SEO World

Engagement will be the Mantra for online marketers in 2012

No business can afford to undermine the growing importance of online marketing (marketing online) as a strong tool for increasing one’s market presence. Those businesses who make the most of the online marketing (marketing online) opportunities are the ones that can look forward to success in the year 2012.

The online marketer of today needs to have the ability to harness and utilise the ever changing trends of the online marketing (marketing online) world. As the number of internet users continue to increase, engaging the user will be of key importance for every online marketer. Targeted Search and Social media marketing will play a key role when it comes or engaging the consumer. It has been interesting to see how some of our clients have leveraged the traffic we created for them to create online communities around their websites. In turn, we have been able to harness these communities to further strengthen their position on search.

The online marketing (marketing online) wizards of 2012 will be able to tap into the power unleashed by a tactful synchronisation of all marketing mediums and tools from social media, SEO to mobile technology for user engagement. Online marketers will be required to use their analytical skills to create a synchrony around these mediums to generate brand value.

Finally it  comes down to providing value to the customers. Those who have the ability to use the many available online platforms to provide value to the customer will find success in 2012.

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SEO Blog by Arrow Internet Marketing – Company Blog

If you’ve read our articles on the benefits of sales and marketing alignment, you likely understand the importance of a marketing strategy that leverages cross-departmental collaboration and integration. And we feel no differently about the relationship between Marketing and Customer Service — they should go together like milk and cookies.

The need for a symbiotic marketing/customer service relationship is only more important now, with consumers increasingly turning to social media as a way to communicate with businesses. In fact, according to a recent study from Booz & Company, 75% of marketers using social media identify customer service as a primary use of their social media platform.

But while the majority of marketers admit that customer service is a major function of their social presence, according to the same Booz & Company survey, only 26% of respondents describe customer service as a department responsible for contributing leadership to social media strategies. Something is off there; don’t you agree?

If you need more convincing, we’ve pulled together 7 compelling reasons why it’s important for Marketing and Customer Service to be closely aligned — and how to create a relationship that’s much better at it.

1) For Better Social Media Support

As we already mentioned, most marketers are using social media to provide customer service. But is your marketing team’s social media account manager really capable of handling these customer service issues as effectively as someone on your customer service team? Probably not. Your business’ customer service team has likely been given the proper training and resources needed to assist customers and resolve issues, meaning they are the best people for the job.

While it absolutely does make sense for your business’ social media account management to be a function of Marketing, that doesn’t mean people from other departments can’t be involved. Why provide your customers with a subpar customer service experience just for the sake of keeping social media management solely in Marketing? Luckily, there are a number of tools available to marketers to make this possible — and easy! Using a third-party social media management tool, such as HootSuite or HubSpot, marketers can easily collaborate with other departments such as Customer Service (or even Sales), routing customer support questions to the support team and making it easy for communications to be handed off to the most appropriate person. Coming up with a system that enables members of your customer service team to participate in customer service-related inquiries via social media will only make for a better customer experience.

2) For Content Creation Ideas

Savvy inbound marketers understand how important regular and consistent content creation is to their marketing strategy. Unfortunately, regular and consistent content creation means marketers also need a steady flow of ideas about which to create content, and even the most experienced content creators sometimes suffer from the struggle to come up with remarkable content ideas that their audience will find valuable.

This is where your customer team can save the day! As people who are constantly communicating with customers and learning about their problems, interests, and needs, your customer team is probably an untapped goldmine of viable content ideas. After all, marketers are trying to create content that helps solve their audience’s problems, and your customer team knows firsthand what those problems are. They will also probably be able to provide Marketing with real-life customer examples and successes to use in their marketing content, which is always an added bonus.

As a marketer, open the lines of communication between the content creators on your team and your customer teams. Consider meeting regularly to learn about the problems your customers are facing, and think about the types of content you can create to address those problems. For example, our blogging team uses a page on HubSpot’s internal wiki as a way for members of the sales and customer teams to submit blog article ideas based on their communications with customers and prospects.

3) For a Deeper Understanding of Buyer Personas

How well do you really understand your buyer personas? Buyer personas are fictional representations of your target customers, so if you implement the suggestions we provided in tip #2 above, you might learn that you don’t really understand your customers as well as you thought you did. Or perhaps you haven’t even developed well thought-out buyer personas in the first place. Truly understanding the inner-workings of your ideal customers can provide you with a number of business and marketing benefits such as a better understanding of customer needs, problems, and interests; knowledge of where customers spend time; better quality leads; consistency across your business; richer closed-loop analytics; and better product development.

