Posts Tagged ‘HubSpot’
How to Avoid Social Media Mistakes
Monday, March 15th, 2010Despite the widespread adoption of social media in the marketing mix, many companies still use this medium less than effectively. This is perhaps not surprising given that, according to recent research by Business.com, 40% of b2b marketers have been using social media as a marketing tool for less than a year, and 60% spend less than 20% of their time on it. This lack of experience can lead to several common, but avoidable mistakes.
One of the most common mistakes is expecting instant results. While the current tough economy is forcing marketers to do more with less and focus on productivity, social media isn’t like advertising: it requires a sustained commitment over time to build an online reputation as a helpful, knowledgeable resource, the kind of company your prospective customers will want to do business with. Giving short shrift to social media activities now, because it may not have an immediate impact on the bottom line, is short sighted. B2b companies that build a social media presence now will be best positioned for growth once the economy rebounds.
An even bigger mistake is ignoring the synergies between different forms and types of social media. Media sharing sites, social networking profiles, blogs and online reputation management tools are all part of a larger strategy of web presence optimization, maximizing your online presence through various forms of media and most importantly, interlinking these points of presence to maximize your company’s visibility in search.
For more guidance on maximizing the impact social media marketing can have for your organization, see 8 Common Mistakes in Social Media Marketing on the HubSpot blog. Avoiding these mistakes will help improve your organization’s online presence and website traffic now, and position it well to thrive once the economy turns around.
The One Effective Use of Facebook for B2B Marketing
Tuesday, March 9th, 2010You’ve seen the eye-popping statistics: Facebook now has more than 350 million active users. If it were a country, it would be the third most-populous on earth, behind only China and India. TechCrunch predicts that “by this summer (2010) well over half of all Internet users will likely visit Facebook each month.” It’s now the second most-visited site on the web, behind only Google.
Given that level of popularity and traffic, it’s no wonder that marketers have embraced Facebook in a big way. What’s curious, however, is that of the top 50 brands on Facebook according to Slate magazine, not one is a b2b vendor. Not even close. And as Mark Schaefer has noted, b2b Facebook success stories are notoriously hard to come by (he found one).
With a mammoth audience and the acceptance, even embrace, of brands there, why is Facebook success so elusive for b2b marketers? It isn’t demographics. Granted, the potential pool of customers for most b2b companies is minute compared to that for major consumer brands, but given the sheer size and ubiquity of Facebook, there are still a lot of b2b buyers using it.
The challenge rather lies in the way Facebook fan pages are used. I’ve heard countless people, within the b2b community, express the sentiment that “LinkedIn is for business, Facebook is for friends and family.” As such, it’s not surprisingly that many of the entries on Slate’s top Facebook list are lifestyle brands. If you buy a new Audi, you might use Facebook to show it off to your friends, but if you’re part if a buying team that just acquired a new enterprise software system—eh, not so much so. And as one more bit of anecdotal evidence, I have my Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook badges all displayed in the left column of this blog. I pick up a lot of new Twitter followers here, and a fair number of LinkedIn connection requests, but rarely a Facebook invitation.
Still, this doesn’t mean that Facebook can’t serve any purpose for b2b marketing. It can serve one helpful role: humanizing a company. As a very wise b2b sales executive said to me several years ago, “people don’t buy from companies. They buy from people.” With the emergence of social media as a marketing tool, that sentiment is arguably even more true today.
Because of the intimate, informal nature of Facebook, it is the ideal venue to showcase personal content related to your company that may not be appropriate on a corporate website or even a LinkedIn profile. Many employees within b2b companies have email communication with customers and prospects, but never actually talk to them. Or they have phone conversations but never meet face to face. Facebook provides an excellent means for sharing photos and even (limited) personal information, to help put a human face on an organization, and “put a face with the name” or voice of an employee for customers and prospects.
