Inbound Marketing Blog

An interesting article on inbound marketing and using Facebook. Increasing your "likes" and "opt in" visitors can boost overall inbound marketing strategy, blog strategy and social media strategy.

Facebook apps and engaging your visitors is a great way to improve your credibility, authority and site traffic.

Read the other blogs available on this Virtual Support System Inbound Marketing Blog to help you understand more about how to harness the power of the internet for your business.

From alphatweets6 on twitter:

A Groundhog Day Facebook Marketing Strategy – Increasing Your Opt ... http://bit.ly/ngVFFe (http://twitter.com/alphatweets6/statuses/93037573236195330)

How to Use Twitter to Market Your Business. Social Media & Inbound Marketing

1. Use your company logo for your Twitter profile photo. The more followers you gain for your Twitter account, the more ‘free marketing’ you get from the exposure of your company brand to not only your followers, but also their followers as well. You can also brand your Twitter profile background to match your business web site colors.
2. Your tweets should not be blatant promotional ads for your product or service; rather, post Tweets that are entertaining, intriguing and/or informational, then include a hyperlink that leads back to similar subject matter on your own company web site or blog. This will drive free traffic to your business web site far more effectively than commercial advertising.
3. Gain as many Twitter followers as you possibly can. You never know which connection (or hundreds of connections) might become an enormous networking ally for marketing your company or service by sharing your Tweets and Twitter profile with their own network followers. It’s a veritable snowball of recognition – and a potential HUGE return for very little investment. 

But try to maintain a balance between the number of Twitter profiles you follow and the number of followers you have. Don’t follow hundreds of Twitter accounts at once in hopes that they will follow you back. Instead, follow smaller numbers, then wait until several of these people follow you back before you go about following more accounts. And if someone follows you, follow them back.
4. Create public Twitter lists for your business. Name your lists according to keywords that are relevant to your web site’s content, for SEO benefit with search engines. Be sure that all employees in your company sign up with Twitter, (using your company branding), and actively take part in posting and networking.  Use Twitter’s search feature to locate other Tweets that are similar in content to your own business, and post comments and replies in these subjects. You can also post requests for feedback about your company or brand, and actively engage with those who comment on them. (Special tip: Twitter lists can also be made private. Use these to monitor your competition and conduct market research.)

Ultimately, the best way to use Twitter to market your business or service is to find as many followers as you can, and actively stay in touch with them by taking just a few minutes per day to interact with them on a level that isn’t specifically promotional or business-like in nature.

If you don’t want to commit to investing a few minutes per day, consider putting aside an hour or two per week creating your posts for the coming week. Then, use a handy tool such as HootSuite to pre-schedule all your Tweets. HootSuite will then post your Tweets for you throughout the week at whatever pre-set intervals you’ve scheduled.

Lastly, feel free to check out Twitter profiles of successful businesses – why reinvent the wheel? Find out what your competition is doing, along with big name companies, and learn from their example. You don’t have to exactly copy what they do, just be open to new ideas for marketing your business with Twitter by seeing what the ‘big shots’ are doing. Then, craft similar practices with your target market in mind, and reap the benefits for your company or service!

Additional Help & Resources:

Web Page Optimization: What you need to be sure of when making any web page search engine friendly.

When a search engine user enters a keyword in the search box, all search engines run through an evaluation process in nano seconds and if your pages do not meet certain criteria, they will pass you by just as fast.

The process of making a web page search engine friendly can include a lot of detail but there are basic elements that will help you get some initial momentum and help you compete, especiallay for the "lower hanging fruit" or what is also known as "long-tail keywords".

If you are a subscriber to this blog, you may have a better sense of the inbound marketing concept, formula and active components, so now we can now focus on the area of web page optimization. The idea here is to configure any given web page to be as search engine friendly as possible or to be sure the work you paid an SEO professional meets these basic requirements.

For an easy download of this information, use this link:

Each search engine uses a different set of algorithms to evaluate a web page and produce search results based on a keyword or key-phrase entered by a search engine user. Even though Google, Yahoo, MSN and the other search engines evaluate differently, they are close enough so it’s possible (at this level) to develop one set of guidelines for all. As part of a more sophisticated strategy, you will ultimately develop these formulas to match each search engine and keyword with more concentration.

Below is a table we developed for you to use as your web page optimization checklist. These are the basic components that need attention when competing for both, targeted or more general keywords. There are two assumptions we need to make before you begin applying these principles:

1. A detailed keyword analysis and selection has been executed.
2. We are targeting 1 to 3 keywords per page.
3. You are able to make these updates to your web page through an HTML editor or your CMS (content management system). Ex. Wordpress, Contribute, Dreamweaver, Front Page.
   

