content that will bring you leads…….how limiting is that? If you want to become a social business you first need to know your capital and your capital is made of the skills, knowledge, content and relationships in your ecosystem.

What do you see as the success factors for generating leads and growing revenues through content marketing. We would love to hear your comments

Download the free eBook on content marketing “Creating Content That Sells.”

Photo courtesy of yourdoku, via Creative Commons and Flickr

5 Rules to Create Content That Sells is a post from: Seamless Social

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Jean-Marie Bonthous, Seamless Social

Recent research by Constant Contact and Chadwick Martin Bailey shows that Facebook Fans are more likely to recommend a brand to their friends, or buy products than blog visitors. The study analyzed the behavior of nearly 1,500 consumers ages 18 and older throughout the US. The findings of this study on consumer behavior highlights the need for small businesses to be active on Facebook. here are the key findings from the study, as excerpted from a press release published by the authors.

Facebook is the platform of choice for interaction with brands
Facebook is the best place to reach consumers looking to interact with their favorite brands online, topping both Twitter and LinkedIn.
• Consumers interact with their favorite brand on Facebook far more than other social networks (tweet this)
• 56% of consumers said they are more likely to recommend a brand to a friend after becoming a fan on Facebook (tweet this)
• 69% of consumers said they want to hear from some brands on Facebook more than others (tweet this)
• 51% of consumers said they are more likely to buy a product since becoming a fan on Facebook (tweet this)
• 77% of consumers said they interact with brands on Facebook primarily through reading posts and newsfeeds (tweet this)
• 52% of those who go online said that they spend at least one hour a week on Facebook (tweet this)
• 76% of consumers said they have never “un-liked” a brand on Facebook (tweet this)
• 58% of consumers said they “Like” a brand on Facebook because they are a customer (tweet this)
• 78% of consumers who “Like” brands on Facebook said they “Like” fewer than ten brands (tweet this)
• 45% of consumers said they spend most of their time on Facebook in the newsfeed (tweet this)

Brand fans spend much time on Facebook and find their interactions positive
For Kristen Garvey, vice president, marketing, Chadwick Martin Bailey, “Two of the more interesting data points that we found were that consumers spend at least an hour each week on Facebook and that 76 percent of consumers have never ‘un-liked’ a brand. This really shows that consumers are on the site for a good chunk of the overall time they spend online, and once they ‘Like’ your brand, they are often your fans for good.”
“The fact that the majority of users never ‘un-like’ a page indicates that most interactions between brands and consumers on Facebook are positive,” said Mark Schmulen, general manager of social media at Constant Contact. “It not only gives marketers a great opportunity to reach consumers, but it also enables them to build deeper connections with consumers who are likely to amplify positive word-of-mouth online. This demonstrates the importance of not only having a strong presence on Facebook, but also the importance of being active, listening, responding and providing shareable content on a daily basis.”

Small businesses need to be active on Facebook
“This data reinforces the need for businesses to be active on Facebook, said Schmulen. “Consumers are not only willing to connect with brands on Facebook, but those that do are also more likely to buy from and recommend brands to their friends. Remember, it’s not just about getting the ‘Like;’ it’s about what you do to keep your fans engaged when they aren’t front of you. Brands need to post content that will help them to build stronger relationships and compel fans to share your content with their friends. The ability to easily share content across a wide network is what makes Facebook such a powerful referral engine.” Read the full report.

Is your brand active on Facebook? Does your experience match the findings in this study? We would love to hear your comments.

Download the free eBook: “Getting Started with Inbound Marketing”

Photo courtesy of Ines via Flickr and Creative Commons

Why Small Businesses Should be Active on Facebook is a post from: Seamless Social

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Jean-Marie Bonthous, Seamless Social

I attended the Inbound Marketing Summit in Boston and had a chance to listen to Brian Halligan, founder and CEO of HubSpot, and author of best-selling book “Inbound Marketing”. I tried to capture the essence of his vision for inbound marketing at a 2015 horizon.

The marketing funnel is shifting: the buyer is in control
In the old marketing paradigm, the buyer seller relationship was controlled by the seller who had all the power. There was asymmetric information between buyer and seller and it worked to the advantage of the seller. The seller controlled the information and leveraged that to control the buying process. If you wanted information about the product, you had to go through the sales rep,. Pricing information, technical information, negotiation parameters, even customer satisfaction, all these were all closely guarded. Marketing played a very small role and sales dominated most organizations.

