Tag Archives: HubSpot

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Successful Social Media Marketing Is Neither Free Nor Easy

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 Gasoline for FreeThis article, "Entrepreneurs Question Value of Social Media," from the Wall Street Journal caught my eye (and I'm sure several other readers' eyes) with it's clever headline and additionally provocative phrases:

* "Marketing Via Facebook, Twitter Yields Results for Some, Others Say It's Overrated" and "Hype Right Now Exceeds the Reality"

The WSJ article quotes findings from 2,000 small business owners surveyed by the University of Maryland's Smith School of Business and Network Solutions LLC.  Among the survey's findings included:

* Most users of social media – 58% – find the medium "just met expectations for success.  For the remainder, twice as many feel the medium fell short of expectations (26%) than exceeded expectations (12%) for success.

* 50% of small business users of social media have found that it has taken up more time than they expected.

So does this mean social media really doesn't work?  Is all that blogging, tweeting, friending, videoing, and updating of statuses to engage a specific target audience or buyer persona a complete waste of time?

  

Of course not.  But, I think these findings should "recalibrate" our expectations about how quickly social media and inbound marketing can impact overall business success.  Here are some thoughts in putting the achievement of business success via social media into perspective:

 

1. Social Media Success Stories Like Chris Brogan and HubSpot Didn't Happen Overnight


In my opinion, two of the most successful social media success stories demonstrating the time, dedication, and commitment required are Chris Brogan and HubSpot.  Both have invested years and countless hours to build their brands and business success via social media and inbound marketing. 

And their level of commitment continues …

Chris Brogan.  Brogan has been an online practitioner and social media evangelist for more than a decade, and in the last few years he's finally receiving more mainstream recognition and credit.  His book, Trust Agents, about how organizations can use social media to personally engage consumers, is a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller. 

But, this success and recognition did not occur overnight.  In fact, Brogan says it took him eight years (8) to acquire 100 subscribers when he started his blog.  Check out his video series called "Overnight Success" so you can see first-hand how social media success is hard-earned.

HubSpot. This organization literally created and proliferated the phrase "inbound marketing." They've published a best-selling book called Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs describing the online strategies and tactics driving their current business success (along with the success of other small to medium-sized businesses).   

And yes, they've also been diligently implementing and practicing those social media and inbound marketing strategies from their book for years.  As a point of reference, I looked at two data points regarding their popular Internet Marketing Blog.  These numbers illustrate the significant time and dedication required (and blogging is just one important channel of their multi-channel social media strategy):

(A) Years Invested in Blogging: ~3.5 years; Their first blog post was written in August 2006.  During a HubSpot webinar I attended this week, Brian Halligan (one of HubSpot's co-founders) said they initially started blogging once per week.  Now, they publish almost 3 blog posts daily.

(B) Number of Blog Posts Published by HubSpot: ~1000+ as of March 31, 2010.  This is my "back-of-the-envelope" analysis based on the number of posts I found on the HubSpot Website.

 

 

2. Long Term Commitment, Patience, and Flexibility: Social Media and Inbound Marketing are No Exception


This post by John McTigue of Kuno Creative, "Disappointed By Your Inbound Marketing Results," provides realistic and practical advice when managing expectations about social media and inbound marketing.  He emphasizes four (4) points (which I've paraphrased here).  Read John's entire post because it's great: 

(A) You shouldn't expect instant success.  Time and effort are required to reach people and convert them to customers.

(B) You must build relationships, not numbers.  Create interesting content, engage people directly, and reach them with great offers and service.

(C) You must be a chameleon.  Remain flexible and tweak your strategy daily by monitoring your metrics to keep improving.

(D) Be patient.  Invest at least a year before deciding to end the program.

From personal experience, I've only been blogging for 6 months and I can speak to the time and effort required to publish this blog.  For me, John's advice is readily applicable and timely. 

