As retailers across the country hope to start the holiday shopping season with a BANG! today, I enjoy the day after Thanksgiving as a
time for planning the following month. It's probably one of the few days of the year that
you can actually think about the end of the month, and then the end of
the year. And, it's pretty quiet on the work front too.
Yes. I am working today. And, yes, it is Black Friday. Why won't you find me in line with the thousands of other shoppers looking for a super-duper bargain? Because, quite simply, I hope to tie a big red bow on the actions necessary to have a successful December.
Primarily, I hope to forecast the expected number of workable leads for the 32 HubSpot sales people on our team. With the Service Level Agreement (SLA) our team has in place with Sales, and it would be fantastic if we could exceed the number we've committed to with them. What a great way to end the year and begin the next one with a pipeline filled with prospects!
How do we achieve our SLA? It's not easy, and with at least three new sales people joining the company each month, the SLA grows incrementally because we've agreed to make sure that every sales person - no matter how small - gets a certain number of leads to achieve their quota. That gives the Marketing Team a quota to achieve. And that quota requires planning.
The HubSpot Get Found Team works very hard to create remarkable content for our
blogs, newsletters, web pages, and other communication outlets such as
SlideShare, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook...the list is almost endless. All their valuable content forms the link bait to drive visitors, contributing to the valuable source of organic sales leads that convert to customers at a very high rate.
The Convert Team continues to focus on the lead generation plan that will optimize the number of leads we will create for the Sales organization. We're responsible for finding opportunities that turn HubSpot thought leadership content into workable leads, opportunities and customers.
What's in store for December lead generation?
* A fantastic thought leadership webinar, featuring HubSpot's Dan Zarrella and his new book on Social Media.
* More webinars, featuring HubSpot speakers, with MarketingSherpa, Web Marketing Today, the AMA, and WebMarketing123.
* Special offers - featuring the HubSpot founders' book on Inbound Marketing - extended to subscribers of RainToday, Debbie Weil, Jill Konrath, Ardath Albee and MarketingProfs.
* And, we have several nurturing emails going to our customer and prospect lists, offering product demonstrations, and HubSpot application review sessions featuring our bevy of speakers, all under the auspices of our Product Evangelism guru, Kirsten Knipp.
Each of these individual marketing efforts requires a special Landing Page associated with it. Why? HubSpot knows that conversion increases with a form, a call to action and a very strong offer. We often tell people that of the hundreds of landing pages we have created - on average - convert around 27%. As a benchmark, that is a noteworthy percentage of visitors to leads.
For the many marketers HubSpot talks to, the single greatest obstacle to creating landing pages is a lack of resources, and oftentimes the resource is in-house. In a prior marketing position, I either spent $500 with my agency to get a landing page for my press release, my Adwords campaign, my email program or I went with out a valuable conversion opportunity. Forget IT, it would take weeks to get anything and then it would not be what was needed.
With HubSpot we can create landing pages on the fly (comparatively) to take advantage of conversion opportunities...well, opportunistically. And, we track every single one of the metrics. The offer, the form, the visitors, and the conversion rate.
There are many variables we consider for landing pages in an effort to increase conversion rates. And, we try them all. Again and again, in an effort to find the magic that will get us one more lead.
What about shorter copy length? Could it be a simple page with few graphics? Will we offer a single landing page versus a multi-step page? Should we consider utilizing an aggressive sales language or go for the soft well? What if we wrote bulleted copy instead of paragraph copy? All of these ideas play into the goal of increasing conversion rates.
A small increase in conversion rates can mean a large increase in the number of workable leads for the sales team.
At HubSpot, because the marketing team uses the HubSpot software for their programs, we're able to simply create landing pages that enable us to perform all sorts of tests on conversion rates so the relationship between testing and performance is critical to success - for the marketing team and for the sales team.
Yes, it will be a very good December for our sales organization. Because, we've planned, we've considered, we've discussed, and we've agreed to a workable objective via our SLA.
These are the things we think about every day, but today I have to wonder...will Sears or Toys "R" Us ever have a Black Friday that lets me get leads at a whopping discount? That is one bargain I'd definitely get in line for at 3 AM.
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Do you know how to make a blog that people will keep people coming back for more?
As you cook Thanksgiving dinner today, watch how your hungry guests keep returning to the kitchen– drawn in by attractive, delicious-smelling food. Today, these hungry people are your family, but on your website they represent your visitors. You want to attract vistiors to your website with compelling content. Notice that as your family comes into your kitchen, they sniff it out, maybe even steal a bite. If this was your website, you’d offer the bite in exchange for a bit of information about the visitor and transform them into a lead.
