Approximately six months ago I started training (consistently) in what is known as Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, based on a recommendation of a friend of mine Chris Reichert.

Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu or “Bjj” as often nicknamed online is a martial art, combat sport and self defense system that focuses on grappling and ground fighting. It’s been made widely popular by the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) and is a very important discipline that Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) fighters must master to be any good.

I’ve been a long time UFC and MMA fan, but I had never really considered training in Bjj. I met Chris at Ad-Tech San Francisco, Ian Fernando had introduced us and Chris had got me hooked on the idea of trying it out. It took me most of the summer to actually pick a school and go to my first lesson but by the end of August 2011, I started.

And so it began. I was pretty much hooked from the minute that I started. I was training about 3 times a week (sometimes more, sometimes less) and I quickly started relating a lot that I was learning in Bjj class to my marketing.

The first major breakthrough I had was learning how to truly stay calm in any situation. Right from the very first class, which I was rolling (they call sparring rolling in Bjj) with a guy that was 100 pound heavier than me and I quickly realized that I was not going to be able to over-power this guy and that my mind was the only thing that was going to allow me to win. In marketing terms, I couldn’t just go and buy a bunch of traffic wildly, I had to actually dissect several different traffic sources and figure out which ones I could tweak here and there to get the sales that I needed.

This became a recurring theme in my earlier days of starting Bjj. I was rolling with people much heavier than me and I had to use my mind to figure out how to win. My ego got in the way a little bit in the early days and even though I was 100 pounds less I tried to use my strength to overpower the bigger opponent. It worked sometimes, but usually I would just tire myself out. It’s like buying up a ton of un-targeted traffic and hoping that it converted without having the proper tracking tools or analytics in place.

So, here I am going to Jiu-Jitsu class 3 times a week and these guys that are 100 pounds bigger than me are climbing on me and trying to choke me out, break my limbs off, you name it. Ok, they weren’t literally trying to break my limbs off, but pretty close to it with some of these crazy submissions that are out there!

I had to come up with a new game plan on how I could conquer this new traffic source… err, martial art venture. I had to do something better than these guys that were bigger than me and stronger than me and trying to take my head off.

The one thing I realized quicker than most people that start off Bjj is that often times it comes down to which guy remains the calmest, uses the least energy necessary to accomplish what they want to accomplish. I quickly started to adapt a minimalist approach where I would only exert energy when I absolutely had to or saw a opening. That’s not to say that I was always playing defense, I try to stay on the offensive constantly just like I do in Internet Marketing.

This approach of using the least energy allowed me to last longer than my opponents that were 100 pounds bigger than me as well as much stronger. Essentially I was tiring them out and letting then use all their energy, then going in to finish them off if I hadn’t already. This calmer smarter approach started to work better and better and I quickly was beating guys right off the bat that were so much bigger than me without having to tire them out.

It’s like a human chess match, which to me marketing is the same way. You are constantly trying to outsmart or out maneuver your competition, or strategically setup some crafty advertising campaigns while having a plan B and plan C in place if your ads get declined or if the traffic runs dry.

Either way, I think a lot of marketers would benefit from joining a Bjj class. When you start off the day having another person trying to choke the life out of you, it only goes up hill from there. I’ve learned to stay calm under even the toughest situations.

My marketing mind is at an all time high. I’m calm, confident and even the worst of problems are not going to frustrate me or cause me to deviate from technique. Reckless power or speed solely to beat an opponent or make money online is probably not going to work. If your technique is the best you will probably be the victor. Technique over everything.

Here’s a video that Chris sent me that I thought is a good representation of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.

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Daily Conversions

Courses in Online Marketing

This week for our courses in online marketing (marketing online) we are going to be taking a look at Pinterest, the new social media craze that is taking the web by storm.  Pinterest is a social media site where its users can create digital categorized bulletin boards that they can share publicly or with their friends.  Pinterest is attractive because it gives its users an outlet to express themselves through sharing pictures that define their lifestyle.  Popular pins are centered around fashion, design, recipes, and other aesthetically pleasing pictures.  This is important to include in our courses in online marketing (marketing online) because including pictures that include your products, infographics, or just company lifestyle could bring back great links to your site if your post goes viral.

Courses in Online Marketing | Stories of Successful Pinsters

For our first section in courses in online marketing (marketing online) for Pinterest, we just want to show you the basics and some tips that will make it really easy to access from your favorite browser whenever you need to post a pic.

We make a note to include how to use these social media sites as a user in all of our courses in online marketing (marketing online), because you need to know how your customers are using the site in order for you to dominate.  Here’s a crash course in getting started with your Pinterest account by Salon:

Once you’re in, simply install a “Pin it!” bookmarklet in your favorite Web browser. From that point on, any time you see a gorgeous photo online, simply click “Pin it!” and a popup window will appear, allowing you to add that photo to one of several photo collections, or “boards,” you maintain on Pinterest.

Pinterest operates on a follower-following basis, just like Facebook and Twitter. You can jump-start your Pinterest network by connecting your FB and Twitter user names. That will populate your Pinterest wall with your friends’ pinned images, and show your pins to people who follow you.

If you’re a business, it might be best to try and add all or many of the fans that liked your Facebook page.  You could easily get this work done by using Fivver and contracting it out to an outsourcer for cheap.  Go ahead and search for people that pin images that are related to your company’s niche market.  Lets move on to step two in courses in online marketing (marketing online).

Courses in Online Marketing | Don’t Make it Obvious

If you take anything away from courses in online marketing (marketing online) for Pinterest then remember to never make your bulletins too sales related.

Mashable explains why in their courses for online marketing (marketing online) for Pinterest:

Pinterest calls for a more holistic approach to marketing, and it can be more effective and engaging than traditional advertising because the consumers can really see how your brand fits into their lives. For example,Bon Appetit can’t just pin pictures from the website or magazine, but it can pin images of cooking appliances, beautiful kitchen decor, cutlery, dinner parties and delicious creations or recipes — basically anything related to cooking and food. Seeing these culinary items will continually drive home the Bon Appetit brand, thus making pinners more familiar with and more likely to trust the brand, visit the website and maybe even subscribe to the magazine.

Courses in Online Marketing | Designers This is For You

Pinterest is all about the images and therefore this is a place where designers can shine.  These courses in online marketing (marketing online) recommend that you find someone in your company that with a creative sense or design talent to make your images stand out amongst the rest.

Salon gives us their strong opinion about the importance of design on Pinterest.

While many of the good moms using Pinterest aren’t clued in to the latest design looks, they are a madly appreciative crowd — if you offer up your gorgeous images, you will be met with copious applause. Anyone posting their portfolio to Behance or Core77 should double up with a little Pinterest test. After all, Pinterest users are well-educated, affluent females who likely wield serious hiring power in between Pinterest coffee breaks.

http://www.salon.com/2012/02/21/your_pinterest_cheat_sheet/singleton/

If any of our readers have anything to add to our courses in online marketing (marketing online) for Pinterest, please leave them in the comments below.