Things are changing a lot: the shape of the funnel is changing and the seller-buyer relationship is shifting from the seller to the buyer. The buyer now has all the power: it has gone from asymmetrical information to a situation where the buyer is more educated than the seller. This is a radical transformation in the dynamics of the funnel

Inbound marketing 1.0 delivered a tenfold increase in traffic and leads
Before inbound marketing 1.0, people would buy a list and advertise or call prospects cold. This model became obsolete a few years ago as people got sick and tired of being marketed to.

Inbound marketing pulled people into blogs, and matched the way you market to the way people shop and learn. Inbound marketing done right, Halligan says, gets you 10 times more visitors that outbound marketing, at a 62% lesser cost, and delivers to you 10 times more leads.

Inbound marketing 2.0 will transform the middle of the funnel
The next wave, according to Halligan, is not around the top of the funnel and getting found by more people, but in improving the conversion from the top to the middle and the bottom of the funnel. This requires rethinking the entire engagement process and the marketing department going beyond getting found and becoming responsible for converting visitors into customers effectively. With the rise in the power of customers, marketing is now in control most of the buying decision-making processes from the top to the middle and even the end of the funnel. Control over the funnel needs to shift from the sales organization to the marketing organization.

Marketing and sales processes often match the old, not the new, buyer behaviors.
Now people enter the funnel by doing a search online. If you are a blogger your articles rank high, you may be found. The prospect may then forget about your company until one of their colleagues on Facebook becomes a fan of your company.

He may then do a free a download and leave some information about his company and then one of your sales rep may call him but, with caller ID, he may not answer. He may listen to your message and search online for your company and your competitors.

This is a completely different process where the prospect is in control and driving all the decisions. Importantly, the first conversations happen very later in the process after the prospect has made many decisions about features, benefits and pricing. Marketing and sales processes in most organizations match the old way of buying and don’t track with the social buyer.

Inbound marketing will remain key for the top of the funnel (TOFU
The people who do inbound marketing right get a lot more visitors. They publish their way to success. They create tons of great content, optimize it for Google and social media. Each piece of content becomes a mini-magnet that pull customers and increases the assets. Inbound is scalable and repeatable.

The same revolution is coming to the middle of the funnel (MOFU)
In the last 4 years inbound marketing has transformed the top of the funnel. Many companies have experienced a 10x improvement in the top of the funnel . Now, Halligan sees a 10x improvement coming in the middle of the funnel. Now is the time to transform the middle of the funnel. Google, Amazon, Facebook, Neflix, Groupon, Linkedin are all very hugely successful because they are conversion experts, MOFU experts, says Halligan. What can we learn from them to do conversion as they do?

The holy grail ahead for inbound marketing
These companies have 4 things in common. When prospects become users, a three step process of usage and conversion unfolds. In these 4 sites:

• Everyone who visits gets a personalized experience.
• The value of the site is a function of the number of users on it: the more people on the site, the better the personalization.
• if you visit to Netflix, Amazon or Pandora for the first time, there is little on the page where you register. But as you start to use it, the recommendations for you become more pertinent. The system knows what you like, what other people like you like.
• The more people use it, the more valuable it gets for them. The platform creates segments of one, where everyone has a personalized experience.

And the conversion model is very scalable.

Inbound marketing 2.0, says Halligan will make it possible for small and midsize companies to market like Amazon. As a company, you will be able to transform your web footprint into personalization engine serving the right content to the right person in the right format and at the right stage of their buying cycle. A capability reserved until now for a few mega organizations with deep pocket.

The promise of inbound marketing 2.0
Halligan sees the conversion rates in the MOFU going up tenfold with inbound marketing 2.0, just like the generation of leads at the TOFU went up tenfold with inbound marketing 10.

We should learn from Amazon and Netflix, says Halligan, quoting Isaac Newton’s: “If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants” Isaac Newton

The need to rethink engagement processes and to hire “DARC”
The role of marketing and sales needs to be rethought, with marketing becoming largely a publishing and analytics organization and taking responsibility for more of the funnel, up to the sales and even later through up-sell and referrals.

And the people with the right skills need to be brought onboard:

• Digital natives speaking internet without an accent,
• Analytically skilled
• “R” stands for reach: hire people who have a big online Rolodex. When HubSpot Hired Dan Zarella, he already had his own 22K mailing list.
• “C” stands for content: hire content creators: people who are comfortable creating content.

Inbound marketing 2015: a better moat around your business
Warren Buffer said: “ Build a moat around your business: large, deep with alligators in it…. For Halligan, the moat of the future around your business is inbound marketing. Inbound marketing 1.0 built such a moat on top of the funnel. Now the same transformation needs to be applied to the MOFU.