 

Conclusion

Patience, Perseverance, Effort.  Last time I checked, those traits applied to "traditional marketing success" also.  I fail to see why accomplishing social media and inbound marketing success would be any different …

 

Photo Credit: From Flickr by Tony the Misfit 

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5 Insights from HubSpot’s The State of Inbound Marketing 2010 Webinar

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Number 5 

HubSpot conducted a webinar on February 18th titled: The State of Inbound Marketing 2010. The webinar focused on key trends in inbound and outbound marketing uncovered from a survey HubSpot conducted in early 2010.  Hubspot's analysis reveals many insights on how businesses are using inbound marketing to reinvent and improve their marketing strategies. This is great content so I've posted the slides in case you didn't have the opportunity to attend the webinar.

The State of Inbound Marketing 2010

Mike Volpe (VP Marketing @HubSpot) and Adam Blake (MIT-Sloan MBA Student) presented many thoughtful insights.  Here are some golden nuggets that really hit home:

Insight 1 – Cost Per Lead for Inbound Marketing Channels is Significantly Lower Versus Outbound Marketing Channels
(Slide 5) Inbound marketing channels (i.e., social media, blogs, SEO – organic / natural search, PPC – paid search / Adwords) cost per lead averaged around $134.  Outbound marketing channels (i.e., telemarketing, trade shows, direct mail) cost per lead averaged around $332 per lead.  Thus, inbound marketing lowered costs per lead by 60%.

Insight 2 – Almost All Inbound Marketing Channels Generate Lower Costs Compared to Any Outbound Channel
(Slides 6, 7) 63% rated social media and blogs as "below average cost" for generating leads.  43% rated SEO as "below average cost."  In addition, these three inbound marketing channels performed better than all outbound marketing channels.  In slide 7, Mike observed that the outbound channel 2010 results for "below average cost" were better than 2009 for all categories.  He noted customers are probably negotiating better terms due to current economic conditions (e.g., a short-term benefit).

Insight 3 - Social Media is One Component of a Healthy Inbound Marketing Mix
(Slide 8) The lesson here: Don't put all your eggs in one basket.  Although respondents rated social media as their most important source of leads, SEO and blogs rated second and third respectively.  In fact, SEO was rated only 1% lower than social media (i.e., 59% to 60%). 

Successful Google results via organic search will continue to be important.  The eMarketer article, Organic Search Still Reigns, reinforces why landing on the first page results of Google, Yahoo!, and Bing is huge.  The rationale: 95% of search-referred traffic comes from first-page results.  Less than 2% of search-referred traffic comes from visitors willing to keep looking after the second page of results.

Insight 4 - Blog Post Frequency Significantly Impacts Customer Acquisition
(Slides 16, 17) Most respondents said they blog primarily once per week.  However, the firms most successful at customer acquisition were those who blogged more (i.e., two to three times per week, daily, multiple times per day). 
Mike and Adam think this is a result of gaining more experience in blogging.  When a firm blogs more frequently, it gets better at writing.  This yields better content which attracts more site traffic (and firms begin investing more time in their company blog).  When HubSpot was a smaller firm, Mike noted it blogged once per week.  When the firm started growing, their blogging frequency increased and they now create blog posts on a daily basis.

Insight 5 - Smaller Companies Implement Inbound Marketing (Larger Firms Not So Much)
(Slide 13) 44% of smaller firms utilize inbound marketing (versus 32% for larger firms).  Mike and Adam cited how smaller firms have more limited marketing budgets (i.e., many are start-ups).  In addition, the larger firms are more established, and they probably achieved their status through outbound marketing.
Insight #5 doesn't surprise me.  It makes sense why smaller firms would look to blogging, social media, and organic search as natural marketing vehicles.  The biggest expense is the investment and prioritization of time to inbound activities.  For the larger firms, I think they look at inbound marketing as additional channels to augment traditional marketing activity.
Check out this blog post: The Fortune 500 and Social Media by Dr. Leslie Gaines-Ross from reputationXchange.com.  It provides some great statistics and data on social media adoption (or lack therof) by the largest US corporations.
What do you think of these findings?  Do these results surprise you?  Please comment and let me know what you think.

Photo Credit: By psd via Flickr

 

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Please let me know if you agree or disagree with my thoughts in the comments. I would love to hear from you. I’m here to read, listen, and learn from YOUR PERSPECTIVE.   Comments are open. So let’er rip!