The great thing is, your customer team is talking to your customers all the time, meaning they probably know more about them than any other department within your company. So because understanding buyer personas is so critical for creating effective marketing campaigns, it behooves marketers to work more closely with customer service to help them truly understand customers’ needs and thoughts. As a marketer, sit in on customer team meetings, and join in on customer calls for better insight into the personas you’re marketing to.

4) For Setting Customer Expectations

One very telling indicator of an effective marketing team is when leads have clear expectations for how your business’ products and services will help them. And when leads have clear expectations, the transition from lead to customer, as well as that customer’s subsequent experience as a customer, can go much more smoothly. This is how Marketing can help prevent customer loss, since often customer churn is the result of misleading expectations that can be attributed back to misleading marketing campaigns.

So how does customer service factor into this? When the two teams are better aligned, Customer Service can notify Marketing of instances when inadequate or misleading expectations have been set, since members of your customer service team will likely be the ones to stumble across these inconsistencies. Then, as a marketer, you’ll be able to modify your campaigns to better set expectations for potential customers. For example, if your marketing team was relying heavily on the messaging that the indoor paint you sell dries in minutes, but in reality customers report that it takes hours, your marketing team could rectify the false expectations they were setting in their marketing campaigns.

5) For Unified Messaging & Communications

When prospects and customers have a question about a promotion your marketing team is running — who they gonna call? Support! The reason is simple: it’s the easiest phone number to find on most business’ websites. So what happens if your customer support team knows nothing about that live webinar Marketing is currently holding and a prospect calls looking for the webinar link they forgot to bookmark when they signed up? “Umm … what webinar?” says the support team rep. Not good.

That’s why it’s so important for Customer Service to be in the know about what promotions Marketing is deploying — so they can be well-equipped to answer any questions that pop up from prospects and customers alike. They should know where on the website to find that ebook, how to log in to that webinar, and where to enter that contest. As a marketer, arm your customer team with the resources they need to be successful. At HubSpot, for example, we keep a shared Google Doc where our support team can access the links and log-in information for every upcoming webinar we host. This eliminates the wasted time and effort of Support trying to contact Marketing while a caller waits on hold, making for a happier caller and a more efficient support process.

6) For PR/Marketing Promotion of Customer Success & Happiness

Customer problems aren’t the only discussion topic your customer team shares with Marketing. They are also often the best equipped and first to identify customer happiness and success.

Better customer service and marketing alignment enables Marketing to more easily pinpoint the customers that make great case study candidates, especially if they’re looking for specific examples of customer success and the customer team knows about these preferences in advance. Your customer service team can also be on the lookout for awesome customer testimonials and examples of customer happiness, as well as encourage those happy customers to provide those online reviews we marketers covet.

As a marketer, be sure to let your customer team in on these types of initiatives so you can more easily source customer successes and happiness to support your public relations outreach and other customer-centric marketing initiatives. At HubSpot, for example, we’ve tasked our customer team with helping us identify customers who are interested in participating in our “I HubSpot Because …” initiative.

7) For Informing Product Marketing Initiatives

Your business’ customer team is likely the most in tune with understanding how customers actually use your products/services. And to many marketers’ surprise, sometimes the way customers use a product doesn’t exactly line up with how marketers have been marketing it.

Marketing/Customer Service alignment to the rescue! Hold regular meetings with members of Marketing and Customer Service to avoid situations where marketing is heavily promoting a product feature that is underutilized by or unsatisfying to customers. Or perhaps your customers are using your product/service in a way that wasn’t originally intended and that your marketing team never thought to promote. This will help inform future, more successful product marketing initiatives and collateral.

Why else is it critical for Marketing and Customer Service to forge a closer relationship?

Image Credit: dennis

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HubSpot’s Inbound Internet Marketing Blog

Product :  If your product does not appeal to your target market and does not get them excited then you will end up wasting a lot of time and money on marketing campaigns, offline or online. I see so many businesses who have not done enough market research to find out what the customer wants.  It is like inviting vegetarians  to a party and having only meat for food. They will go back hungry.