Image attribution:

If you enjoyed reading “Courses in Online Marketing: Pinterest” then read more right here at BlackBoxSocialMedia.

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Social Media Marketing And SEO For Business

Tracking your marketing analytics can provide a ton of great insight into the performance of your marketing initiatives, show your boss how marketing is faring, and help you to prove that inbound marketing is really paying off.

But that’s only a small piece of why analytics are valuable. In fact, the true value of your analytics is what you can do with them. Good marketers use analytics for the first few things we mentioned. Great marketers use them to adapt, improve, and modify their marketing efforts. In other words, great marketers make their analytics actionable.

Oh, so you want to be one of those great marketers? Well here are 9 ways to make your analytics actionable.

Use Your Analytics To…

1) … Identify Which Topics to Blog About

Use your blog analytics to determine which topics resonate with your target audience. To do so, group blog articles by topic (for HubSpot customers, export Blog Analytics and then sort in Excel) and then take a look at the views for those individual blog posts. Do you notice a trend in how certain topics perform compared to others?

Adapt your strategy to create more content about the topics your marketing personas care about, and less about the topics that don’t resonate. For example, if you’re a unicorn breeder and you blog about various unicorn care-related topics, you might find that your readers are more interested in topics about unicorn diet than unicorn exercise. If that’s the case, you should create more content about healthy unicorn diets!

2) … Refine Your SEO Strategy

Unless you’re just getting started, hopefully you’ve already conducted some initial keyword research to inform your SEO strategy. But if you want to take it to the next level and start refining your strategy, the SEO analytics you’ve built up to this point can play a very important role in deciding which keywords to target in your link-building and content creation efforts.

Take a look at your closed-loop analytics to determine which keywords have driven the most traffic, leads, and customers for your business. This will give you a sense of which keywords people are already using to find you, and which keywords are actually sending you qualified traffic (i.e. the keywords that contribute to leads and customers). Using this information, you might want to start targeting other long-tail keyword variations based on these high performing keywords.

You can also use this data to identify holes in your content creation strategy. If you’re generating a lot of traffic for a given keyword or phrase (maybe you have an awesome blog article that ranks highly for it, for example), yet none of that traffic is converting, it could be that you have no marketing offers relevant to that keyword for visitors to convert on. With that information, you could create new offers to address that problem and start capitalizing on all that lost traffic.

3) … Decide Which Social Media Sites to Spend Your Time On

With so many social media sites at your disposal, it can be hard to prioritize how much time you should be spending on each one. Let analytics be your guide. Look at your traffic sources granularly to see how much traffic and how many leads each social media site is referring to your website. For many marketers, LinkedIn is the top lead generator among the social networks, but this may be different for you.

You should also used closed-loop data to determine how many of those visitors and leads are actually converting into customers for each social channel. Then allocate your time accordingly. If you’re generating little traffic, leads, and customers from Twitter, for example, but are seeing a lot of ROI from Facebook, spend more of your time engaging your Facebook community and less time tweeting.

4) … Determine Email Frequency

Are you emailing your list too much — or not enough? To determine this, you’ll also need to do a little testing, but the insights you’ll gain from your analytics as a result will help you determine your optimal email sending frequency. First, figure out your hypothesis. Are you trying to see if increasing your email frequency yields increased conversions? Perhaps you want to see if decreasing your sending frequency results in fewer unsubscribes than usual.

Once you’ve used you analytics to segment your communications (see what we did there?), choose a segment of your list to use as your sample, and use email marketing metrics provided by your email service provider such as open rate, deliverability rate, unsubscribe rate, and click-through rate to establish the current benchmarks for that specific segment. Now create a series of emails, and send them using the frequency you decided upon in your hypothesis (maybe it’s increasing from once every two weeks to once a week, for example). When the test is over, compare your analytics from the test against the analytics from your previous sending frequency. Do the results align with your hypothesis?

5) … Decide Which Content to Use in Lead Nurturing Campaigns

Not sure which content you should use in your lead nurturing email campaigns? As you’re mapping the content you use to a lead’s stage in the sales cycle, you’ll want to fill in that content map with the most successful content you have. So how do you identify which of your content performs the best? You check your analytics, that’s how!

Use your landing page analytics to determine which marketing offers have the highest conversion rates and contributed to the most lead-to-customer conversions. When you’re choosing the best content for a particular lead nurturing campaign, choose the most relevant offer with the highest lead-to-customer conversions.

5) … Segment Your Email Communications

Are you segmenting your email communication? MarketingSherpa reports that emails that have been tailored to specific audiences through segmentation get 50% more clicks than their counterparts. If that’s not reason to start segmenting, I’m not sure what is. But if you want to start improving the performance of your email sends through segmentation, guess what you need? You guessed it: data!

There are a number of ways you can segment your email communications: by geography (especially if you’re a business for which location is a major factor), by industry/role, by  content interests, by point in the sales cycle, etc. To determine which segments make the most sense for your particular business, take a look at the data you already have available. Analyze the information you gather from your leads via lead-capture forms and lead intelligence. Figure out the most logical groupings based on your buyer personas, the information your recipients want from you, the questions they might have, or their stage in the buying cycle. For HubSpot customers, the List Creation Tool makes it easy to segment emails, and the Marketing Automation Tool allows you to trigger email communication based on specific visitor activities on your website.

7) … Improve Your Calls-to-Action and Landing Pages

When was the last time you did a little audit of how your calls-to-action (CTAs) and landing pages were faring, and how they complement each other? Have you ever? Analyzing the click-through rates of your CTAs as well as the traffic and conversion rates of the landing pages they point to can reveal a lot about how effective each asset is, and also provide hints to what can be improved about them. (Note: HubSpot customers can get this data from the Call-to-Action Module and the Landing Pages Tool, respectively.)

For example, if you have a high click-through rate on your CTA but the conversion rate of the landing page it points to is low, then you probably have a problem with your landing page. If your landing page has a killer conversion rate but you find that traffic to that page is low, then it’s likely the CTA for it is the element that needs work.

So what do you do after your initial diagnosis? Start A/B testing! When it comes to CTA and landing page design, a little tweak can go a long way to improve click-through and conversion rates. Here’s a great guide to landing page testing, and another one for CTA testing. For HubSpot customers, A/B testing is easy with the CTA Module and the Advanced Landing Pages Tool.

… Score & Prioritize Your Leads for Sales

Lead scoring is a great way to help your sales team prioritize your leads and only work those that are qualified. If you’re a business that generates lots of leads and you want to implement a lead scoring program, there’s no way around it — you’re going to need to rely on your analytics to set it up. First things first: you need to decide what a marketing qualified lead (MQL) looks like for your business.