How to Bake a Delicious, Content-Filled Blog
INGREDIENTS
1 blogger (preferably someone passionate about content production)
1 RSS reader (set up and containing blogs related to your industry)
1 URL (with Typepad or Blogspot accounts removed and discarded)
Blog Analytics, installed
2 cups Social Media
1 cup SEO
1 Image, iconic and captivating
Blog Post Titles, Engaging
3-10 Meta Keywords, Researched
1 Meta Description containing 1 Keyword Phrase
Call-To-Action, Attractive and Mixed with a Compelling Offer
A whole lot of patience (don’t worry if you bake it, they will come)
(Optional) Team of passionate employees who foster a sense of content creation in your company
PREPARATION
1. Use your RSS reader to begin reading the blogs of other people in your industry. Be sure to comment, especially on posts interesting to your prospects, with meaningful insights and questions. Repeat this step continually while your blog bakes.
2. Begin writing posts that your prospects will find interesting. You can format your post in a variety of different ways, but make sure that you organize your thoughts in some way. People have a tendency to skim, so be sure to highlight important sections with a sub-title or organize your post into a list format. When completed, set blog post aside to cool.
3. Start thinking of photos for your blog post. It’s easy to get distracted searching for an image. Keep the process short by focusing on the theme of your post and using it as a keyword in an image search. You can make an image yourself (a chart or graph) or use Flickr’s Advanced Search to search for images based on tags people have used. Be sure to include alt-txt that contains important keywords when you add the image to your blog post.
4. Now it’s time to add an effective call-to-action to the end of your post. If you’d like you can prepare these ahead of time. Make sure your offer is compelling to people who may read your blog post.
5. Top off your blog post with an engaging title which will draw people into your site. It’s best if your title is also less or around 70 characters in length.
6. Return to your blog post and populate the keyword Meta data with appropriate keywords you’ve selected as low difficulty, but have a generous search volume (if you’re a Hubspot customer you can use Keyword Grader to compile and monitor your list of keywords).
7. Write a unique Meta description that does not include your blog title. Include 1 of your keyword phrases. You want to keep your Meta description less than 156 characters in length.
8. After proofreading your post, your blog post is now ready to share. Be sure to share your blog posts via your social media accounts such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. If you can, set up a tool that automatically posts your blog posts when they go live.
9. Your blog is now in the oven of the internet, baking. Repeat steps 1 through 8 once a week or more for the next few months, all the while using your Blog Analytics to discover who is visiting your blog posts. Check out your most popular blog posts and try to recreate your success in new posts. Analyze and repeat.
10. Have a Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!
Yield: endless
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NOTE FROM THE PRODUCERS: Special Thanksgiving Episode of the show TODAY (Wednesday, November 25) at 1:00pm EDT. Click here at 1:00pm ET today to watch the show live.
Episode #67 - November 20, 2009
(Episode Length: 27 minutes, 35 seconds)
Intro
New Guest! The Wonderful Dan Zarrella!
ReHashing ReTweeting
Blogger Takes Heat for Comment Moderation
- Follow up: The vulgar comment & the school
- Kurt Greenbaum of St. Louis Post-Dispatch's wrote an article about the strangest thing you've ever eaten.
- Commenter
left vulgar comments twice, Greenbaum realized from commenter's IP that
it was from a local school. Contacted the school and sent over IP
details.
- Commenter was a teacher and resigned when confronted by Principal.
- Marketing Takeaway #1: There is no such thing as an anonymous comment.
- Marketing Takeaway #2: This social media thing is still new, think twice about your actions.
Digg Blending Advertising and Content
- Digg CEO: Content as Advertising
- "Instead
of the standard billboard or whatever you read on the Internet, we're
going to create ads - and we do create ads - that are literally
content, so if you click on it you read an interesting story or
article, and you put branding next to it. And we get literally get 100
times the click-through rate of what a typical ad would get, so that's
good for advertisers."
- Marketing Takeaway: Content performs better than sales promotion, and content can help build brands.
Forum Fodder
Marketing Tip of the Week: Your customers are there...your competitors are there ... why aren't you there? Buy The Social Media Marketing Book!
Closing
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Today I came across a study released earlier this year by the Altimeter Group titled “ENGAGEMENTdb: Deep Brand Engagement Correlates with Financial Performance.”