Presence :   Your web and mobile presence are critical elements of your online marketing (marketing online). Very often companies are selling great products but make their website using a cheap template. Your website graphics, layout, content and presentation will decide whether the visitors on your website are engaged or leave it quickly.

Promotion :  If you have a product which appeals to the target market,  promoting is the next important step.  Your promotion should always combine the need to get some quick wins and getting long term, sustainable competitive advantage.  A targeted online advertising campaign, utlising the latest advancements in technology can yield a quick return on investment with a low cost of aquisition.  Some examples are display campaigns on Google Adwords which target specific audiences and Facebook advertising which allows advertisers to choose audiences by geography and demographics. Having a specific call to action in the advertising campaign, like inviting people to webinars and then selling to them can be very powerful. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) which is the process of improving the relevance and reputation of a website to rank highly on Google is a great way of building competitive advantage for a business, as websites which rank on top positions on Google are trusted more than websites which pay for being seen on top results of Google.

Process :  Does you have a process to encourage your website visitors to engage with your company.  Have you got atleast three different ways in which your prospective customers can engage with you? Not every one who comes to your website will buy or enquire straight away. Some people will want to know more about you and your business before they decide to take action. What are you doing to engage these people?

Metrics :   Do you regularly measure how many people visit your website, what % of them got converted into leads/sales, How are these results trending on a weekly/monthly basis? Do you know what pages of your website are popular and what pages need improvement? Do you find out what links are getting clicked and what links get ignored. Do you ever split test different headings and different images on your website to see what converts better?

In most cases, you can increase your website leads and sales by alteast ten times by doing these things.

If you are doing all this, congratulations.  If not it is time to make your online marketing sharper.

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SEO Blog by Arrow Internet Marketing – Company Blog

I’m finally writing a post out of (frustration?) for the first time in a long time.

It continues to boggle my mind that nobody seems to understand variance, probabilities and basic math.

Here’s a quick lesson on variance using an example you gamblers will understand.

When you sit down at a blackjack table at a casino you are probably somewhere around at 1-10% disadvantage (unless your name is Don Johnson.) This means that 51-60% of the time the house will beat you. It also means that 40-49% of the time, you will beat the house (using the figures from this example.) So, let’s say you walk in and play 1 hand and win, you just fell into the 40-49% bracket and won, but if you continue to play over an extended period of time those numbers will eventually change to 51-60% house advantage. Variance, for the purpose of this post, you can think of as winning over a short period of time when the odds are against you, AND it doesn’t mean that you will continue to win – using the blackjack example you will (eventually) lose more than you win at the given chances of winning.

If that didn’t make any sense then think of it like this. If you buy 100 unique visitors and send them to a landing page and 1 person buys something then that doesn’t mean that if you buy 1,000 that 10 people are going to buy. The 1 in 100 buying, could be variance. In fact, if something was tested over millions of unique visitors and it only had 1 sale in 1 million visitors, that 1 in 100 could be variance from the 1 in 1 million. It doesn’t mean you are going to get 1 sale for EVERY 100 visitors that you send to your landing page.

I’ve heard far too many arguments lately of people assuming that things are going to continue without a large enough sample size. Sample size means that you have TONS of data (like the 1 million number in the above example) as “enough” sample size to reasonable expect something to continue. Also don’t forget that if you get a large sample size and you start to understand the typical results over larger volume, that doesn’t necessary mean that some kind of outside factor (like a competitor or a world event) can’t change those original expectations.

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Daily Conversions

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Webmasters are perpetually searching for the best tactics to use to promote their websites to the world.  This is one reason why the webmasters use marketing techniques and back them with solid SEO.  They work in tandem to make the website friendly to both the people who will view the site and the search engines which will display it.  Where these two facets intersect is within the content which is offered on the site.

The most important function of any webmaster is to generate the content necessary to keep people coming back to the site.  There is a fine balance between writing for the search engines and writing for the people which must be met through the content on a site.  If there are too many keywords, both the search engines themselves and the readers will penalize a site.  If there are too few keywords and the site is not optimized, then the search engines will not find the site to be relevant, though readers might organically market and recommend the site.

Content can come in many forms, including video, articles, info graphics, PDF files, and more.  Each piece of content is marketing material – something of value to keep the reader coming back.  When there is something of value afforded to the reader, that makes the content linkable and shareable, and that raises the search engine rankings.  In turn, if the content is truly shareable, then more people read it, raising it even higher.