An MQL is a lead who is more likely to become a customer compared to other leads based on their demographic information and their activity on your site before they become a customer. To paint a picture of what an MQL means for your business, you’ll need to gather three types of data from your analytics: demographic information, lead intelligence, and closed-loop data. Demographic information is data you gather from your lead-capture forms to tell you about a lead’s role, company size/industry, etc. Lead intelligence data will give you information about a lead’s interests and activity on your website (e.g. forms completed, number of pages visited, etc.). Closed-loop data can tell you which conversion events you offer on your website have the highest close rates.

Combining this data together will help you identify which criteria make for a marketing qualified lead. Then you can assign point values to these criteria depending on which are more critical than others and decide on a total score that warrants a lead being passed onto Sales. Then your sales team will have a very numerical way to prioritize which leads to work, and which leads they should let marketing nurture more.

For a more in-depth explanation of how to implement a lead scoring process, read this post. HubSpot users can leverage the Lead Management Tool and the Lead Grader App to set lead scoring criteria, auto-score, and re-score leads in real time.

9) … Focus on the Marketing Channels That Actually Work

While we’re on the topic, lead scoring isn’t the only thing you can do with closed-loop data. Another very valuable benefit of closed-loop data is that it lets you compare how effective each of your channels is compared to others. Similar to how you’d use analytics to decide which social media channels are worth your time, you can use your analytics to see which marketing channels — social media vs. email vs. SEO vs. blogging vs. paid search vs. any other channel — are the most effective at generating actual customers for your business, and which ones are lagging behind.

If you notice that email is your best source of customers and that SEO and blogging generate few customers for your business, for example, you could be missing out on a huge opportunity. Invest time in ramping up your blogging efforts and better optimizing your blog content and the rest of your website so more people can find you through search. Or perhaps you’re spending a lot of time on your social presence, but the leads you generate from social media never actually turn into customers (but leads generated from your blog have a high customer conversion rate); it might be wise to start directing more social media traffic to your blog rather than to dedicated landing pages.

Thinking critically about your closed-loop analytics can help you determine which channels are your bread winners and which aren’t so you can adjust your efforts accordingly to make the time you spend marketing more fruitful.

How else can you use your analytics to make actionable improvements to your marketing programs?

Image Credit: Courtney Dirks

Connect with HubSpot:

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HubSpot’s Inbound Internet Marketing Blog

Just recently, Pinterest hit more than 10 million unique visitors, making it one of the fastest growing websites ever. In the past six months, visits to Pinterest grew by 4,000%, receiving 11 million hits in just one week.

Despite its rapid adoption, I often hear, “I don’t get Pinterest,” or “It’s only useful when planning a wedding.” I hear you, and I felt the same way.

But let me tell you something. Pinterest is ridiculously simple, and it can make a big impact on your business. I’m not saying this for the sake of jumping on the bandwagon. It’s not “just another social media site.” This one is different. Pinterest is doing a great job of driving traffic, leads, and sales.

Here are 5 great reasons your business should start using Pinterest for marketing now:

1. Pinterest Converts More Browsers Into Buyers

What’s unique about Pinterest compared to most social media websites, is that it reduces the number of steps from discovery to conversion. This means that visitors from Pinterest convert into leads or sales faster than from other social media sources.

Take Twitter, for example. If a user sees a tweet regarding a product, it’s less likely that a user will buy that product from just one tweet — unless maybe when it’s celebrity-endorsed. Willing to fork over $ 10k for a Kim Kardashian-sponsored tweet? I didn’t think so.

Josh Davis of LLsocial.com clearly explains the workings of Pinterest buying behavior:

“For retailers, the path to purchase from a social network is no more direct than on Pinterest. ‘See it, like it, buy it’ happens frequently … Even in cases where the path to purchase is not as direct, rarely do you have a social network where linking to for-sale items is done so frequently. You have clear social proof of the desire for the item, you see a picture of it, and you are only one or two clicks away from being on an ecommerce site.”

This is a dream come true for businesses. Pinterest helps increase conversion rates and reduce sales cycles. Who doesn’t love that?

2. Pinterest Drives Tons of Traffic

Ten million unique views is not chump change. That’s a lot for any website, but it’s especially noteworthy for one so new. If you rely on your website to fuel your sales and marketing, you need to generate traffic in order to increase leads or sales. Pinterest is a great tool for increasing links back to your website, thus driving more traffic.

In fact, early research indicates that Pinterest is more effective at steering traffic back to a website compared to other social media sites, even Facebook. Josh Davis includes some interesting stats on his blog:

• Pinterest is now driving more traffic to the Real Simple website than Facebook is.
• Warbly Parker, the hip but inexpensive eye glass retailer, reports that 11% of its social traffic is coming from Pinterest. 18% is coming from Twitter.
• Like many early bloggers, Kate Bryan managed a blog that was based around her interests, but it never generated many readers. She blogged about her professions of hairstyling and jewelry making, and also her craft projects. Hairstyles are extremely popular pins on Pinterest. Kate started pinning her own work and rapidly started generating traffic. In five months, she achieved over 14,000 new subscribers to her site as well as generating over one million page views from Pinterest.

We’ve even seen it here at HubSpot. Pinterest is already driving more referral traffic than Google+, and we’ve only just begun using it.

3. Pins Get You More Inbound Links

As marketers, we love it when people share our content and link back to us.

What’s awesome about Pinterest is that every pin includes a link, leading back to the source of the image. “Links built through images are some of the best links you can acquire when it comes to actual engagement,” says John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing. About 95% of the images on Pinterest were either pinned or re-pinned from the web.

With Pinterest’s growing popularity, this could provide you with very valuable inbound links. While these are nofollow links, any link directing visitors back to your website is always beneficial.

4. User Engagement Is Addictively High

I admit it: I’m addicted to Pinterest. It happened overnight, without warning. And this is coming from someone who, just a few weeks ago, didn’t think Pinterest was worth the time. And I’m not alone. I’ve heard the same from so many others. Even for those who deny it. Yes, I see your pins on Facebook!

Pinterest users are far from passive. Case in point; I can’t not share stuff when I’m on Pinterest. John Jantsch states:

“Unlike many social sites, where the game is to get followers, Pinterest users seem very content to simply find stuff and share it with small groups. Pinterest users are keenly interested in what’s hot and what’s cool – a behavior that translates well into the kind of influencer marketers desire to attract.”

This is a good sign for businesses and retailers, because it means your pins are more likely to be seen, touched, or better yet, go viral. I believe the main reason for such high engagement is that it’s so easy to digest information on Pinterest merely because it’s visual. Scanning tons of images is easier and far more enjoyable than scanning hundreds of tweets, for example.