The study looked at how the 100 most valuable brands — as identified by the 2008 BusinessWeek/Interbrand Best Global Brands ranking
— engaged in 11 different online social media channels. They ranked the
top 10 companies based on their social media engagement with their
customers, and came up with this list:
- Starbucks (127)
- Dell (123)
- eBay (115)
- Google (105)
- Microsoft (103)
- Thomson Reuters (101)
- Nike (100)
- Amazon (88)
- SAP (86)
- Tie – Yahoo!/Intel (85)
The study focused not only on the breadth of the social media
channels they were engaged in, but also the depth to which they
interacted with their audience. The most amazing statistic in the
report is the following:
“The above companies on average grew 18% in revenues over the last 12 months, compared to the least engaged companies who on average
saw a decline of 6% in revenue during the same period. The same holds
true for two other financial metrics, gross margin and net profit.”
As far as I know, this is the first study directly linking social
media engagement to financial performance. It is well known that social
media can drive traffic and increase leads
– but the connection between social media and more traditional
financial measurements such as revenues, gross margin, and net profit
were previously unclear.
It is important to note that the authors do not claim that social media is the SOLE reason for
the companies’ financial performance; simply that those companies who
are highly engaged in social media also have superior financial
performance when compared to their peers.
photo by Jon Tucker
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An interesting email found its way into my inbox today. The CEO of a Fortune 500 company has set up a standard reply to vendor-initiated emails or voicemails which request his time or information in pursuit of sales.
Unable to read, follow-up, or reply to the dozens of emails sent to him every week, the CEO created the standard reply (excerpts posted below) to prevent unsolicited follow-up emails and to try to provide some meaningful answers to the recipient.
Much like how TIVO has created a generation of consumers able to block advertising messages, other tools such as email filters and caller ID have created a generation of CEOs able to block out sales noise. Not wanting to ignore the messages that barraged him daily, the Fortune 500 CEO crafted a response which would spurn almost any vendor’s advances. The email was a little long, so I included just the highlights below:
The CEO Explains the Need for His Email Reply
“Please understand that I get dozens of these types of messages a week. I simply do not have time to read them, dig into them, follow-up on them, or reply to them. The most effective solution to this problem is for me to ignore the messages, which is what I usually do. This, however, is unsatisfactory for you because you never hear back, and possibly unsatisfactory for me if indeed your product would be attractive. So I have my email system send this reply back to let you know that your message was received.”
He Lists Several Ineffective Outbound Marketing Tactics
“Similarly, I find the following things difficult to deal with, so please:
- Do not send endless follow-ups.
- Do not reach out to many of us on the team.
- Do not try connect to me on some social networking site. I get too many of those requests too.
- Do not subscribe me to your newsletter. (This will eventually get all email from your company blocked; sorry.)
- Do not include attachments.
- Do not embed HTML that contacts your website.”
Some of you might be thinking, “Wait, is connecting to influential individuals on a social network considered be an ineffective Inbound Marketing strategy?” That depends. Trying to connect to someone who has not solicited your friendship/connection can be just as interruptive as cold calling someone. You want to create content that draws influential people to you on social networks. Therefore, I can understand if this particular CEO finds endless friendship requests to be annoying.
Remember, social networking sites have different intimacy levels. On Twitter, someone can follow me, but I don’t necessarily have to follow them back. I assume that this CEO must be talking about a social networking site like LinkedIN or Facebook where adding someone as a friend requires a second step or action from the recipient.
His Advice: Use Inbound Marketing To Get Found Online
“Finally, a small comment. As a customer, I find this type of approach to sales to be largely annoying to me and unproductive for you. We learn far more about what we want to purchase by searching the web, looking for customer references in blogs and forums, word of mouth, and by finding white papers on your site that concretely describe solutions to problems we are having.
I apologize that I cannot be more responsive. I do hope that this message is more helpful than no response at all. Let me reiterate that this response has nothing to do with you or your company in particular, but is simply the only way I have to deal with the volume of requests other than to ignore them all.
Thank you for your understanding.”
As we draw closer to Thanksgiving, I can’t help but be thankful for the power of Inbound Marketing. It’s so powerful a CEO of a Fortune 500 company (who is constantly blocking out messages that interrupt his work life) recommends it as the best way to grab his attention. Online search, blogging and social media have profoundly altered the way business deals are done. Are your methods in touch with this new marketing reality?
Let this email be a friendly reminder to all of us that creating meaningful content such as whitepapers, webinars, and blog posts that “concretely describe solutions to problems” is a much more effective way to get found by your customers than sending an unsolicited sales message via email.
photo by avantard
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