With knock-down-drag-out dynamite content, a little bit of keyword tagging, and a simple bit of exposure, a website will rapidly work its way into the leaderboard for a particular niche.  As a webmaster, the focus then becomes not on SEO or marketing, but on producing that dynamite content.  Here are a few suggestions.

Break it Up

While people appreciate the studiousness involved in typing long drawn out arguments, many would rather see the shortened summary version as conveyed through bullet points, subheadings, and more.  Breaking up the text makes it more readable, and hence more valuable to the readers and the search engines.

Keep it at 1-2%

Keywords are still an important function within href="http://www.highervisibility.com/">marketing and SEO.  By focusing a page toward a single few keywords, a webmaster can gradually overcome and overtake its competitors.  1-2% keyword saturation is about the maximum saturation that an article can have without the search engines viewing it as spammy.

Be natural

This is one of the aspects of SEO and href="http://www.highervisibility.com/social-media-marketing/">social marketing with which marketers have difficulty.  Google emphasizes the fact that they want to see naturally crafted and created articles that really show the value of a site.  Be genuine about the content which is produced, and then worry about the SEO strategies which may or may not be employed.

Content is most arguably the most potent tool that any webmaster has as their disposal.  A webmaster will use marketing and SEO techniques to get individuals to come and see the content.  When content is at its highest quality, search engine rankings and profits will soar.

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HigherVisibility

Posted by searchbrat

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

There has been a lot of great discussion about the term “inbound marketing” of late and exactly what is covered by that phrase. For the purposes of this case study we are using the hubspot definition of inbound and outbound marketing. The following is a case study of how we (Salesforce.com) used inbound marketing along with social advertising and great retargeting to grow both our traffic and leads in the UK. Whether you are in B2B or B2C marketing, this case study should be relevant to you and your markets.

The new B2B Purchase Journey

The online landscape for marketers is changing at a rapid pace. People don’t buy the way they used to. There is a new purchase journey with three key elements:

1. Search-initiated – Most people begin their research of a new product via search engines, 78% of Internet users conduct product research online (Source Pew Internet & American Life Project, May 2010)
    
2. Social-powered – The growth of social networks has meant we can now tap into our own external networks for recommendations. Twitter’s active user base alone generates 90 million tweets per day, with 24% of adults have posted comments or reviews online about the things they buy. We now have a lot of user-generated content to review before making a purchase decision.
    
3. Buyer controlled – People can now choose where and when to engage with your brand, plus what content they would like to consume. You have to produce marketing strategies they choose to engage with.

For B2B companies this means their sales people are being engaged a lot later on in the purchase cycle and presents marketing with an great opportunity to become an integral part of the overall sales process.

"Get Found"

Considering the above, we decided to run a pilot project in the UK around the concept of “Get Found” (coined by Brian Halligan of Hubspot). Our aim was to get found by the people who are actively looking for help with the kinds of issues we address. We would do this by harvesting our own expertise in content that helps our prospects do their jobs better.

Since the core mediums involved in this project were search, social and content, we needed to consider how these different tactics are starting to converge and try to hit our sweet spot.

To do this we needed to answer three key questions:

• What do our prospects care about?
• How can we harvest our expertise to help?
• How can we get this content to market now?

Our Answer – “Content Rich Microsite”

When discussing microsites, a lot of people probably conjure up images of those used in new product launches (they have a very short life span) or those used to build elaborate link schemes. Our solution was to build content-rich microsite filled with the kind of content our target market would value. One critical aspect of the project was the location of the site. If you look at the salesforce.com structure, you will notice we already have a lot of great blogs sitting on http://blogs.salesforce.com/company/. Since I am interested in EMEA and in particular the UK for this project, I wanted the site to sit within our UK folder, so it would benefit from all the inbound links and social shares generated. To build our micro-site strategy, we had to address six key points:

1. Personas:
Who would this site be for?

For me persona development is the foundation of any good inbound marketing strategy. I am a massive fan of persona development, from the usability and design of your site, to content development; they ensure you strategy stays on target. In fact one of the best link building posts I read last year involved a type of persona development. We ran an intensive persona workshop (with the help of iqcontent.com) that included people from marketing, sales and customer feedback. We came up with 5-6 profiles of users we were trying to reach.

We mapped these against different stages of the purchase cycle and segmented by company size. All of this would help us when it came to content strategy and promotion.