5. Pinterest Integrates With Your Website, Twitter Account, and Facebook Profile

What seems to be a critical factor to success for social media websites is connectivity. These sites can’t get away with being a silo, and Pinterest has identified that right out of the gate.

The site now connects with Facebook, according to a recent Open Graph announcement, enabling users to automatically post new pins to their Facebook news feed for others to see. This means more eyes from other channels get access to the images you post to Pinterest. That being said, for marketers, right now Pinterest only connects with Facebook profiles, not business pages, so there is no way for marketers to automatically share their pins to their Facebook pages. In order to do so, marketers must manually share the link to the pin on their business page.

However, if marketers sign up for Pinterest using the same email address used for their corporate Twitter account, they can automatically share the pins they post to their Twitter account.

Additionally, marketers can add a ‘Pin It’ button to their website and blog (similar to other social media sharing buttons). This makes pinning products or visual content for site visitors super easy.

6. Discover What Your Audience Loves

Pinterest is a great place to discover trends. From marketing to fashion and beyond, you can discover what people love to share. You can follow your followers to see what inspires them. This gives you an opportunity to understand what’s hot today and use that information to position your own offers and products. I would imagine that, down the line, Pinterest will eventually make it easy to see trending data in specific categories.

As Pinterest evolves, I’m sure there will be even more great reasons to get started on this fast-growing social network. Businesses are already receiving first-mover advantage in their industries by leveraging the platform to drive traffic, leads and sales. Just yesterday, I purchased clothing I found from pins posted by a women’s golf apparel line, and I never would have discovered them if that business wasn’t using Pinterest.

So, are you ready to get started? If so, learn how to use Pinterest for business using our brand new Pinterest ebook!

Image credit: Marqui

Connect with HubSpot:

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HubSpot’s Inbound Internet Marketing Blog

The (True) Story

It was late on a Friday night. My wife and I had been busy all day and all night. Now it was nearly 10:00pm, and we had not had dinner. I called into a favorite local place for takeout. We were both starving and were excited to have a late dinner date at home together.

When I got back home and opened up my meal (chicken), I found an incredibly small amount of chicken. I was very disappointed. In my opinion, I would have gotten more chicken in a kid’s meal from McDonalds.

The Thing This Business Did Right (Social Media Marketing)

When I was picking up the meals, I had to wait a few minutes for them to finish it up. While waiting, I noticed something on their counter, by the registers. They were promoting the fact that they were “now on Facebook,” and asking for people to come and like them on Facebook so that they could be notified of Facebook-only specials.

This was a great way to help people become aware that they were now on Facebook, and gave their customers incentive to like and follow them. To learn more best practices, see this post about best social media practices for 2012.

My Social Media Action

In my disappointment that night, remembering that they were now on Facebook, I snapped a picture of my disappointing meal, “liked” them on Facebook (it killed me to do that, but I had to), and then posted my picture on their wall, explaining my displeasure.

Their Social Media Reaction (Social Media Marketing Mistake)

I got up the next morning anxious to see if they had replied. What I found was not a reply from them, not a direct Facebook message, but that my post had been deleted from their wall! “Are you kidding me!!” I said out loud (and by out loud I mean LOUD). I am pretty sure that I startled my wife who was not completely awake yet.

My Social Media Reaction to their Reaction

Needless to say, I was not happy about them removing my post. I emphatically and rather quickly, reposted the picture with my displeasure of the portion size and then made a comment asking them to “please not remove my post” from their wall.

Their Reaction to my Social Media Tirade

It did not take them but 1-2 hours before they found my post and removed it once again. They still did not contact me privately either. No apologies, no trying to make things right and no explanation. They simply removed my post once again.

Now the Gloves were Off

Now in all fairness to them, they had no idea I knew anything about social media. However, that shouldn’t matter. The fact is there are going to be unhappy customers and you need to address them in your social media channels as well as converse with those that are happy. It could have been a simple apology, and a message along the lines of “we will contact you to resolve this.” Then everything after that could have been behind “closed doors” as it were; but that’s not what they did.

I was more than just an unhappy customer at this point, I was angry. Instead of reposting on their Facebook wall where they would likely take it down yet again, I simply went looking for online review sites to leave negative reviews for them and to tell of my experience with their “customer service”.

Lessons You Should Learn from This

• Your social media properties are an extension of your customer service. DO NOT IGNORE your customer’s complaints on these properties.
• Engagement is key to success with social media, with both good and bad experiences. Here are some interesting facts on small business and social media marketing.
• With unhappy customers, address them quickly on the “public” forum in which they posted and the contact them to handle it “behind closed doors.” If you handle it right, you will not only have a customer for life, you will have an advocate telling everyone about how professionally they handled your complaint. For the record, I have also had this experience as a customer, and I am an advocate for that business now because of the way they handled my experience.
• Addressing bad experiences professionally and promptly with social media is a great way to advertise your commitment to a high level of customer service. Every company gets complaints, so don’t feel like you have to hide anything.
• Like it or not, customers have a power over your business that they have always had – wait, did I say “that they have always had’? Yes, I did! Word of mouth has always an incredibly powerful factor in hurting (or helping) businesses. The difference is you have a chance to be part of that conversation now.
• Some customers will be angry enough to leave negative reviews on review sites, such as Yelp, Google Maps, or Foursquare, when you ignore their outburst on the internet.

If you’ve seen any similar examples of bad social media, share your experiences of social media marketing mistakes in the comments below and start a discussion on what could have been improved.

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SEO.com

St. Valentine’s Day has become one of the biggest events in the retail calendar. Second only to Christmas, it is a huge money maker for brands, with 32% of gifts being bought online. In America, it is expected that a whopping $ 3.5billion will be spent on jewellery alone. Men are the biggest spenders, buying all sorts of gifts for their loved ones, from flowers, to chocolates, to dinners out and weekends away – and they are more likely than women to buy elaborate gifts. With such huge revenue opportunities, ask yourself… how well did your brand perform and what can be done to improve performance for next year?

1.       Planning

People start searching for Valentine’s Day gifts around mid-January, with momentum picking up pace at the beginning of February. The biggest sales days are the 5^th and 6^th of February, with the week running up to the 14^th February characterised by frenzied and frantic last-minute gift buying. This means brands have to get their thinking cap on and start planning well in advance. Think about what worked well the previous year and act on it. The earlier you start, the wider the audience you will reach.

2.       Segmentation

Not everyone on Valentine’s Day will be expecting to receive a gift. Not every woman is going to appreciate a ‘Perfect Earrings for the Lovely Lady in Your Life’ branded email.  Segment your market by the gifts they may buy. A Facebook ad campaign is a particularly good way to go about this, as they have the ability to target your audience by their age, location, gender, relationship status, etc. Also, look at who bought from you last year and be sure to target them with a special message.