Halligan sees inbound marketing in the middle of the funnl as a powerful a strong deterrent to rivalry because, just like it’s very hard to become another Amazon or Pandora, it’s very hard to catch up on a competitor that has implemented personalization throughout the middle of funnel.

Have you started implemented processes to improve lead scoring, nurturing and recycling? What challenges are you encountering and how are you overcoming them? I would love to hear your comments. Thank you

Download the free eBook: “Getting Started with Inbound Marketing”

Photo courtesy of sntgmdm, via Creative Commons, Flickr

Inbound Marketing in 2015 is a post from: Seamless Social

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Jean-Marie Bonthous, Seamless Social

Marketing teams in B2B are different from marketing teams in B2C. In B2C, you mostly find employees who studied marketing, have worked in marketing for other brands, and have the marketing knowledge needed to run a B2C marketing department. In B2B, you often meet marketers who came from engineering, product development or sales. They lack formal marketing education and experience and rely on their in-depth experience of the industry and products.

If you ask them to show you their marketing plans, they will often describe their current or recent campaign. Much of their energy is spent reacting to shifts in market trends, bursts in competitive pressure

This has worked until now, as there was across the entire B2B sector, with exception of software industries, a deficiency in marketing skills. But the marketing skills landscape is changing rapidly, let by new, effective and affordable technologies like lead scoring, nurturing and recycling, inbound marketing, marketing automation and of course industry data mining. Suddenly, B2B marketers are invited to have a place at the revenue generation table. To rise to this new challenge, they need to brush up their skills.

1) Make time for marketing strategy
While much B2B marketing has been until now ad hoc and reactive, now is the time to have clear revenue generation objectives where marketing will demonstrate accountability. And a clear plan, with the “why this approach, how we will go about it, when we will do it, what it will cost, and what it will bring, who will be accountable, and what the milestones are.”

2) Plan marketing initiatives that are more than reactions
Gone are the times where it was possible to keep growing revenues by just adjusting the course to catch up with competitive moves. There is a need to constantly plan to outsmart, outperform and leapfrog the competition. The intensity of competitive rivalry has grown dramatically in the last 2 years, and will continue to increase

3) Commit to continuous, not intermittent, measurable progress
Until now,. B2B marketing often grew in spurts: marketers would plan a campaign, create some materials and wait for the results to have dissipated to have manifested to think about what to do next. These times are gone. Just like when playing chess, there is a need now to plan several moves ahead. Not only do marketers need to have the upcoming campaign designed, but also scenarios for future campaigns down the line.

4) When mistakes are made, commit to never making them again
Learning from mistakes again and again was a normal way of working in B2B marketing. Mistakes would be made, again and again. The number of marketing mistakes that can be made is infinite, and there are endless ways and many excuses to repeat them and make them differently each time. While failing is a great school to learn, the same mistakes cannot be made twice anymore, the competitive pressures just don’t allow for it anymore. There is a need to get to the root causes of mistakes, take corrective action, as painful as it may be, and move forward on a different footing.

5) Be paranoid about waste
Margins have become razor thin. Revenue performance management and marketing automation now allow you to measure the contribution of marketing to generating leads and revenues. It is now possible to calculate the cost of each lead, and to bring it down as needed. The C-Suite is becoming aware that the cost of marketing is now becoming transparent. If this has not happened already, prepare to explain what marketing spends for each lead, and how it will cut these costs and track progress.

6) Get ready for marketing disruption, and for mandatory marketing innovation
Industries that were stable or changed at glacier speed are now being disrupted, whether it is by technology, globalization, the global economic morosity or changing buyer behaviors. What looks like a great marketing plan today may be tomorrow’s obsolescence. Be ready to turn on a time, reinvent your strategy, formulate and implement new plans in a very short time. And while it is relatively easy to formulate plans, remember that these plans may call for initiatives that require new skills, knowledge and behaviors, which are a lot harder to acquire rapidly. While these are difficult times for marketers who like the status quo, these are exciting times for those with a keen affinity for calculated risk taking and adventure!

Have you encountered similar situations with B2B. How have you addressed these challenges? I would love to hear from you.

Download the free eBook: “Guide to B2B Social Media”

Our thanks to Doug Kessler from Velocity, whose article in EConsultancy inspired this article. Thank you also to Oebemamo for the use of this photo through Creative Commons via Flickr.

6 Ways to Win the B2B Marketing Race is a post from: Seamless Social