2. Theme:
What would be the overarching theme that would hold all of our content together?

We used our own Radian 6 our social media monitoring tool, analytics and feedback from personas to come up with “The Social-Powered Business”.

3. Topics:
How do we take that theme and break it down into specific topics we can generate content around?

For us, this was pretty easy; we looked at the areas of business where social media had the greatest impact (sales, customer service, collaboration and marketing). It’s also important that your topics and themes are aligned to your products (we are trying to generate leads after all).

4. Process:
Exactly where would this content come from and how would it be validated?

Getting people excited about the project is key. You need to have people who will help with content development, feedback and amends. We used our own collaboration tool Chatter to build an internal social network around the project that consisted of 56 people. All content development was driven through that group.

5. Resources:

Of course we needed to source budget and a team.

6. Metrics:
How would we measure success?

This is a really important part of establishing any successful strategy. Brand awareness is never a good enough metric, traffic; leads and pipeline are what count. We built a dashboard in omniture with all key business metrics to measure our project.

The Launch – #socialsuccess

In 12 weeks we managed to develop:

• Strategy
• Personas
• Website
• 32 pieces of content

and our #socialsuccess site was launched on January 3rd, 2012.

The following five items were important in terms of making the launch of the site a success.

1. Content Types

For launch we chose four different categories from which we could generate content:

1. Created: Original content that was created from scratch. These are obviously the most resource intensive. They included things like an eBook, infographics, articles and slideshares.
2. Curated: These are round-up style posts. Choosing a topic like social selling and pointing to the best resources from the web on this topic.
3. Collaborative: We choose some of the best thought leaders around our topics and reached out to see if they would contribute some content.
4. Legacy: One of the easiest ways companies can quickly scale their content for inbound marketing is to repurpose content they already have into different assets. For example, our Dreamforce event that runs in San Francisco has a huge amount of expert presentations that are recorded over three days and put onto Youtube. We simply took the best videos and turned them into articles.

2. Product Messaging

Remember this sort of content is not product centric. Best practice for this kind of content is to follow the 80/20 rule – 80% non product and 20% product, for launch we stuck to 90/10. Product references were used where they made sense, but only on a limited basis.

3. Promoting the site

If you build it, they probably won’t come unless you have an awesome promotion plan. Some of the things we did to promote the site were:

1. Facebook/Twitter: Of course, all our best content was shared via our own Facebook, Twitter and Google+ pages
2. We took over the home page of our corporate site (www.salesforce.com/uk) to promote this new microsite
3. Expert advocates: We collaborated with 15 experts for launch, who were kind enough to share our content with their networks.
4. Email/Newsletter: We promoted the site launch to our UK email database and also created a newsletter called #socialsuccess Insider to keep connected with users who signed up via our eBook download.
5. Guest Blogging: We did some guest blogging on relevant sites to promote #socialsuccess
6. PR: We did some PR around some of the pieces we produced
7. Employees: We galvanized our internal employees to share with their external networks

4. Outbound Marketing

We supported all our inbound marketing with great outbound tactics:

1. Twitter: We ran sponsored tweets for our premium content (eBooks). We saw some really great CTR numbers for these. I highly recommend them.

2. LinkedIn Banner Ads: We ran some advertising on LinkedIn targeted at our core personas developed above (linkedIn has some great targeting options like target by job title). Again, we saw a far higher CTR from these ads (those offering content) over those just advertising a product.

3. Google Display Network: We are currently rolling out the same type of ads (those offering our premium content) on GDN.

5. Experts

Reaching out to thought leaders in your market is a great way to produce some highly valuable content. We were lucky enough to have some great experts involved in the initial content, who shared their expert advice with our audience and were kind enough to share our content with their own.

The Results

The project was launched officially on January 3rd, 2012 and we have seen some great results already. The feedback we have been getting back on our social channels around the content is great.

But we have also seen great results in terms of our business metrics (keep in mind we are in B2B):

• Traffic for January was up 80% YoY
• Traffic from social sites was up 2500 %
• We have over 6500 people signed up to our newsletter
• Our eBook has been downloaded over 10,000 times (generating 10,000 leads)

Our inbound marketing experiment has really shown us how impactful this stuff can be. We are currently working on similar sites in France, Germany and also new topics sites for EMEA.

So it’s Onwards and Upwards!!

