Google, Yahoo and Bing increasingly include results from social media discussions in their search results.

But how to get into those results the smartest way?

The easiest way to get better found on search engines is content marketing. As content marketing has become the most powerful marketing strategy to increase brand awareness, trust and credibility with the audience.

As content is only a part of an integral marketing strategy there is more part of the marketing puzzle important to be used.

The most powerful internet marketing strategy which also has proven to be successful and to bring guaranteed results for businesses is Inbound Marketing.

Inbound marketing consist of content creation like Blogging, Social Media Marketing, Lead Conversion, Lead Nurturing and Closed-Loop Analysis.

Inbound Marketing has proven to:

• Save up to 62% of a businesses marketing budget.

• Make a business stand out of their competition.

• Help to generate a massive amount of leads with up to 55% higher lead conversion rates

• Increase customers, sales and revenue.

Content creation

Content Marketing has become a significant part of online marketing strategy. Content marketing has proven to be the best and most cost effective way to drive traffic to a company website and convert this traffic to leads and customers.

The most popular ways of content marketing are blogging, social media and video. Studies show that 57% of companies which operate a corporate blog get customers through their blogging effort!

Social Media Marketing

Social Media Marketing has become a powerful tool to spread remarkable content to reach a wide audience.

For companies who engage in social media and show presence in these channels can open wide opportunities to get in touch with their audience. This leads to an increase of credibility and unfiltered feedback of the target audience and can lead to an improvement of products and services.

New studies show that up to 65 percent of today’s consumers expect a brand to listen and to respond on questions, comments and complaints in social media. Studies also show that companies which use social media actively to communicate with their audience are more successful than companies who do not.

Lead Generation

Inbound marketing has a 62% lower cost per lead than traditional marketing strategies. Inbound marketing way generated leads have a 55% higher lead conversion rate than lead generated through traditional marketing strategies.

Lead Nurturing – Lead Conversion

Effective lead nurturing increases lead conversion by up to 55%. Which does not mean that lead nurturing consist of sales pitches. Moreover effective lead nurturing is also a communication process with the future client in which the lead receives helpful and valuable information too. This grows the trust and increases the chances that a lead buys when he is ready to do so, because he knows the source as a trusted and reputable one.

Closed-Loop Analysis

All marketing tasks need to be measured to ensure you are walking the right way. During this closed loop analysis you increase successful tasks measure, improve and repeat. This ensures a step by step quality increase and a gradually decrease of marketing costs up to 62%.

Infographic: Content creation

Keep your inbound marketing flexible to react on real-time news! Always keep the news in focus. As news appears they can offer a tremendous opportunity for you to jump on this bandwagon to use it as your own marketing push the piggy pack way! But you must react quickly, in real-time!

Simply be the first who tweets, shares or likes the story and also take into account to write a blog article from your point of view ASAP! This can help to increase your brand awareness.

Did I missed something, what do you think?

Further important resources:

• Creating a Content Marketing Strategy | Business 2 Community
• What makes content marketing google worthy?
• Social media, content marketing top priorities for 70 percent of …
• The 10 Commandments of Social Media Content Marketing …
• How 3 Companies Took Content Marketing to the Next Level

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Free report: Get found and get leads the smart way.

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This article discusses some of best ways to generate leads for your business and some of the top blogging tools which help you to drive traffic for your blog.

 How to change your business blog to lead generating machine?

With recent advancements in social media, it is very useful for businesses to get their business into major social media sites. Blog is one of the best ways to get your business into social media.

Through your business blog, you can attract readers from different geographic location in to your business. With Google plus entering into social media world, social media is going to impact more on business networks.

By writing articles regularly in your business blog, it is easy for you to share your articles in social media. If you are thinking of starting a new business blog for your business online, it is important to select best blogging platform for your business. One of the best blogging platforms that supports businesses in generating leads in WordPress.

Using WordPress to generate business leads

WordPress is one of the top blogging platforms that is been used by many businesses and professional bloggers in web. There are even many blog driven websites that are powered with wordpress.