Remember that these are the main elements of a well-optimized page and have been outlined for the user who isn’t ready to hire an inbound marketing or SEO consultant. As the process evolves, there are other components that require attention and will ultimately benefit your efforts. Here is a partial list:

For a complete inbound marketing analysis of your current website, use this link:

Marketing objectives may have remained the same but the marketing methods have changed dramatically.

What every business should know about the revolutionary shift from Outbound Marketing to Inbound Marketing.

I believe that fundamental marketing objectives haven't change too much over the past 40 years.

Marketing principles as defined by "Wikiversity":

"Marketing seeks to satisfy the needs of people (customers or the market) (creating a sense of usefulness or utility) through the exchange process.
The Marketing Mix or the "4 P's" are:
    •    Product
    •    Price
    •    Promotion
    •    Place (or distribution)
These are employed to satisfy a target market' or target demographic (the pool of potential customers).
Example:
    •    Product: Procter and Gamble introduces a new toothpaste designed to taste good and fight cavities. Logo and packaging designed in bright colors to appeal to kids of elementary school age to encourage more tooth brushing.
    •    Price: $2.00, and discounted by means of coupons
    •    Promotion: television and radio commercials, magazine and newspaper ads, and a website; these use bright colors and happy music, perhaps an animated cartoon character for a fun and family-friendly attitude
    •    Place (or distribution): Supermarkets, drugstores, discount stores such as Wal-Mart
Target demographic:
    •    Mothers with kids who make toothpaste buying decisions for the family (advertising could be shown on children's programming, prompting kids to ask parents to buy the toothpaste)"

The Inbound Marketing Concept:

The inbound marketing objectives are very similar to those mentioned above in the wikiversity definition and example. The major changes are seen in concept, formulas and expectations.

Inbound marketing or attraction marketing is the conceptual antithesis of the more traditional, 40 year old outbound marketing.

The idea is simple:

• Outbound marketing equals “interruption” marketing. This older less effective process attempts to interrupt a given marketplace through traditional methods of advertising.
  • TV advertisements
  • Radio advertisements
  • Telemarketing
  • Billboards
  • Print advertising
  • Yellow pages
  • Email broadcasting

• Inbound marketing uses a different concept & method that makes your message available when your target market is actively researching or searching your subject or topic. Successful inbound marketing also configures your message to be used again and again as it becomes available in more online locations. Adding the viral concept to your inbound marketing messages also make it easier for your message to be passed from one person or business to another with the power of a traditional referral.

The Inbound Marketing Formula:

• Get Found
• Convert
• Analyze

The Inbound Marketing Components:

• Website Development
• SEO (search engine optimization)
• Blog Development
• Social Media Promotion
• Conversion Strategies
• Regular & Accurate Analysis
• Regular & Focused Evaluations

Inbound Marketing has landed, don't drive around it, pay attention to it!

It started slowly about 15 years ago but only a few paid attention and got involved. In the last 5 years, inbound marketing began to take strong root and became a viable segment of marketing for companies that recognized this emerging opportunity. In the last year alone, inbound marketing has become the primary marketing method for small to mid-sized companied around the world. The consumer and business market have moved from outbound marketing to inbound marketing 2 to 1, and I'm talking about both sides of the process. First, using inbound marketing to search, research, define, isolate and choose their vendors of choice and second to promote and market their own business products and services.

What are the differences between inbound marketing and outbound marketing?

To better understand the concept of Inbound marketing, think of it's counter part, outbound  marketing. Outbound marketing has been the preferred and primary method of delivering a commercial message for the past 40 years. The outbound marketing concept has been to blast or push out an organization's message to as many people as possible in hopes that the message will get the attention from the right market, at the right time. Examples of Outbound marketing include, TV, Radio, Telemarketing, Print Advertising, Direct Mail, Yellow Pages, Email Broadcasting, Billboards, etc. Some people refer to this type of marketing as the "shotgun" approach where a message is shot and scattered over a group of people with the hope that some small percentage of these people will be interested at that particular time. Although outbound marketing or traditional marketing will always have a place, it has become much less effective and much more costly as the ROI (return on investment) continues to shrink.