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SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

When chatting with marketers, one of the most common questions we hear at HubSpot is regarding “first touch” versus “last touch” attribution in marketing analytics. First touch, last touch, and assist reports are all different ways to attribute conversions on your website, and each of these attribution methods will tell you something different and important about the effectiveness of your marketing and the behavior of your visitors.

The following guide will help you understand the difference between “last touch,” “first touch,” and “assists” attribution, as well as give you a sense of the primary use-cases for each approach. As a wise man once said, you should always give credit where credit is due!

What Are ‘Attributions’ in Marketing Analytics?

Before we begin, first a definition …

‘Attribution’ is a way of understanding which marketing channels or campaigns contributed to a conversion on your website. In HubSpot software, for example, you’ll notice that our Marketing Analytics tools report on the number of leads and customers generated through various marketing efforts — that information is what you’d call an attribution. But because a lead’s or customer’s lifecycle with your company is made up of a number of different interactions, there are multiple ways to report on attribution. Understanding how attribution works will help you understand which of your marketing efforts are actually generating results.

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s discuss the different attribution methods that can be used in your marketing analytics.

Last Touch Attribution

Most analytics packages, including Google Analytics, use last touch attribution as their main method of reporting. Last touch data shows you the most recent interactions and conversions your leads had on your website before they converted.

When It’s Useful

As its name suggests, last touch reporting is useful in determining what happened right before your leads converted. If we were presenting last touch data for a given soccer game, for example, it would attribute the winning goal to whoever kicked the ball into the net. Last touch analytics, therefore, is often a good measure of the effectiveness of different landing pages, email campaigns, or other efforts that tend to lead to a direct conversion. What it doesn’t tell you, however, is anything else that led up to that conversion. So, if we were to extend that same soccer analogy, it wouldn’t give credit to the defender who made that great forward pass that made the goal possible.  

HubSpot’s Landing Page Analytics report (pictured below), for instance, uses last touch attribution to help marketers evaluate which landing pages were most effective at generating leads and customers. Looking at first touch attribution for the two customers who converted on the Introduction to Business Blogging ebook offer, however, would show marketers an entirely different view. 

First Touch Attribution

First touch attribution answers the question, “How did this lead or customer originally find you?” What brought him or her across your digital doorstep for the very first time? In HubSpot software, for example, first touch attribution is used in the Sources report, which shows marketers a breakdown of which channels brought in leads and customers in a given time frame.

(Note: Google Analytics doesn’t have a report for first touch attribution out-of-the-box, but if you are tech-savvy, Will Critchlow of Distilled put together some helpful instructions on how to use a .js code to adapt Google Analytics to show first touch attribution.)

When It’s Useful

First touch attribution is useful for evaluating the effectiveness of different channels at generating website visitors and leads. Often, first touch reveals valuable, closed-loop ROI information for channels that are traditionally difficult to measure, like social media or search. Below, you can see that organic search brought us at HubSpot more than 1,400 leads and one customer since the beginning of the month. That one customer may not have purchased our software the very first time he or she visited us through search, but it was search that brought the customer in originally, so through first touch attribution, search is credited with bringing in that customer. 

Assists Attribution

If first touch attribution shows you how a lead originally came across your website, and last touch attribution shows you the final interaction that triggered a conversion, I bet you can guess what assists attribution reveals. Marketers use assists reporting to identify the pages that were viewed throughout the lifecycle of people who ended up converting.

(Note: Different analytics platforms handle assists reporting in different ways. Google’s multi-channel funnels detail assisting interactions in the 30 days prior to a conversion. HubSpot’s Conversion Assists version, pictured below, shows you the web pages, blog articles, and landing pages that were most commonly viewed by people who ended up converting as leads or customers.)

When It’s Useful

Just because a page wasn’t the first page people saw or the final page they viewed before converting or buying, doesn’t mean it was insignificant in their decision-making process. Assists reports can help you identify and optimize influential pages on your site, and we’ve actually written an in-depth article about how assist reports can help marketers do this.

Ultimately, you’ll want to use an assist report for insight into the middle of your marketing funnel. For example, Olympia Steel Buildings, a HubSpot customer, used assists data to find that a photo gallery of its pre-engineered steel buildings was influential to a sizeable number of people who ended up converting into leads. Armed with that information, Olympia Steel made that gallery easier to find by integrating it into their homepage navigation and including it in their lead nurturing emails. Below is another example of HubSpot’s own Conversion Assists report and some valuable information our own marketing team could glean from assists data:

Which Attribution Method Does Your Marketing Analytics Software Use?

