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Inbound marketing is all the rage. Social media has us consumed. B2B Marketers are creating more content than ever before. We’re optimizing everything we possibly can all with the intention of driving more people to our sites, engaging with them and offering them opportunities to raise their hand and announce themselves. For many of us, it’s working! Visitors are showing up at rates we’ve never seen before. Some are just stopping by to see what we’re offering, some clicking around the site to check us out and of course those that decide to take the bait, oops, I mean fill out the lead form.
After offsite engagement for awareness, the next step along the route to revenue looks at the "Consideration" phase where engagement – as well as other factors – can affect click-through rates (CTR) in search results, an oft overlooked, and underrated metric in the world of SEO. First a caveat! CTR studies are both fun and farcical. When no two search results are the same, predicting the percentage of click-throughs in certain positions, and leveraging that as a prognostication of actual traffic can, at best, provide directional data and, at worst, leave clients unhappy when targets fall short. .
Just about every marketer over the past month has been working on 2013 planning and budgeting. In many cases, they are searching for innovative content ideas. In that spirit, here's a list of content marketing ideas you may want to execute this year to give you an edge over your competition.
.It’s time we re-imagined the way marketing works. This is not a new way of doing marketing. It’s a new way of understanding it. Content Marketing, Customer Acquisition, Inbound vs. Outbound, The Sales Funnel, Customer Retention, etc. all get revamped and refitted into one concise model — Gravitational Marketing What you learned in gradeschool applies here. The larger the planet, the stronger the gravity. By increasing your planet’s (website) size with great content, you become much more attractive (think gravity) to potential clients. Check out (and share!) this infographic, then download the accompanying eBook to fully understand the implications with lots of tips, entertaining illustrations, and illustrative data.
Inbound marketing is a highly effective strategy for companies seeking to reach and connect with prospective buyers, but in isolation it will fail for most companies. Two of the most critical limitations are outlined in this excellent post.
The FBI recently posted a Request for Information (RFI) for a “social media application.” But, it was really a request for a social media monitoring application. Why? Because the FBI recognizes what many inbound marketers already know and many others are discovering: There’s gold in them thar social media data. You can use the same social media monitoring attributes the FBI wants to use to catch bad guys to generate and nurture leads, identify hot spots (good and bad), and close more deals.
Content Marketing at its core is about planning information that is thoughtful about the needs and interests of target customer groups as they take the journey through the buying cycle, interacting with content and pulling themselves towards purchase. The role of search engines in making ebooks, white papers, case studies, newsletters, webinars, reports, video, images and many other content marketing tactics is often underestimated or overlooked. Here are 5 basic SEO troubleshooting tips for you if you're a content marketer.
Laura Fitton, inbound marketing evangelist at HubSpot, sees inbound marketing as composed of three key processes: get found, convert and analyze.While legacy Outbound Marketing techniques are designed to “push” messages out to prospects, inbound marketing combines the art of creating valuable content with techniques to maximize the opportunities for prospects to discover and share that content on web and social channels. Critical analysis is made possible by growing banks of consumer and prospect data, as well as improved traceability of sales conversion touch points. Many companies, however, are not taking full advantage of available data, as they are unable to filter for relevancy or link findings from disparate sources. And many are not taking full advantage of opportunities to convert. Insights are shared in this post on inbound marketing concepts and practices, using two brief case studies to illustrate its potential.
Marketing is moving from analog to digital and many well established companies have not woken up to this and are still persisting with what was the “tried and true” but is now becoming the expensive and ineffective. There are essentially 3 elements that have emerged in the last decade that have brought us to this generational shift: 1) social media 2) mobile devices enabled with wireless broadband and 3) Google and other search engines continual evolution. Here is a list of the top 10 essential activities that should be considered part of your marketing strategy roadmap that are becoming vital in a digital world and are quite often ignored by a generation of management that grew up in the age of the TV industrial complex and telemarketing.
Today’s blogosphere counts several millionsactive blogs offering a great variety of topics and content. The wonderful aspect of a blog creation is that anyone who has a particular hobby, knowledge, passion or a business to promote, can easily do it. The danger, though, is to start a blog without a specific plan, target group and more importantly knowledge of content creation. Good content is the most important factor of your blog since not only it is the key to attract readers and turn them to loyal followers but also to increase your internet exposure via the Search Engines. With the following blog writing tips and a little practice, you will certainly become an active part of the blogosphere.