The gap between inbound marketing and outbound marketing is growing to a point where marketing professionals are using the follow two terms to highlight the major difference:

1. Outbound marketing is "interruption" marketing.
2. Inbound marketing is "attraction" marketing.

Another way to understand why outbound marketing is not as effective as it was years ago, is to understand how much better we are all equipped to block the outbound messages:

• Remotes controls to block commercials
• DVRs to pass over commecials
• Caller IDs to evaluate who is calling us
• Satelite radio to remove commercials
• Spam filters to block email advertising
• Yellow pages have become nothing more than paper weights or door stops
• More...
  

Inbound marketing is the unfolding "revolution" of marketing. It represents the transformation from the old, to the new. Technology has been advancing at an unprecedented rate and it has caught up with the marketing industry and has staked it's claim. The truth is, like all other technology, if you don't get on board and utilize the resources available, you will be left behind in the world of obsolete. To use an analogy, inbound marketing is to outbound marketing as the automobile was to the horse & buggy. If you look all around, you see the mega marketers (Johnson & Johnson, CNN, AT&T, etc.) using the new methodologies of social media, search engine marketing, blog development and conversion strategies.

What you should recognize is that these same powerful strategies, are available to you. Understand that you are now on a leveled playing field and can compete. For the same money it would take to run a short series of radio advertisements (outbound marketing), you can create and develop a farther reasching inbound marketing strategy.

Inbound Marketing Objectives:

1. Get Found
2. Convert
3. Analyze

1. Website or Blog Creation
2. Search Engine Optimization
3. Blog Development
4. Social Media Development
5. Conversion Strategy
6. Evaluation & Adjustment Process

Inbound Marketing Foundation Elements:

• Lead Generation
• Lead Tracking
• Lead Nurturing
• Lead Conversion

One additional note: A warning to those considering or starting an inbound marketing plan. Get professional advice and consultation. If you are using Twitter for example, you might see outragous claims stating the ability to spread your marketing message to thoughands overnight. This simply translates to an ineffective and incomplete strategy. Like anything else worth while, this is a process that does take time and careful planning. If you are going to get involve in a new marketing startegy, do it right and work with an experienced professional. Even if it's only to consult and help you create and launch components in house.

More helpful inbound marketing resources:

Inbound Marketing White Paper:
How To Use Twitter For Business

How much focus have you applied to your conversion strategy?

As a certified inbound marketing consultant I am consistently evaluating online or Internet marketing strategies. I'm sure it comes as no shock to any reader that in the past 12 months, almost every (if not all) KPI (key performance indicators) have shown significant increases in:

1. Overall search traffic
2. Blog readership
3. Blog creation & posts
4. Social media accounts
5. Social media communications
6. Paid advertising
7. Products & services offered
8. Websites launched
9. Etc, etc...

My point is that all players in all ends have increased dramatically. In my own mind, and from my own perspective, this simply means more competition for attention as well as more opportunity for the savvy marketing professionals.

All of this overview leads me to the focus of this particular blog post and that is a perceived weakness or oversight in many inbound or Internet marketing strategies.

If getting found, converting & analyzing are the staples of a good Internet marketing process, this blog post is about the middle element or conversion strategy as I see that in many cases, this area needs the most attention. It's considered a great success to improve your search engine positions, increase your inbound links, double your traffic and reach but in the end, if your conversion process is sub-standard, it's not as big a success as it could have been.

With all of this in mind, it is important to understand the traditional sales funnel and sales cycle.

1. Top of the funnel = Tier one traffic from all sources including:
   • Organic traffic
   • Referral or link traffic
   • PPC traffic
   • Direct traffic
   • Email traffic
   • Blog traffic
   • Social media traffic
2. Middle of the funnel = Lead generation or conversion. This is the process of qualifying or filtering all traffic into interested or lead traffic. Once tier one traffic is converted to a lead, they have moved from the top of the funnel to the middle of the funnel.
3. Bottom of the funnel = Customers

In my next blog post I will discuss the process and methodology available to manage the middle of the funnel and convert tier one traffic into leads.

Other resources available to help you expand your reach:

Marketing Analysis: How To Evaluate Your Inbound Marketing Efforts: KPIs

This article is part 4 in a series outlining the philosophy and approach behind an effective inbound marketing strategy. If you haven't read the previous 3 articles, please feel welcome to do so here:

Article #1: Inbound Marketing Methodology - Part 1, Get Found, Convert, Analyze.
 Article #2: Inbound Marketing Fundamentals - Part 2, Get Found.
Article #3: Lead Conversion: How Do I Convert Traffic To Leads?