3.       Sending Out The Right Message

Once you’ve segmented your audience, it’s time to create a customised message for their wants and needs. People are price sensitive and they’re looking for a good deal and great service. An Email Marketing Campaign can be a great place to start. Make sure you have a punchy subject line, that you feature suitable products for the segment you’re targeting and include other special deals you might have on. Use a range of social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to promote your offering and utilise your blog if you have one. Solve the problem for those who don’t have a clue about gift buying for their lover and encourage them to strike while the iron’s hot.

4.       Your Website

Now that you’ve made sure you’re getting the message out to your contacts and social media followers, it’s time to target anyone visiting your site. Make sure your homepage clearly promotes your Valentine’s Day offering. Give the landing page a makeover with red, pink and beautiful hearts and be sure to include on every page of your website information about delivery and shopping cut-off dates.

5.       Get Creative

You don’t need to be in the chocolate or flower industry to benefit from this holiday and reap the financial rewards. You will, however, have to be creative if you are not in the traditional industries associated with this romantic holiday.  Create a video. Use Valentine’s Day inspired discount codes. Partner with a company that offers complimentary products to yours. Create a special Valentine’s Day product. Run a Valentine’s competition on your social media platforms. Use this holiday to drive traffic to your site and increase engagement.

© SEOptimise – Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. Valentine’s Day Marketing Strategy – Did Your Brand Get it Right?

Related posts:

1. Who Should Represent Your Brand on the Social Web?
2. Google Freshness Update – what it means for your brand
3. International SEO Strategy – Domains, Subdomains or Subfolders?

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Over the past few years, QR Codes have become more mainstream and can be seen in most day-to-day activities. There are examples of some very good uses of QR Codes as well as some badly thought out QR Codes.

QR Codes are great for getting offline marketing messages online quickly. Adding QR Codes to typical offline marketing material such as posters, flyers, business cards or event badges allows the user to see the message instantly.

With all these offline marketing activities being used, how can the business track what is working and what isn’t? Well, with Google Analytics and I am sure most other analytics packages, you can put tracking codes directly into the QR Code and track when users scan the code.

Below is a step by step guide to tracking QR Codes in Google Analytics.

1. Choose the URL that you would like the QR code that you are generating to return once scanned.

Example: www.oxondigital.co.uk/register/

2. Now create your campaign tracking code that you will use to identify the traffic that you receive from the different marketing activity you are running. You can do that by either using the Google URL Builder tool or my GDocs campaign tracking spreadsheet.

Example:

Campaign Source: University-Flyer
Campaign Medium: QR
*Campaign Content:
Campaign Name: OxonDigital4

This will provide you with the following URL to use:

http://www.oxondigital.co.uk/register/?utm_source=university-flyer&utm_medium=qr&utm_campaign=oxondigital4

*Using the campaign content tag you can differentiate between the ads. In the example above I could have used the Campaign Content to differentiate between the different campuses (Wheatley, Headington, Botley).

3. Now that you have your URL with the correct tracking code, you need to find a QR Code generator or use one of the following:

- http://createqrcode.appspot.com/
- http://qrcode.kaywa.com/
- http://goqr.me/

The example below shows the outcome of what we have just created. Give it a try by scanning the QR Code on your smart phone.

4. Now place the QR code on the relevant marketing material that you are going to distribute.

5. To see the results of the tracking code, you need to go to Traffic Sources > Campaigns

6. Now that you have your campaign data you are more than likely wanting to delve further into your analytics to see metrics such as types of devices and locations.

To do this you will need to create an advanced segment or two. This can be done in a number of ways, two of which I have shown below.

Segment 1

Include > Metric = Medium > Exactly Matches > Campaign Medium (QR)

This segment will bring back results that were generated using the campaign medium name of QR.

Segment 2

If you are using lots of different QR Codes you might want to split them by campaign name and campaign medium to delve into the specific marketing channel at the time.

Include > Metric = Medium > Exactly Matches > Campaign Medium (QR)

AND

Include > Metric = Campaign > Exactly Matches > Campaign Name (OxonDigital4)

Once you have created your segments, you will be able to delve further into the data you have received.

The above shows you how you can track your QR code. So whether you put them on a poster, event ticket, t-shirt or coffee cup, you will be able to see what traffic they have generated to your targeted page and/or website.

How do you use QR Codes? Are you making sure that you are tracking your offline marketing channels with techniques such as QR Codes? I look forward to hearing your thoughts in the comments below or on Twitter @danielbianchini

Thanks to Dan Barker for help on some aspects of this post
<image credit>

© SEOptimise – Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. Tracking Your QR Codes to Bring Offline Marketing Online

Related posts:

1. Tracking Online Marketing Campaigns in Google Analytics
2. Google Analytics Location Tracking Changes: Where Has London Gone?
3. Social Media Marketing

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It puzzles me that the SEO industry and the content marketing industries rarely talk to each other. While there is some modest overlap, by and large, the two worlds keep to themselves on blogs, twitter, and even with having separate conferences. This strikes me as a missed opportunity for both industries. I believe there’s a lot we can learn from each other and in this post and more over the coming weeks, I’d like to bridge the gap between the two industries and foster communication and discussion between SEOs and content marketers.

Why SEOs Should Care About Content Marketing

We demand budgets and resources from our clients in order to produce content. We are hungry for and passionate about content. And not just content that will rank for keywords, but content that will be remarkable- content that will earn links and content that will convert users into customers. We should care about content marketing. We should understand how it works, how brands produce content, and what innovation looks like. There is rumbling within the SEO industry towards more cross-disciplinary inbound marketing and as we make this shift and become involved in these projects, it will become crucial to understand how all the pieces of the puzzle fit together.

To be crystal clear, content marketing is not article marketing or spun press releases. We’re talking about editorial remarkable content that a brand can be proud of.

Content Marketing is Hot Right Now

Content marketing is undergoing massive growth right now and we’re seeing a revolution take place across all aspects of online marketing (marketing online). One of the most widely shared and high profile examples is Coke’s recent 2020 content strategy. These videos are long, but essential watching if you want to understand how brands are going to be spending their marketing budgets in the coming years:

Props to Joe Pulizzi for covering this originally.

Brands Are Becoming Publishers

As hinted at in the above videos, brands are starting to wake up to the fact that generating unique and compelling content is the key to winning online. As some are lamenting the death of the publishing industry, publishing for brands is undergoing a revolution. Brands like Redbull are leading the charge:

Red Bull, the popular energy drink, supports its content strategy with just that foundation, though, owning its very own Red Bull Media House. [...] RedBull.com covers all of its digital bases, with an offering of web TV, web radio, online games, newsfeeds and digital databases. [...] And to date, nearly 300 million YouTube views have been generated from Red Bull content, making Red Bull Media House one of the top five sports content producers on YouTube globally – source

Props to Erica at Contently for writing the post about Red Bull’s content strategy

But Smart Publishers Are Doing Just Fine, Thanks

Let’s not count the old school publishers as down and out just yet though. Those that get the web and embrace the new world of content consumption and marketing are thriving:

The Atlantic, the intellectual’s monthly that always seemed more comfortable as an academic exercise than a business, is on track to turn a tidy profit of $ 1.8 million this year. That would be the first time in at least a decade that it had not lost money – source

You should read the whole NYT piece on the profile of The Atlantic, it’s a fascinating #longread.