Just a few examples of content that work better on Facebook than in more formal settings are:
- • Photos of employees in casual office settings;
- • Photos of employees and customers interacting, or casual shots of a customer using a product (with permission, of course);
- • Trade show photos;
- • Pictures of employees working on community service projects;
- • Company executives speaking, accepting awards, meeting with VIPs, etc.;
- • Photos of production facilities (for manufactured products);
- • Photos taken with resellers or channel partners;
- • Informal or even humorous videos, such as HubSpot’s spoof of The Office or Resco’s “border battle” video shot before last season’s first Vikings-Packers game;
- • And of course, interaction! Most customers and prospects probably won’t want to interact with your brand on Facebook, but for those who do, it’s important to engage them through this channel.
In short, Facebook provides a place to show the human side of your company, to cut loose just a bit and have some fun. While it may produce a lead now and then, it isn’t a very effective lead generation vehicle. Instead, by humanizing your company and giving a glimpse inside, it’s business value lies primarily in lead nurturing—helping move leads through the buying process. It’s more about making current sales cycles more productive than about generating new potential business.
Because the ROI is likely to be difficult to measure with precision, it’s best to keep the “I” fairly modest. Still, with realistic expectations, using Facebook as a means to put a human face (or faces) on a B2B brand can be one effective component of an overall social media marketing strategy.
Best Business Blogging Tips of 2009, Part 2
Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010How can you develop a steady stream of new topic ideas to write about on your blog? Attract more blog traffic? Which WordPress plugins are most essential? Which highly successful blogs should you emulate, and what can you learn from them? What common blogging mistakes should you avoid? How do blogging and other “real time” activities like social media posting affect Google search results?
Discover the answers to these questions and others here in the final batch of the best articles and blog posts on business blogging from 2009.
5 outstanding corporate blogs by iMedia Connection
Defining an outstanding corporate blog as “one that accomplishes the clearly articulated goals of the organization,” Chris Baggott provides five examples, including Carhartt’s Tough Jobs blog (focused on user-generated content) and the Alerding Castor blog, targeted at attracting high-value clients.
58 ways to build a better blog by How to Make My Blog
Marko Saric presents a huge collection of tips for maximizing business blog success, ranging from the basics (get your own domain name, think of a catchy title, be SEO-friendly) to the less obvious (make your blog tough to hack, “declutter” your blog, don’t make assumptions about your readers, and include a media kit for potential advertisers).
101 Steps to Becoming a Better Blogger by Lifehack
If those 58 tips in the post above weren’t enough for you, Kim Roach provides more than a hundred more suggestions for improving your blog, broken into categories like must-have plugins for WordPress, ways to monetize a blog, and writing tips.
9 Useful Twitter Retweet Button Scripts For Blogs by Cheth Studios
Noting that Cheth Studios gets 40% of its blog traffic from Twitter alone, this post reviews nine scripts, tools and plugins to make your blog content easily tweetable, from TweetMeme (my favorite) TwittLink to Retweet.com and BackType.
The Most Important Blogging Analysis Ever by ViperChill
Noting that blogs grow by having their content shared, Glen Allsopp studies “the most linked-to blog posts on four of the most popular blogs in the world and analyse(s) what made them so popular.” Not surprisingly, resource posts and techniques for solving specific, common problems top the list of how to make your content spread.
5 Simple Tips for Creating a Content Culture at Your Company by Hubspot’s Inbound Internet Marketing Blog
A common challenge for corporate blogs is maintaining a steady stream of fresh content. To help, Adrian Mott provides recommendations ranging from implementing an “idea bucket” (an application that makes it easy for folks to submit their ideas about your products or services) to looking “at your analytics everyday and see what’s working and what’s not,” then analyzing why certain posts became popular and replicating that success. Another noteworthy post from HubSpot is 10 Ways Blogging Will Simplify Your Marketing Program, in which Rick Burnes outlines several beneficial results of blogging, from improved SEO and social media traffic to establishing thought leadership and brand building.