Part 4 - Analyze: (Marketing Analysis)

1. How do I evaluate my "get found" & "convert" efforts?
   
2. What are the "key performance indicators" I should be studying?
   
3. How do I know if I am doing all the right things?
4. What changes could I make to get better results?
5. Is my marketing analysis complete?
6. What methods are best for my marketing analysis?
   

In summary, our view of a powerful, integrated and effective inbound marketing strategy needs to include 3 main elements:

1. Get Found - Have your content optimized for search engines, blog articles & social media).
2. Convert - Make it easy for the traffic you created to engage and become a lead.
3. Analyze - (marketing analysis) Evaluate all elements and data to improve your inbound marketing
 strategy and plan of action.

Another great resource for learning best practices for your blogging strategy is by read additional articles from HubSpot.

Accurate analysis of all important metrics and KPIs (key performance indicators) is a critical component of a healthy inbound marketing strategy and inbound marketing technologies. A very significant luxury that a well constructed inbound marketing analysis & strategy can provide is real time numbers and measurable ROI. With the availability and integration of the front line inbound marketing applications, we are able to perform a marketing analysis daily and understand exactly what is working and what needs attention or even termination. If you have ever used an application like Google Analytics, you know that it's not very hard to view very detailed traffic statistics. However, many of these metrics aren't very useful and just because it can be measured, doesn't mean it has value. We feel a good marketing analysis application should include these metrics and KPIs:

• Traffic Sources
• organic traffic flow 
• paid traffic flow
• direct traffic flow
• referred traffic flow
• email campaign traffic flow
• social media traffic flow
• Twitter
• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• You Tube
• Social Media Conversations
• Know what is talked about on Twitter, LinkedIn and the blogosphere that relates to your important keywords.
• Reach (how many subscribers & followers do you have on:
• Facebook
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Blog email subscription
• Blog RSS feed
• Site converted leads
• Lead Conversion Rates
• Landing pages
• Specific offers
• Specific CTAs (call to action)
• Main site pages
• Leads:
• Where they converted
• When they converted
• What they downloaded
• What to do next
• Prospects: What organizations have reviewed your site (not leads)
• Blog
• Number of post views
• Number of comments on each post
• Number of inbound links generated
• Number of subscribers both email & RSS feed
• Keyword Performance
• Master keyword database
• Monthly traffic per keyword
• Level of competition per keyword
• Page ranking for each keyword
• Change in ranking for each keyword
• Related value of each keyword
• Competitive Marketing Analysis
• Website grade
• MOZ Rank
• Traffic rank
• Blog grade
• Inbound links
• Bookmarks
• Search engine indexed pages
  

With the ability to perform your marketing analysis using these key performance indicators, you are then able to watch and evaluate your marketing strategy as it unfolds. These metrics enable you to make faster, better and more powerful decisions and in turn, take better advantage of all your marketing your resources.

 Inbound Marketing: Get Found, Convert, Analyze

This article is part 3 in a series on the philosophy behind effective inbound marketing. If you haven't read the previous 2 articles, please feel welcome to do so here:

Article #1: Inbound Marketing Methodology - Part 1, Get Found, Convert, Analyze.
Article #2: Inbound Marketing Fundementals - Part 2, Get Found.

Part 3

Lead Conversion:

In summary, our view of a powerful, integrated and effective inbound marketing strategy needs to include 3 main elements:

1. Get Found - Have your content optimized for search engines, blog articles & social media)
   
2. Convert - Make it easy for the traffic you created to engage and become a lead
   
3. Analyze - Evaluate all elements and data to improve your inbound marketing
   strategy and plan of action

Getting found is a critical to success and becomes the result of a good web page & blog SEO strategy and the execution of that strategy. Write articles, produce videos (creating remarkable content), develop a large database of keywords and apply SEO (optimize). Then use all the social media sites and run email and PPC campaigns (when appropriate) (Promote). At the end of the day, however, we aren't in this for fun. We're also not in this for traffic. The goal is quality sales leads and customers, so the next step is to focus on converting as much of your traffic as possible to leads and customers.

Understand that there is potentially, huge value if you can increase your conversion rate and generate more leads from existing traffic. If you only get a few hundred visits per week, increasing your conversion rate by 1% could generate 10-15 more leads per month. If you get a few thousand visits a week, you stand to increase your lead flow by 100-150 leads per month

Landing Pages
 to targeted already established traffic (identified and/or isolated) can draw your audience to a specific page that has a very specific message, language & keywords. For instance, if you email everyone you met at a trade show and offer them a free trial of your product, that is a "targeted" traffic source because all the visitors have something in common - they are all from your trade show.