The Observer is profitable by a thin margin for the first time in its 24-year history. This is a big, big deal. – source

This is a quote from Elizabeth Spiers, Editor in Chief for the Observer, and is part of a fascinating look at the Observer one year in.

Everyone Is Producing Original Content

There’s a real macro trend here for companies to start producing original content. UGC-driven communities are doing it:

The popular social blogging site Tumblr is hiring writers and editors to cover the world of Tumblr. [...] “Basically, if Tumblr were a city of 42 million,” Ms. Bennett said, referring to the number of Tumblr blogs that exist, “I’m trying to figure out how we cover the ideas, themes and people who live in it.” – source

Content juggernauts like Netflix are doing it:

Up until now, Netflix has not had content in this first window. Instead, they’ve focused on the second or third or even fourth window. That is, they’ve shown content after it’s in theaters or on television for its initial run. And sometimes they don’t get content until after it’s been in theaters and then on television for quite some time. This catalog of content has been the service’s bread and butter.But with House of Cards, the game changes. For the first time, they’re going to get people signing up to Netflix to get first access to content. And if it’s as good as the talent behind it suggests, they might get a lot of people signing up for that very reason – source

A Focus On Engagement Is One Emergent Trend

Smart marketers have known this for a while: there’s real value in not only sucking users in with content, but also keeping them engaged once they hit the site.

in a front-page story in December, Donna St. George reported that black students in the D.C. area were suspended and expelled two to five times as often as whites. That story attracted 3,736 comments, more than 2,000 of those by 9 o’clock in the morning – source

Wow. By the way you should check out the full article where among other fascinating insights I learned that the Washington Post has 6 full time staff dedicated to comments.

From a technology perspective, I’m fascinated by features like Disqus Ranks that allows anyone to better reward and engage with commenters on their site.

Bold Content Plays Is Another Emergent Trend

Fortune favors the bold. There have been some bold redesigns and rethinking of the traditional blog format in recent times. I love the FastCo redesign:

Read more about the redesign here

And it’s worth noting that the Gawker redesign actually worked.

Disruptive Business Models Are Another

As the old-school traditional ad model starts to die out, we’ll see more innovative and disruptive revenue models for content. Retargeting is just the start of this revolution and we’ll see all kinds of crazy approaches. In particular I was struck by how Buzzfeed monetizes their site:

Its business model, in part, capitalizes on the mix of high and low content; instead of banner ads, BuzzFeed works with companies like Pillsbury to create content ideal for sharing, including “10 Things You Never Knew You Could Do With a Crescent Roll.” – source

What Can We Learn From All This?

I’m a fan of actionable insights and I think there are a few key takeaways that I can see:

1) Being Remarkable Produces Outsized Rewards

In the connected world in which we live, the difference between average content and bad content is hardly noticeable. In fact, the difference between good content and bad content is not that big. Truly, the only thing that really gets rewarded is remarkable content. If you’re investing in content production, always invest in the most amazing, ballsy, exceptional content that you can get your hands on because if you build it, they won’t come. This quote sums things up for me:

We’ve tried to work longer on stories for greater impact, and publish fewer quick-takes that we know you can consume elsewhere. We’re actually publishing, on average, roughly one-third fewer posts on Salon than we were a year ago (from 848 to 572 in December; 943 to 602 in January). So: 33 percent fewer posts; 40 percent greater traffic – source

This is a quote from a fascinating article about the growth of Salon.com – check the whole thing out

2) Hire a Chief Content Officer

I spoke about the need for a Chief Content Officer in my SearchLove presentation in NYC and this is a trend that businesses of all size need to follow. The key point here is that this role needs to be senior enough to oversee all kinds of content production. David Edelman agrees with me:

Our research shows that in companies where the marketing function takes on the role of publisher in chief—rationalizing the creation and flow of product related content— consumers develop a clearer sense of the brand and are better able to articulate the attributes of specific products. These marketers also become more agile with their content, readily adapting it to sales training videos and other new uses that ultimately enhance consumers’ decision journey – source

This is a quote from the full version of this article (which you’ll need to register to be able to read) and the whole thing is well worth a read.

3) Invest in Page Types

As Sonia points out at Copyblogger, every page is now a landing page and it’s important for both social and SEO to invest in crafting excellent page types. I always point to Oyster.com as the gold standard here with their large imagery and massively detailed content, but really more sites are starting to get this. If you’re not investing in making your content pages be excellent pages with thick content, then you’re going to get left behind by those that are investing in their page types:

4) SEOs Are Perfectly Placed To Engage In Content Marketing

Smart SEOs are already doing content marketing as part of their online marketing (marketing online) strategies and have been for some time. Our skillset matches extremely well with what it takes to win at content marketing. In particular, we understand the whole process. In summary, producing content looks like this for us here at Distilled:

1. Researching & identifying influencers and communities
2. Keyword research & analysis
3. Competitive content research
4. Creative content generation
5. Outreach and promotion
6. Analytics, measurement and tracking

I’ll end this post by highlighting an in-depth analysis of what content promotion looks like and how a simple guest post can be more powerful than many other mainstream content channels:

In previous times, before the Internet, this was called the Oprah Effect. And don’t get me wrong, I’d still leap at the opportunity to share my message on cable with arguably the most persuasive person who ever walked the planet. (Producers—you can reach me via my website!)But as more of our attention (and our book buying) shifts online, its only natural that the mantle Oprah held for a quarter of a century in introducing readers to new books, shifts to a digital native.And in my opinion, the digital native who has taken up that mantle in the book world, is Tim Ferriss – source

Go read the whole piece, it’s fascinating and detailed.

We do an awful lot of guest posting as SEOs, and we’re already valuing the benefits of this above and beyond a simple link. Now is the time to understand content marketing.

Image Credit:  Movable Type www via Bigstock

Tom Critchlow Tom Critchlow is VP Operations for the NYC office, living in Brooklyn and working in Manhattan. Fiercely curious about most things and passionate about everything.

Follow @tomcritchlow

Tom Critchlow

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distilled

Recently, Facebook sponsored a study run by NeuroFocus — found via Search Engine Land– intended to quantitatively determine how people respond to websites and website ads. The results had some interesting findings for marketers who are wondering how their site structure and ad campaigns affect how users react to their website. Let’s just dive right in to those results and see what marketers can learn from their experiments.