The best 50 blogging ideas to choose from by Future Perfect
Still wondering what to write about? Aswani Srivastava provides an outstanding list of topic ideas sure to jumpstart your muse, such as special events, news, book reviews, product reviews, “top tips,” definitions of terms specific to your industry, interviews, beginner’s guides, and if all else fails—soliciting guest posts.
How to find topics for your blog posts by My Blog
Mike Consol takes a different approach to coming up with new topics for blog posts. He looks at the headlines of some of the top posts on Google’s corporate blog (one of the most successful in existence) and reviews each to see how its subject matter might be applied to other blogs. Among the topics he ferrets out using this process: recent product or service enhancements, new partnerships, good causes supported, helpful tips and insights, or recent industry research.
A few mistakes that beginning bloggers should be aware of by Blog Design Studio
A brief but helpful list of common blogging mistakes new bloggers should avoid, including poor design, boring posts and ignoring SEO.
Real Time Search and It’s effect on Corporate Blogging by Chris Baggot’s Guide to Blogging
After stating that “the introduction of Real Time Search is yet another major signal that Social Media is an SEO tool more than anything else,” Chris Baggott proceeds to dissect Google’s approach to integrating “recency” signals from blogs and social networks into its search results.
Genoo Aims to Shake Up Marketing Automation Market
Sunday, February 14th, 2010Marketing automation / demand generation software enables marketers to build microsites and use content marketing to capture leads and nurture them through the buying process. Companies evaluating established providers such as Marketo, Eloqua, Silverpop’s B2B Engage and HubSpot would be well-advised to check out a relatively new contender as well—Genoo Marketing Automation.
The company’s new marketing automation platform enables users to create complete websites as well as microsites and landing pages, automatically send emails triggered by specific actions, configure lead scoring, and integrate with Salesforce.com. Because Genoo is a SaaS offering and includes a flexible and powerful (Genoo’s own website runs on their platform) yet easy-to-use content management system (CMS) that allows non-technical users to create websites and pages, marketing departments can implement and use the product with little or no IT involvement.
Features include:
- Point-and-click stylesheet editing, enabling users to create a custom look and feel without any knowledge of HTML or CSS;
- Javascript headers and footers, making it easy to add web analytics tracking code such as for Google Analytics;
- Ability to add Flash files anywhere on a page;
- Auto-generated email messages to marketing or sales personnel based on action taken, which can even place the lead’s email address in the “From” field for easy reply;
- Flexible options for Salesforce.com integration, such as the ability to push lead information into specific campaigns;
- Ability to set up an automated sequence of activities based on user actions (e.g. downloading a file, clicking a link in an email) to provide relevant content;
- No limit on the size or number of visits permitted to microsites.
Pricing starts at $199 per month for a single user and microsite, with no limit on the number of leads in the account, plus $8.50 per 1,000 emails sent. Additional marketing users (with full editing privileges) are $49 per month, while sales users (access to leads only, with ability to update information about a lead, synchronize with their Salesforce.com account, view lead interest profile or push leads back to nurturing from within their Salesforce.com account) are $9.95 per month. Large companies can opt to pay a one-time fee of $2,500 for unlimited sales users.
For a truly custom design, the company will convert a layered PhotoShop file into a Genoo template for $500.
With a boatload of advanced features and an affordable price point, Genoo hopes to earn a spot on the shortlist for any marketing automation / lead gen purchase.
Note: this post was originally published on the WebMarketCentral blog in September 2009.
Social Media Marketing Tips from the Experts: Rick Burnes
Monday, January 25th, 2010Late last year, I sat in on a couple of social media marketing webinars from two of the best: Rick Burnes, Marketing Manager at HubSpot, and Chris Abraham of Abraham Harrison, along with Sally Falkow of Expansion Plus. Here are some of the key takeaways on using social media effectively. This post will review recommendations from Rick Burnes, while a follow-up post will present ideas from Chris and Sally.