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Inbound Marketing by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah Levels the Marketing Playing Field

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J0105220[1] I am a huge fan of HubSpot and its founders, Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah.  Their team members, Mike Volpe and Rebecca Corliss, generously share outstanding content and services (i.e., Inbound Marketing University) to help all marketing professionals continuously improve and reinvent their marketing skills.  This organization is the epitome of a social media core value: “It is always better to give than to receive.”

 Inbound Marketing Book Cover Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs is an outstanding and practical marketing strategy guide targeted to small and startup businesses.  Halligan and Shah have written this book with small and startup businesses in mind because their book shares numerous insights from their own experiences as entrepreneurs (i.e., Tips from the Trenches).

The Value of This Book.  Inbound Marketing makes a convincing case that marketing success is not limited by the size of our respective marketing budgets.  Instead, these limits are now a function of our own creativity and investment of time.  Inbound Marketing practically explains how small or startup businesses can practically and effectively compete with larger competitors by executing:

* Social media strategy via channels such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.
* A lead nurturing and conversion process
* A sales marketing funnel process to measure campaign ROI


Inbound Marketing Versus Outbound Marketing

What’s Inbound Marketing?   Halligan explains the differences between Inbound Marketing and Outbound Marketing in this blog post: Inbound Marketing vs. Outbound Marketing.

Outbound Marketing = Traditional, “Push / Interruption-Based” Marketing.  The marketer pushes the message out far and wide hoping that it resonates far and wide with the target consumer.

Outbound Marketing tactics include:

  • Trade shows
  • Seminar series
  • Email blasts to purchased lists
  • Internal cold calling
  • Outsourced telemarketing
  • Advertising

Inbound Marketing = “Pull” Marketing Leveraging the Internet.  Any marketing tactic that relies on earning people’s interest instead of buying it.  Inbound marketing focuses on helping yourself “get found” by people already learning about and shopping in your industry. 

Inbound Marketing tactics include: 

  • Search engines
  • Blogs
  • Social media sites

The Inbound Marketing Process Transformation.  Three (3) business activities provide foundation for marketing transformation:

  1. Getting found online
  2. Converting visitors and leads
  3. Analyzing and improving

 

The 6 Practical Benefits of Studying Inbound Marketing

1. Understanding how/why Google plays a signifcant role in your marketing success.  Here, Inbound Marketing explains in non-technical terms why inbound links (e.g., links from other websites that connect to your site or blog) play a vital role in your website’s  “Google Juice” or Google Authority (e.g., the number of inbound links to your web pages and the authority of those pages linking to your site).

2. Executing practical and actionable “to-do” lists at the end of every chapter.  The suggestions are hardly rocket science but they require personal commitment, preseverance, and time.

3. Learning social media marketing tactics for use across all major social media channels.  Halligan and Shah ably provide specific examples on how to effectively deploy blogs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Digg, StumbleUpon, and YouTube.

4. Measuring the effectiveness of your social media marketing initiatives by channel.  For example, the book guides you on how to compare the effectiveness of a Twitter campaign versus a YouTube campaign.

5. Implementing a lead nurturing process in all marketing campaigns.  Why is this important?  Every prospect is at a different place in the buying cycle for your particular product or service.  Therefore, you want this prospect to have your organization at the “top-of-mind” even when they’re not ready to buy from you (because one day they will be).

6. Informing marketing decisions (e.g., ROI) by creating a sales marketing funnel process.  This process will enable your organization to measure and evaluate campaign yield along with ROI.

 

The 3 Audiences Who Will Benefit from Studying Inbound Marketing 

1. Amateur Bloggers.  You will learn how to build Google Authority for your blog by understanding why you don’t want your blog’s URL address to include the name of your blogging platform.  For example, if your blog’s URL address is www.myblogname.typepad.com or www.myblogname.wordpress.com that’s not good.  Make sure to address this problem — I did and my search engine results are all the better for it.

2. Marketing Professionals (especially CMOs).  You will make better marketing decisions by creating a sales marketing funnel so you can measure campaign effectiveness per channel using campaign yield and ROI measurement techniques.