You had a good 2011. Your online marketing campaign went off without a hitch; you made so many new customers and increased your traffic so quickly that you’re ready to rest on your laurels. You can't. Here are 5 ways to stay ahead of your competition in 2012.
How to posts are a time tested method for building links and driving traffic. This post provides tips for maximizing the technique & avoiding mistakes.
QR codes have been getting a good bit of flak recently as a fad that are mostly used by brands and marketers but ignored by consumers. There have been some pretty silly uses but this latest campaign from Heineken is actually a very smart and social way for them to be used at a music festival. Check out the short video to see what it was all about
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Digital Marketing Power - My Curation Topic
I've been fascinated with digital marketing and its possibilities ever since the term was coined. I guess that's because I've been professionally involved in sales and marketing for over 20 years now, way before the invention of the internet. I remember trying to think of a suitable title to encapsulate what digital marketing means to me and I realised that the word POWER had to be in there. When you think about it, when has there ever been a time in the history of commercial marketing and PR where a one man band or small business could compete with a multinational or global business. Digital marketing (when executed correctly) can level the playing field. My objective with 'Digital Marketing Power' is to select the best content from the best content producers around the world based on the following 3 key principles; 1) Education - provide hot tips and advice which you can use in your business immediately to make a difference 2) well written and nicely presented content for your enhanced experience and 3) evergreen content - so you can go back and reference this material regularly if you so choose. This is not a news site. Finally, I wanted to take this opportunity to mention my business, Gary Hitching Associates. I'm a business development consultant and specialise in lead generation, sales and customer retention for mainly SME businesses. Digital marketing and social media marketing are very significant components of my business development toolkit. Please feel free to visit my website and download a free copy of my 'Marketing Audit Checklist' www.garyhitching.com
Content marketing is about telling a story that resonates with your audience and finding a relevant channel to deliver it. It’s the loyal followers that then spread the brand message, these days, commonly, but not exclusively, via social media. Well that’s the theory. Getting it right can be hard. Sometimes we all have to go back to the drawing board to gather ideas and inspiration. For a recent content marketing workshop we hosted, I did just that. I wanted to showcase the brands that are doing content marketing brilliantly. OK, I admit, some of the companies I used as examples have massive budgets, but they still have their unique challenges. What all the brands have in common is the creative flair, the ability to change direction, adapting to new environments and communicating with the people that are most important to them – their customers – in a variety of ways.
Information graphics, or infographics, are graphic visual representations of information, data, or knowledge. Infographics have become a powerful, revolutionary marketing tool—a single infographic has the potential to reach up to 15 million people. As opposed to traditional posts, infographic posts perform better on Twitter, Linkedin, and Stumbleupon (as measured by tweets, shares, and pageviews). Google ranks trends from 0-100 giving a number to a keyword based on how often it is searched compared to other keywords. Based on this measure, the top six countries in the world for the keyword “infographic” consist of the following: the Philippines (60), South Africa (56), New Zealand (50), Netherlands (41), India (38), and the U.S. (38). The top six cities include Singapore, Bangalore, San Francisco, Sydney, Chicago, and Melbourne. Some popular infographics on the Internet today include “How Much Can You Trust a Bearded Man?” and “Should I Text Him?” If you’re into dating bearded men, these infographics just might appeal to you. If you want to learn about why startups fail, how you can better handle your headaches, and the evolution of the geek, there are some excellent infographics available. Among the most popular infographic themes include business, economy, health, social media, and technology. The first infographic was published in 1626, but they have really only become truly popular since 2009. The overall popularity of infographics has skyrocketed since 2009, 2012 was the most successful year for infographics thus far. .
Each year, small businesses spend considerable time and effort marketing their products and services online. But are you making the most of the time you spend marketing on the web? To help you find out, we offers the following list of five things small businesses do to undermine their online marketing efforts.