According to Rick, inbound marketing is a magnet, attracting new business to your enterprise. Outbound marketing is a sledgehammer, barraging prospects with advertising hoping they will form a positive association with your brand in exchange for interrupting what you are reading, watching or listening to. Outbound marketing can work, as it has in the past for big companies like McDonalds and P&G, but it’s very expensive (and intrusive). Contrast those brands with companies like Google, Amazon and Facebook, which have achieved success with very little advertising but great products and a broad online presence.
Rick divided inbound marketing into two areas, “attract” and “convert.” His formulas for these are:
Helpful web content + blogging tools +SEO +social media = attraction.
Well-designed landing pages + email newsletters/marketing + calls to action = conversion.
The cost of inbound marketing (PPC, SEO, email, blogs, social media) is significantly less than the cost of traditional outbound marketing. Publications (online and offline) have traditionally sold advertising space. But sites like Facebook, Twitter and Digg are essentially “social search engines” that enable prospective customers to find content recommended by their friends and peers, which is both much more powerful than advertising and much lower cost (at least direct cost, though creating great content does require resources). Rick noted at that time that 15% of HubSpot’s website traffic was driven by social media.
For those new to social media, Rick recommended staring by signing up on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, then working these online venues like a “cocktail party.” Find interesting conversions and join in, socially—being helpful, but not with a hard sell approach. Meet people, build relationships, ask and answer questions, build trust, and build a reputation for being knowledgeable and helpful. To start, listen. Then listen some more. Build some relationships. Then share content; this is what drives people back to your site and/or blog and generates referral traffic.
Tools: search for your company name, competitors and industry terms on Twitter to discover who’s talking and what’s being said. Google Blog search and Technorati are helpful blog search tools, and Google Reader is great for listening. Use keyword search on TwitterGrader and tools like MrTweet to find interesting Twitterers to follow. Revver was recommended for video sharing.
Develop a reputation by participating in Q&A though Facebook discussions, Yahoo Answers and LinkedIn Q&A and group discussions.
Social media sharing is not like advertising—it spreads across your social network and their followers. You probably already share great content, but when was the last time you “shared” an advertisement with anyone? Content that is not frequently shared includes product information, free trials and software documentation. Content that is shared includes new data and reports, amusing videos and useful blog posts.
For social media marketing, your blog is “ground zero.” This should be the focal point of social media efforts, but additional avenues for sharing great content include podcasts, videos, photos, presentations, eBooks and even social news releases. This is “marketing by publishing” rather than advertising. The type of content you develop and share should be what’s important to your audience, not just information about your products or services.
Conversion is the process of turning visitors into opportunities, opportunities into leads, and leads into customers. It’s accomplished by including calls to action everywhere (on your blog, at the end of videos, in news releases, etc.) with links to landing pages. An effective landing page has limited navigation; an incentive for response (e.g. a white paper, report or webinar registration); and a contact form, kept “above the fold” and as short as possible. In order to generate quality leads, it’s imperative to know your audience and write for them.
Success can be measured using tools like TwitterGrader, Facebook Grader and tracking referral sources through web analytics software such as Google Analytics. Succeeding in business with social media requires a constant stream of new content, which is why blogging and other forms of content creation are critical. Content can come from anywhere; for example, when answering a complex question from a colleague or customer, consider turning that answer into a blog post. Marketers need to look for opportunities to create content everywhere, developing a “content mindset.”
Advertising is high cost but requires a relatively low time commitment. Social media marketing is the opposite; there are few direct costs, but the time requirement is substantial.
Finally, social media marketing can be applied to virtually any industry; it’s a matter of searching to find out where your customers, prospects and industry influencers are congregating, then joining the conversation.
FTC Disclosure Notice: I have absolutely no financial relationship with HubSpot whatsoever, and have not been compensated for this post in any way—other than hopefully a few retweets.