Because you can slice marketing data a number of different ways, it can sometimes be difficult to understand exactly what you’re measuring. The best approach to marketing analytics is to start with a question. Determine what it is you want to know, and then find the attribution method and analytics report that will get you the closest to the answer.

If you’re not sure how your marketing analytics service provider handles attribution, make it your prerogative to find out. As you witnessed in this post, HubSpot’s analytics tools leverage different attribution reporting methods depending on the goals of its various reports. Your analytics package might do things differently. Either way, it behooves you to know how your analytics is reporting attribution so you can fully and completely understand the data you’re gathering from your marketing efforts. 

Image Credit: A6U571N

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HubSpot’s Inbound Internet Marketing Blog

Marketing collects a lot of information about the leads they generate, much of which is made available to Sales to make their jobs easier. But it doesn’t do much good if nobody actually, well, uses that information. And often all that lead intelligence falls to the wayside because nobody has explained how it can be applied to the sales process.

That’s where this blog post comes in! We’re going to take a look at some of the intelligence Marketing gathers on leads, and explain exactly how it can be used in the sales process. We will demonstrate where this intelligence lies within HubSpot software, but there are several free and paid tools on the market you can use to collect this information as well. Or if you’d like to follow along using HubSpot software, you can set up a free trial of the software right now!

7 Sales Applications of Marketing Intelligence

1) Leverage prospects’ social media profile information.

There’s a very good chance your leads are active on social media, and your marketing software should be able to easily direct you to their profiles.

Use this information to get a picture in your head of who your prospects are. What are they tweeting about? What is their job history on LinkedIn? What are their skills and areas of expertise? For example, at HubSpot, we’d speak to a prospect differently if they were a seasoned marketing director well versed in inbound marketing than if they were working in their first marketing job out of college and only had experience in social media marketing. That kind of information can be gleaned with social media intelligence so your conversations are more pointed.

You can take it one step further and search for common connections with your lead, too. At the very least, you can do a little name dropping to help put your prospect at ease. Or you can take the time reach out to your common connection to get an even more in-depth inside scoop!

2) Get to know leads with landing page form data. 

Marketing collects all that information when they’re generating leads for a reason — it gives them insight into leads that lets them segment, target communications, and route leads to the appropriate salesperson. Sounds pretty useful for a salesperson too, right? Imagine taking a look at data of this nature before speaking with a prospect:

Not only do you know company information about this lead, but you can also gauge their level of engagement in your product … and this lead is very engaged! She not only attended a demo of your product — an action leads typically perform when they’re further along in the buying cycle — but she stayed for the entirety of the webinar. With this knowledge, a salesperson can prioritize their pipeline based on concrete indicators of sales readiness.

3) Track social media mentions. 

Social media monitoring is often looked at as a marketing function, but sales teams miss huge opportunities when they aren’t actively tracking social media mentions like you see below.

Track mentions for your brand name, product names, competitors, industry influencers, and industry terms. This is a scalable way to surface sales opportunities Sales and Marketing might otherwise miss if the person mentioning your tracked term either hasn’t been entered into your leads database yet, or hasn’t been rotated to a salesperson yet.

In the image above, for example, the last tweet that mentions “marketing automation” offers a salesperson a prime opportunity to reach out to ExecNetwork. Whether they are seeking marketing automation vendors with social media savvy (that’s HubSpot!) for a personal solution, or they are a potential partner with whom we could work and receive referral business, building that relationship could reap great benefits for a salesperson’s future pipeline.

4) Use the best performing offers when prospecting and selling. 

It’s not every business that can close a sale after just one conversion event; it’s more common that a prospect reconverts time and again as their relationship with your company grows and they move further along in the sales process. So when Sales is working with prospects, it makes sense for them to elevate the highest converting offers to move their leads along in the sales cycle more swiftly. Access to landing page conversion information can empower Sales with the information they need to refer the content and offers to their leads that will actually help them close deals.

Take this landing page data, for example. Let’s say a salesperson was monitoring social media mentions and found that great marketing automation opportunity we just talked about — it would be wise to include a relevant offer when reaching out, right? Well, taking a look at landing page analytics like these show that this particular offer converts quite well on social media. You can also look at the rate at which those who redeem these offers convert into leads and customers for a closed-loop view of your offer’s success.