3. CEOs.  You will learn how to monitor your competitor’s activity and progress by tracking seven (7) attributes.  These attributes can be tracked using free tools on the Internet.  These attributes or tools are:

* Website Grade via WebsiteGrader.com
* Number of Delicious.com bookmarks
* Number of inbound links
* Number of Facebook fans
* Website traffic via Compete.com
* Google Buzz of your brand name relative to a competitor’s brand name

If you’ve read Inbound Marketing, please leave me a comment and let me know what you thought of the book.  I’m curious to know what you found helpful or valuable.

 

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LinkedIn Lessons Part 1: Monitoring Your Personal Brand with the Popular Profile Section

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It’s hard to believe I graduated from Washington University twenty-plus years ago.  Since that time, I’ve made many important professional relationships.  “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know” is more than a clever cliché.  Relationships and access to key individuals is vitally important to succeeding in any organization, conducting a job search, executing a strategic plan, or selling a solution.

I started using LinkedIn more than a year ago to build, centralize, and maintain my professional relationships.  LinkedIn is a social networking site targeted to business professionals.  According to its website, LinkedIn counts 43 million+ members in over 200 countries.  In many ways, it’s the business audience version of Facebook.  Similar to growing and keeping in touch with Facebook “friends,” your primary purpose is to grow and maintain your LinkedIn “connections.”

Participation in LinkedIn is Important for Personal Branding and Online Visibility
When I started documenting ideas for The Social Media Reinvention Blog, I naturally thought of writing a LinkedIn-related article, and its importance in personal branding.  Here are some helpful online resources describing the importance of participating in LinkedIn:

·     HOW TO: Build Your Personal Brand on LinkedIn by Dan Schawbel

·     4 Minutes to Optimize a LinkedIn Profile for SEO by HubSpot

·     10 Ways to Use LinkedIn to Find a Job by Guy Kawasaki

Your individual, LinkedIn Profile is a personal branding opportunity that promotes your skills, capabilities, and connections to:

·     Your current employer

·     A prospective employer

·     A prospective connection

Even more importantly, LinkedIn public profiles rank very high in Google Searches which significantly increases your online visibility.  My public LinkedIn profile consistently ranks as my highest Google Search Engine Result when searching for “Tony Faustino.” 

The Popular Profiles Section Measures Your Personal Branding Efforts Within LinkedIn 
LinkedIn Popular Profile Cropped Many LinkedIn features are highly useful in personal branding.  For this post, I will focus on the “Popular Profiles” feature found in the LinkedIn Company Profile Page of a respective company. 

In a LinkedIn Company Profile Page, the top five Popular Profiles are displayed for that respective organization.  According to LinkedIn’s Frequently Asked Questions: Origin of Data for Company Profiles, a Popular Profile is defined as: “These are LinkedIn users who have the most Profile views for the Company Profile page you are viewing.”

Therefore, the Popular Profiles Section measures your LinkedIn Profile’s “findability” or “searchability” to other LinkedIn members.  This is extremely important so I monitor my profile’s popularity on a weekly basis.  This monitoring activity helps me gauge how well I’ve optimized my profile with important keywords and the effectiveness of my comments in various LinkedIn Discussion Group forums.

Note: I checked with LinkedIn Customer Service if the Popular Profile algorithm also factors in the number of views of one’s public profile – it does not (e.g., LinkedIn profiles views resulting from Google Searches).

I’ve Maintained a Popular Profile on my Firm’s LinkedIn Company Page for 22 Consecutive Weeks
Maintaining a Popular Profile on LinkedIn takes significant time and commitment.  When I discovered the Popular Profiles feature, I made it a personal goal to get my profile listed in this section.  Here are the four tactics I employ to continue achieving this result:

·     Optimize Your Profile for Important Keywords (Particularly The Specialties Section)

·     Thoroughly Describe Your Work Experience

·     Frequently Update Your Status with Useful Content

·     Actively Comment in LinkedIn Discussion Group Forums

In LinkedIn Lessons Part 2, I will describe in further detail how I specifically employ these four tactics.