What the Study Looked At

NeuroFocus used devices to measure the brainwaves of searchers when visiting websites, and looked to see if any patterns emerged. The test subjects were 50% men, 50% women, aged 21-54, and with a minimum annual household income of $ 30,000. The researchers tested the subjects’ reactions to the Yahoo! homepage, The New York Times homepage, and their personal Facebook news feeds. These are the reactions they measured:

• Attention: The test subjects had clear instances of sustained focus, and shifted focus — meaning it was easy to measure when they were very interested by what they were looking at, and when their attention got diverted by something else.
• Emotional Engagement: There was a clear delineation between positive and negative emotional response to certain page elements. For the purposes of this study, a positive emotional response is called “approach motivation,” which means the test subject felt motivated to do something, while a negative emotional response is called “avoidance motivation,” which means the test subject felt compelled to avoid a certain action.
• Memory Retention: Researchers could clearly detect when something on the page was interesting enough to be stored in the test subjects’ memories.

The researchers were able to combine scores given for each of these responses into something called Overall Neurological Effectiveness, a composite measure of the efficiency of a test subject’s cognitive processing.

Interesting Findings From the Study

To see how each website fared individually, you can read the whitepaper in its entirety. Here are some of the most interesting findings that emerged from the study.

1.) Overall: The New York Times had higher levels of attention and memory than the other two pages, but less emotional engagement. The Yahoo! homepage had higher levels of emotional engagement than The New York Times homepage, but less than the Facebook page. And Yahoo! had the least amount of memory activation out of all three pages.

People viewing their own news feed on Facebook, however, had high levels of activation on all three metrics — attention, emotional engagement, and memory. The Facebook page had statistically higher levels of emotional engagement than The New York Times and Yahoo!

2.) Effect of Ads on Attention: The mere presence of ads had neither a positive nor negative effect on subjects’ attention levels.

3.) Different Types of Ads: There’s higher attention and emotional engagement with social media ads than with TV ads or ads on a corporate web page. But ultimately, subjects’ memories weren’t activated enough in any context. Take a look at the results of an experiment NeuroFocus ran with a Visa ad on television, on a corporate web page, and on a social media site.

People paid more attention to the ad in the two online contexts, the ad had the most emotional engagement in the social context, but it had low memory levels in all contexts. NeuroFocus reported that memory scores at these levels usually indicate an ad has weak persuasive capability and that viewers discount it in their memory. 

4.) Effect of Stimuli on Memory: Memory scores tend to be higher when stimuli are personally meaningful and provide learning opportunities.

5.) Post-Facebook Activity: After subjects view their Facebook pages, the next site they visit makes subjects feel more connected — more users associated their experience with the word “connecting” than they had before.

6.) Engagement vs. Attention: Overall, emotional engagement scores are lower than attention scores. This makes sense, since online content demands more attention than passive media like television; there are simply more elements competing for a user’s attention, and consequently the study found that emotional engagement shows a slightly negative correlation with attention. The results indicate that high attention levels have a diminishing impact on emotional engagement.

7.) Effect of Prior Expectations: All of the consumers’ responses to the websites were found to be impacted by the expectations of the site that they carried with them before visiting.

What Marketers Can Do With This Information

If nothing else, it’s encouraging to know marketers are on the right track when we strive for a more and more personalized experiences in our marketing — even beyond our website. Along with great nurturing and segmentation, allowing people to interact with your brand in a social way is key to achieving this personalized experience. This study has shown that marketing is about more than just information consumption and cognition. Facebook is so successful because it provides new information that is both emotionally driven and highly personal. That means the information delivered is relevant to the user, and it makes it far more likely they will remember what they see on that site.

In the age of information overload, it’s remarkable content that can actually embed its way into someone’s memory. That is only achieved when you really know your target audience, what they want to hear, and you present it in a way that resonates with them. It’s just as much about the topics you select as your presentation of it — something that A/B testing can help you refine.

And as if you didn’t already know it, your reputation matters. Every time people come to your website, they are building up a pre-conceived notion they will carry with them on every subsequent site visit. So be purposeful with what you put out there and the brand image you build for yourself. Selectivity is a good thing; what you don’t publish is just as important as what you do publish. Use your website and company social media accounts to build the emotional experience you want people to have when they interact with your brand.

Finally, it appears that site with social elements are particularly attractive for advertising because they have both the high emotional engagement of TV (without the high costs) and the active cognitive engagement characteristic of the online experience. So, if you’re going to run an ad…run it online!

Have you run any tests on your website to see how users engage with your content? Share your findings in the comments!

Image credit: digitalbob8

Connect with HubSpot:

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Posted by JoannaLord

It happened friends. After years of Rand exposing me to the many benefits of inbound marketing I am ready to admit it…{big gulp}…today's marketer needs to be doing more than paid marketing. In fact, I'd go as far as to say, if you are only doing paid marketing you are failing yourself and your company. THERE I SAID IT. I feel better. Way better actually.

Because it's true. Things have changed. There is no longer two main players in the game (SEO and PPC). Search marketing itself has evolved. We've covered a great deal of this here on the blog so I won't go into it too much. If you need a reminder, I urge you to go check out Rand's posts where he outlines The New Era of Inbound Marketing, and outlines how quickly it is growing. As marketers, we saw the shift coming, and now we are feeling it in our every day gigs. Our roles are expanding as traditional SEO itself expands. There is so much happening all around us. Who is freaking out? Yeah me too.

The real question you may be asking yourself is, "why is this paid marketing lady talking about inbound marketing?" Good question. The other day I was running through my to-do list and I couldn't help but notice how not-focused it was on paid marketing. In fact, most of my day was spent brainstorming with others on how to better share data, repurpose existing assets, and collaborate. While Justin and I manage paid marketing here at Moz, more and more of our time is spent on learning and leveraging our inbound efforts more effectively.

I thought I'd run through some ways that I'm leaning on our inbound marketing efforts to both reduce Moz's costs and capture more leads. Did you all know you could get leads for free? Yeah, crazypants I know. Anyway, here are the top ten ways I've leveraged inbound as a paid marketer here at Moz;

#10: Share Persona Outlines
You know who is really good at researching a target audience? Content writers. Recently, Michael King actually did a killer webinar on understanding your target audience and using social media tools to help define your best audience. It covers this concept really well. The idea is there are so many excellent demographic tools available to us now that these social networks want us to buy ads on them. We can look at audience sizes, location, categories, etc. All of this information has been helping organic marketers write targeted content for years. Paid marketers should be leaning on this data. What have they discovered that could help me better target high-value leads?  Outline your target audience and extracting personas can be really challenging, but the more teams connect on this the better all our marketing efforts are targeted.