Converting a targeted stream of traffic requires two things:

1. A well-crafted offer on a landing page that is designed specifically for the audience you will be driving to the page, and
2. A stream of targeted traffic that you drive to the page.
   

If we compare this to the "organic" traffic from natural search (e.g., Google), social media sites, and other sources, we have learned that for "organic" traffic that finds you through SEO and social media, our conversion tactics need to be a little different because the audience is so much more diverse, and more difficult to target an offer that is designed especially for a particular visitor type.

Website & Blog: 
As you produce remarkable content, optimize and promote it, you are then able to generate traffic from variety sources, like Google, social media sites, the blogosphere, etc. You will have essentially created a magnet that attracts & pulls in prospects from throughout the web.

Conversion through the main pages on most websites is challenge. When someone hits a page on your site or your blog, you don't actually know where that visitor came from or what is on her mind. Because of this, it's sometimes hard to design an offer specifically for that person. For these reasons, your approach should consider the following:

• What is the range of conversion paths on your site?
• Where might people land
• What paths through your content might they take?
• How do we put offers and calls to action along the most common paths?
• How do we gain the maximum chance of getting the "right" offers in front of a given visitor? 
• What are all the methods available to maximize the chance of converting these visitors into a lead?
  

Article #4 in this series (Analyze) will be posted next week.

Inbound Marketing Methodology: First, you need to "Get Found".

1. First, create remarkable content. That's the core of inbound, attraction, search or pull marketing.
2. Optimize the content for the major search engines (SEO) and other audiences.
3. Promote this remarkable content in the blogosphere, social mediasphere, email marketing, and other appropriate channels.
   


A. Content Creation
The first and most important part of “Getting Found” is creating remarkable content. This means creating blog articles, web pages (updating existing pages & creating new landing pages), videos, photos, webinars, whitepapers, and other resources that are useful, interesting, thought provoking, controversial, and entertaining. This may be the most critical step in the development of a powerful inbound marketing & SEO plan and generating more traffic and qualified leads.

Create a content creation strategy and schedule, and then try to stick to it as closely as possible.

Every web page has the potential to rank well in search engines and draw traffic from other sources, like social media sites and the blogosphere. Of course, whether a page draws traffic (and links) depends on whether it's optimized and how remarkable (useful, interesting, etc.) it is. But in general, most pages do "well" and contribute to the cause, so it's both a quality and a quantity game.

Consider a 10 page website. This site has 10 unique pages that could rank on the major search engines as well as other places. 10 unique opportunities to draw traffic. Now compare that to a 100 page website. The 100-page site has 10x more opportunities to draw targeted traffic, and on average will be drawing 10x the amount of actual traffic. Thus, content really is king, and creating great content is the first challenge in any inbound marketing strategy.

B. Optimize Content

After content creation (which you need to continue through the entire inbound marketing process), you need to optimize that content for search engines (SEO) as well as for other channels, like YouTube & Twitter.

The foundation of any successful inbound marketing program is compelling content creation. Optimizing that content is a key step to ensure you give your valuable content the best chance possible of drawing traffic from the web.


Focus on two major components of your Search Engine Optimization (SEO):

1. On-Page SEO is the process of placing selected keywords in the right places on the web pages so that Google and other search engines know what each page of our client’s website is about, and what keywords to rank the different pages for. On-Page SEO makes up about 25% of how well you rank in the major search engines.
2. Off-Page SEO is the process of building links and authority, getting other sites on the Internet to link to you. The more links you have from other popular sites, the more important your site appears to be to Google and other search engines. Links are your online reputation from the perspective of the search engine. Off-page SEO makes up about 75% of how you rank in search engines.

Keyword Selection & Strategy Process

Choosing the right keywords for your SEO plan and Inbound Marketing strategy is one of the most important components for your success.

There are some basic rules to get this foundational work completed accurately. Here are some steps and check points that should help you develop or supervise your own inbound marketing strategy. I have posted an example of what a good keyword analysis and database should look like.

The general concept here is to start with what I call "long-tail" keywords. These type of keywords have lower levels of competition so you can consider these, the lower hanging fruit. The goal is to balance the activity or monthly search volume against the competition over those specific keywords.

1. Brainstorm your master list by yourself
2. Brainstorm with your team
3. Brainstorm with your customers
4. Enter than list into a keyword selector tool
5. Use that brainstormed keyword list in the keyword suggestion tool to further expand the master database.
6. Prioritize each keyword with a level of importance
7. Sort by search activity
8. Sort by competition

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