A tectonic transformation is happening now in the world of digital marketing. With the exponential rise of social media channels and online consumer engagement, it is getting increasingly difficult to reach consumers and increase ROI through traditional advertising. While big corporations keep shelling out on expensive outbound marketing campaigns, there is increased evidence of a major shift in consumer behaviour, with more and more people being in favour of opt-in promotional methods and tending to block out interruptive advertising messages.
We’ve all been there: You’ve had a raucous weekend, and now it’s Monday morning, time to drag yourself into work. If you have a certain kind of job, it’s no big deal. You can coast a bit, maybe surf the web and take a few extra trips to the water cooler until you feel up to reallyworking.But if your job requires you to be creative — and perhaps you’re getting paid a decent amount to come up with ideas — then you don’t have that option. In that case, you have to start coming up with ideas even though you’d rather be lying on your couch eating Cheez Doodles. What to do? Mashable checked in with some digital innovators and a few professors who study creativity to get some tips on how to get the upper hand on the muse. Below are seven suggestions.
How content, social media, search engine optimization (SEO), and marketing automation work together to grow your business. This is a really nice infographic that visually explains the power of inbound marketing.
There are a number of ways using Google+ for marketing can have a beneficial impact on your business' search engine optimization efforts. Because Google is so eager to provide plenty of incentives for people to actively use the network, it has tied the platform very closely to all of its Google Search features as well. As a result, there are many ways that using Google+ can help boost your regular performance in Google's organic search results as well as help you generate more traffic from people doing searches on the topics you already rank for. In fact, because of the strong connection between Google+ and Google Search, businesses can't afford not to create and maintain a Google+ page. Because Google is launching new integrations between Google+ and Google Search on a regular basis, your business' search presence will only suffer without an active Google+ page. Here are 5 ways you can use Google+ to help you enhance your business' SEO.
Many marketers have worked hard in 2011 to develop appropriately customized ROI measures for social media. Are you measuring the interplay and overall performance of your combined paid, earned, and owned digital media channels? Here's a 5-step process to discover which elements are driving the most value.
Forget predictions from Nostradamus or the Mayan Calendar. Now, we have companies like Recorded Future analyzing semantics and sentiments to foretell the future. They do this by sorting through thousands of news publications, blogs, tweets, comments, trade journals, government web sites, financial databases, and more. Recorded Future sees ahead “By applying temporal analytics to what is written about the future, and by algorithmically crowd-sourcing the resulting temporal information, we can draw conclusions and gain insight.” Now even small businesses can tap into the trove of rich data and forward-looking insights.
In the marketing world, getting in on the ground floor of the latest digital trend can pay huge dividends for users, particularly if they’re brands. But it’s difficult to know exactly which emerging site or app to dive into with both feet. Not every idea pans out, regardless of how much VC funding is acquired. True success depends on widespread adoption of the masses, or at least a dedicated community who simply can’t do without that service. So for marketers planning for 2012 (maybe a bit late), where should they start?
Launching a new website can be an intense experience. The following post will give you 10 things you must do to ensure a successful and pleasurable experience is achieved.
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![Inbound Marketing Ecosystem [Infographic] | Digital Marketing Power | Scoop.it](https://img.scoop.it/1Phpag8bZNjYkGOT4oqNOzl72eJkfbmt4t8yenImKBVvK0kTmF0xjctABnaLJIm9)
This article discusses the ways the inbound, social media, marketing can effect your outbound, traditional, marketing efforts. As companies are beginning to understand that their customers are constantly online and that social media websites are an effective, inexpensive way to communicate with them, budgets are going up. Businesses are allocating more money to social media marketing. When thinking of the flaws in social media marketing, this one is not something I had previously thought of and I find it very interesting: Companies are having their customers fill out information such as names, email addresses, birth dates, etc. through social media webpages. They are then using this information to determine target markets and necessary traditional media that should be used. Many customers, though, are not comfortable giving out their personal information over the internet, and are giving these companies false information. This false information can effect the success of any traditional campaign, and something needs to be done to avoid this. The article gives a few suggestions, such as requiring valid email confirmation, that I now understand and believe should be done. When measuring the success of your traditional media, it is important to measure the success of any social media efforts used to fuel the traditional. This is something to keep in mind while measuring.
Is Inbound Marketing Trashing My Outbound Marketing?