Top 5 Inbound Marketing Stories of the Week: Missed Branding Opportunities

The social media-sphere offers an uncountable number of marketing and branding opportunities.  Your company's brand can not only live on its own website, but now you can maintain a presence and manage your brand on social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter in addition to various other social media sites such as Flickr and YouTube.

Engaging in social media is a great way to promote your brand, but are you overlooking some of the simple ways to help create a recognizable company image?  This week's most popular article on InboundMarketing.com highlights a great branding opportunity you might be missing out on...

1. Missed Simple Branding Opportunity in Email Signatures

Author: Dan Ronken of Push not Pull Marketing

Email may not seem like the most cutting-edge tool anymore now that it's a Web staple, but are you using it to its fullest potential?  Dan Ronken mentions a plugin from Firefox that can help your email signature stand out, making it more brand recognizable by including RSS feeds, logos, links to your social media presence on the Web, etc.

The plugin, called WiseStamp, takes only a few minutes to set up and is compatible with any webmail service, such as Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail!, or AOL Mail. 

Lesson: Don't overlook simple ways to promote your brand.

2. HOW TO: Use Social Media in Your PR Pitch Plan

Author: Susan Payton in Mashable

In the past week, there has been a lot of mention on the HubSpot blog about the changing nature of PR with a post about the death of PR and its follow-up about modern PR professionals.  To further the discussion about how to adapt your PR efforts, Susan's post offers some tips about how to successfully and appropriately incorporate social media into your pitches. 

Some of her advice: Use social media as a tool to learn about the journalist/blogger you're targeting, be a resource by listening to writers' story needs, use social media tools like Twitter to communicate your story ideas, and form a well-rounded, overall strategy that includes press releases, article marketing sites, blogs and social networking sites. 

Lesson: Traditional marketing techniques can be adapted and applied to the new ways of the Web.

3. How Speakers Should Integrate Social into Their Presentations

Author: Jeremiah Owyang in Web Strategy

While we're on the topic of integrating social media into traditional marketing tactics, let's chat about Web strategist Jeremiah Owyang's article, which discusses how to develop a social strategy during speaking engagements.  To stress his main point - that the savviest of speakers will engage with their audience in the real world and in the digital world (or suffer the consequences) - Jeremiah's suggests some ways speakers should integrate "social" into their presentations. 

Jeremiah's recommendations include being prepared, knowing the audience's social technology adoption, monitoring the backchannel (e.g. audience reactions on Twitter) during presentation, interacting with the audience, and being a multi-tasking speaker.

Lesson: Make your presentaion more engaging/successful by taking audience participation and feedback into account.

4. Niche Brands Should Embrace Big Market for Offbeat Content

Author: Alan Wolk in Advertising Age

When was the last time you watched something risky on YouTube?  Alan's article recognizes that there's a huge marketing opportunity out there that's been largely untapped by niche brands - creating edgy, offbeat content.  Most marketers are producing content that satisfies the mainstream audience, because - let's face it - it's safe.  But what about creating fresh and unique content that satisfies the interests of a brand's target audience?

Alan ecourages niche brands to learn from the example of Red Bull, whose cool, entertaining content targets the young and the hip.  A similar strategy, he says, can work for any brand willing to offer content that's of actual interest to its target audience.

Lesson: Be unique.

5. YouTube Integrates Promoted Videos with AdWords

Author: Jason Kincaid of TechCrunch

Every minute, 20 hours of footage is uploaded to YouTube.  Every minute. This is a marketer's nightmare, because it means that at any given time, YouTube has a ton of content to offer users, making that awesome, potentially viral video you're trying to promote get easily lost in the clutter.

While YouTube offers a 'Promoted Videos' feature that allows users to pay for increased exposure for their videos, Jason's article highlights a new option available for YouTube promoters looking for increase ease-of-use.  YouTube has now joined forces with AdWords to allow 'Promoted Video' users to manage their video promotion directly from the AdWords platform, which has more robust campaign tools.  

Lesson: Look for ways to make your content rise above the clutter.

Video: How to Use Social Media to Attract More Customers

Learn how to use social media to attract more customers. Download the free video and learn how to generate more business using social media.