#9: Leverage Landing Pages
Design resources are hard to come by. Here at Moz we have Derric and Ramil basically sleeping in the office and we still have a backlog of projects that need their creative brains. Ask any paid marketer what is the bottleneck and often you will hear design resources pop up. So what can we do? Use landing pages that our inbound marketers have already queued up for us! Brilliant! Often times these pages are beautifully designed, and laced with excellent engagement opportunities. These are mandatory in a solid inbound marketing page and they are requirements of a successful paid search lander…coincidence? I think not. 

#8: Exchange Conversion Reports
Oh conversion data, how sweet you are. I think most paid marketers are looking at the SEO data at their company. At least I hope they are! Beyond that though, there is more data you should be looking at. Here at Moz, we are a little data crazy. Jen, our Community Wrangler, puts together amazing metrics on our social activities every week. I have found that by mining her weekly data summaries I can see what content has gone hot and where. I can see where we are increasing brand awareness and what type of people are taking to the Moz brand. From there I can better allocate our budget to supplement these efforts. 

#7: Collaborate on Keyword Research
So this one is one of those things we keep saying we are going to do, but rarely does it actually happen. I am always amazed by the keyword research process. First off, it's really time consuming. Secondly, it's not effective as a one-time step, it really needs to be done in an ongoing basis. Yet despite all this, both paid teams and organic teams have been doing separate keyword research for years. Ick. Yuck.

An awesome benefit to doing inbound marketing is the speed in which we can detect if something resonates. Where as before I might have used paid search budget to test an adjective or product description, I can now push out a targeted piece of content and see how the audience responds. It's immediate data collection and its statistically valid. I can't get over the power of the social graph when it comes to crowdsourcing reactions to certain keywords. This is the new keyword research in my opinion. We must combine our traditional keyword tools with audience response across these inbound channels. 

#6: Repurpose Content
This one is pretty obvious, yet, so easy to skip over. I am guilty of this too often myself. Paid marketers need to be driving traffic to past inbound marketing wins. For example, about a year and a half ago we updated the Beginners Guide to SEO. This has gone on to be downloaded close to a million times, translated into other languages, and continues to be an excellent traffic driver. Guess how much of my paid marketing budget goes to driving traffic to this excellent piece of content? Yup you guessed it…none.

In the past, my argument was "it didn't drive enough free trial signups to show ROI." What I've realized over the past few months is I need to go deeper into what "conversion" means. What does acquisition mean? What does growth mean? My paid marketing efforts should be wrapped around these already successful content pieces. Repurposing hot viral content through paid marketing channels is a great example of how we can accomplish cross-channel marketing. Isn't it pretty when we all get along? Who wants to hug? Bueller?

#5: Share Customer Feedback
Customer feedback is gold, pure gold. Inbound marketing is about being found online through a variety of activities — content publishing, social engagement, etc. A huge benefit of these conversations and interactions is the wealth of feedback you can receive from the community you have created. Often here at Moz, we will ask our community team to help us understand what our customers really love about our PRO service. We can hear right from them what keeps them happy, and what we can do better. This helps drive our marketing messages and our product roadmaps. Sharing the customer feedback and voice is so important, and the value found in sharing that across multiple teams in the organization is huge.

#4: Planning for Resources
Over the past few years we have seen the expectations of an online marketer change. We have more on our plates, more tools to log into, more reports to pull, more content to write, and so on and so forth. Inevitably these demands require more resources and more talent on any given project. I have found that by asking the organic marketers and community marketers here at the company what they are working on, I can better plan for my paid projects. If we are contracting a copyeditor for a content piece, I can slip in a request to revisit some ad copy headlines in the same contract. I can also repurpose design resources for banners, and landers. By knowing what your inbound team is working on, all of us can push out more faster. This is a huge benefit to connecting the to teams in both goals and resource planning.

#3: Fuel the Fire
I am a big fan of the halo effect as it applies to marketing. The halo effect, for those that might not know, is when customers show a bias to a product or brand based on some favorable or pleasant experience they have had previously. The beauty of it as it applies to today's marketing efforts is there are so many opportunities for a brand impression, and most of which are free.

A positive conversation a brand representative has with a user on a Facebook page may be enough to persuade a user to click a retargeting banner when faced with the brand's logo. Those two combined may build enough trust to persuade them to take a free trial. I call this "fueling the fire." While paid marketing may be measured on a CPA basis, there is a lot that happens prior to an action that influences the likelihood of a conversion. Inbound marketing offers mutiple opportunities to positively bias a potential customer. The goodwill a customer has in a brand often has very little to do with push marketing efforts, but has everything to do with these more organic experiences.

#2: Prequalify a Message
At the heart of it, marketers are story tellers. We love to persuade. As a paid marketer I spend most of my time coming up with ways to message my audience. Sometimes it's a new audience and sometimes it's my current audience, but either way I need to constantly be testing new ways to capture their attention. Prequalifying a message can be time consuming and can cost a lot of money depending on how I test it.

In the past I may have run a banner campaign on a relevant blog post and looked at metrics like CTR and CR. I may have also thrown money at a focus group (and whoa those can cost a lot) to see how people responded to a story we had crafted. These days I can use the power of social to test messages in record time. I can put together a presentation or a white paper and see how many times it gets shared, viewed, and downloaded. By counting these "social votes" I go beyond just clicks as a means of pre-qualification. It's a really great way for me to collect good data fast.

#1: Strengthen the Brand's Story
While the other nine ideas are great, this is my favorite. Nothing is more powerful than a consistent marketing message. Over the years I've worked to connect retargeting banners, paid search ads, landers, affiliate banners, and social advertising to send a strong and cohesive message. You know what stinks about that? All of those cost me money…which is no fun. Keeping money is fun. Spending all your money…not fun.

For promotions or time sensitive messages, if I really wanted to see an impact, I had to have serious budgets. There has to be a better way. Aligning some of these paid efforts with some inbound efforts makes for an even more compelling story for half the cost. As you push out new things and try to create buzz, you need to be asking yourself, "Is this the best use of my time and money?" I think as a paid marketer we can often forget to take that pause. We rest on the channels we know well but we need to push for more.

In Conclusion

Rand was right. In fact, all of my SEO friends were right. While paid marketing has a role to play in all of this, the direction the web has taken demands more from us marketers. While I am not sold that inbound marketing is all any marketer needs, I do believe there is a synergy between the two that can be very powerful. If we share resources, connect data, and collaborate rather than compete I think both teams win. I'm super excited about what this means for the future of paid search marketing. If you do paid and you aren't connecting with your organic marketing and social teams, you really are making your job harder than it needs to be. 

I'd love to hear from you guys if there are other ways you have seen the teams connect and work more effectively together. Where do you see this all going as social marketing and content marketing continue to take more of our time as marketers? Where does paid fit into this? 
 

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

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