5) Build an arsenal of your most powerful content.

People buy from people they trust, so it’s crucial that every salesperson establish themselves as a trusted resource when speaking with prospects. One way of doing it is referring prospects to helpful, educational content that helps solve the problems that come up during discussions. But how do you know you’re passing along the best content? Use the analytics Marketing uses to decide that! Let’s take a look at blog analytics, for example:

Sort content based on page views and inbound links — two excellent indicators that others find that content helpful and authoritative. Then begin bookmarking that high-performing evergreen content that addresses the questions you commonly hear during discussions with your prospects. That way, you have all of the resources you need to establish authority with prospects, and you can send them out at the drop of a hat — in real time, even! How great will that make you look?

6) Jump on leads right when they come in. 

Quick lead follow-up is crucial for sales success. The Harvard Business Review found that companies that contact prospects in an hour or less are 7 times more likely to have a meaningful conversation with a decision maker than their less eager counterparts. Intelligence about when and how much time leads spend on your site helps Sales be the “eager” ones in the industry.

First, enabling site return notifications for leads is a simple but crucial step toward a quick sales follow-up. But you should also take a look at how long ago a lead was on your site, and on what pages, in order to prioritize your pipeline. For example, if a lead is visiting a product page, you’d want to follow-up with them ASAP — they might be ready to talk about a solution! If they’re visiting your blog, however, waiting 31 minutes for a lead to navigate through your site and browse your content is a-okay.

7) Prospect smarter, not harder.

Sales is often tasked with prospecting on their own to fill their pipeline, but what tools are given to help them do it effectively? Unfortunately, many salespeople are left Googling a stranger’s contact information and cold calling with the hope they connect with someone who actually wants what they’re selling. We use a tool called “Prospects” that tells Sales who is visiting the website (even if they haven’t filled out a form) so they have the kind of intelligence they need to nurture relationships with people who are actually interested in HubSpot software.

Collecting site information like company name, location, name, number of visits, and length of visit lets prospecting salespeople do some serious recon work before hopping on a call with a new prospect. In the sample above, for example, a salesperson could be prepared with a document about how to fix the PC Load Letter error. Or let’s say you see a certain company is repeatedly visiting your site and exploring more pages than other visitors — that’s a great indication for a salesperson that the prospect is interested in their company and may be ready to speak to Sales.

What marketing intelligence do you think helps the sales process? Share how you use your customer and lead intelligence in the comments!

Image credit: Marcus Vegas

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Source
HubSpot’s Inbound Internet Marketing Blog

I’ve been taking a close look at Pinterest lately and the possibilities that are there for marketers.

I’m noticing a lot of changes in the past few weeks that have made things a lot harder for marketers to really get a lot of traffic from Pinterest.

Basically, it’s phasing from the Wild Wild West to more of a Fort Knox. They are desperately trying to stop what they consider “spamming” on Pinterest.

For now, I think it’s pretty tough unless you are willing to do some risque things to get traffic.

Perhaps soon they will introduce an advertising element so marketers won’t continue to try to game the system with any means necessary.

I do think it would be a wise move for them, the amount of money it costs people to “spam” they could use the same money buying legitimate ads or “sponsored pins” if they were to introduce something like that.

Come on Pinterest, marketers just want traffic, why not sell it to them and cut out 85% of spam?

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Source
Daily Conversions

I recently stumbled onto a piece of software called Contest Domination.

Basically what it is, is a wordpress plugin that allows you to run a contest.

Now, that’s not the interesting part.

The interest part is that these contests have a viral element to them, you get X points per entry, meaning if you post your link on Facebook, Twitter or tell your friends you get a new entry for every person that joins the contest.

So, for example you could give away a free product, software, ebook, etc and then people are more motivated to go out and post it on their Facebook because for each person that opts in through their link they get another entry into the contest. It’s viral at its purest form plus the incentivzed aspect which makes it even stronger than traditional viral marketing.

The plugin installs in seconds and its very simple to set it up. I got my copy set up in literally a few minutes, it wasn’t bad at all. It directly connects to popular email services like Aweber and auto integrates for you. You don’t even have to manually copy and paste your codes, it just directly connects to Aweber which is quite brilliant.

Here’s a screenshot of what your contest page can look like:

Try out Contest Domination, it’s pretty slick!

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Source
Daily Conversions