Main advantage of WordPress is that it is easily in synch with social media sites. There are some top wordpress plugins, Mozilla plugins and blogging tools that help you to share your content in social media when you post a new article. Such is the power of wordpress.

In simple words, you can reach market faster and improve business for your products by reaching social media faster. This can be made possible through some of the popular tools that help to auto post your content to social media.

Among this powerful business tools, onlywire provides some of the powerful tools for businesses.  It provides onlywire wordpress plugin that autoposts content to social media when you submit a new post to your website.

It also provides downloader that can be downloaded to your website and with which you can submit your favorite content to 41 social media communities in one shot. You can read the full review of this onlywire tools

This is one example of powerful business tools that you can use for your business with the help of wordpress blog.  Another strong of advantage of using blog is to get wordpress plugins for contact form and also driving traffic to your landing pages. Start using these powerful wordpress plugins. There is also some powerful back link creating plugins like BlogGlue WordPress Plugin that helps businesses to link with their niche and partner websites and create huge back links that increases their search engine rankings.

 Using Email Marketing to generate leads

With blogs, you have the power of content and it is upto you in how you wish the traffic to be driven to your landing pages. Generating leads is made easy with the help of quality content.

Another advantage of blogging is to capture leads either through feed or through email marketing. With powerful email marketing software’s, you can easily engage with your blog or website readers.

Using Video marketing to generate Leads

Also you can upload videos and generate leads through Video Marketing.  5 Advantages of Video Marketing helps how to get started with Video Marketing.

Everything in website depends on how effectively you organize your landing pages. Landing pages are very important for lead generation. 10  Lead generation Tips helps in bringing quality leads for your business online

Finally, Blogging is one of the top business lead generation strategies implemented online. If you are not having a business blog for your business, you are missing potential leads for your business online.

About the author:

Sriram Raj is a software engineer, blogger and article writer from India. He is blogging on trending topics. Blogging is his hobby and he is spend his time writing about latest trending topics in web.

There’s no doubting the fact that social networks are playing more of an important role in the way the web works, with people using Facebook to track down local suppliers and Google admitting that it now uses social factors when compiling its rankings.

There’s also set to be more integration between the search engines and your social networks, with Google displaying websites that your Facebook Friends have recommended in its SERPS.

Google have even gone so far as to develop their own social signal, +1, which will enable people to show which websites they like by clicking a button, much in the same way the Facebook “Like” button works.

It is this cross platform integration that is causing the most excitement at the moment, with web marketers predicting it will change the entire way in which people find websites on the internet. But before we get too carried away, it is important to consider who this won’t effect, as well as who it will.

Cross Platform Integration

Us internet marketers are a pretty switched on bunch. We’re always signed into Google, our Facebook profiles are always open and we could Tweet from the North Pole if we chose to.

So when you see results pages in Google with which of your Friends has tweeted about a certain website or who has “Liked” a particular company it’s pretty easy to get excited about a new way of searching.

But stop for a second. Just because as a search marketer you are always signed into Facebook and Google at the same time and you always have your accounts active, does the average searcher?

Just because it is possible to integrate information between different platforms, it is still a massive leap between this capability and everyone on the web being able to see it. Some people don’t have a Facebook or Twitter account. Some people don’t have a Google account.

Some people search Google without being signed in to Facebook at all. Personalised search of this kind depends on many variables being in place at once for it to work and the more variables there are, the less take-up a particular service will have.

What About B2B?

B2B web marketers should get a lot less excited by every announcement coming out of Silicon Valley. Google integrations with social media platforms are a great idea in theory, but unlike the wonderful world of web marketing, your average office worker is more likely to receive a disciplinary than see your company displayed in the SERPS by being logged in to Facebook at work.

Big companies have measures in place to stop employees from straying off topic when browsing the web, and to the average business owner, Facebook is well and truly off topic! The image of Facebook as a place to go to chat to your friends and spy on lovers past is too engrained for it to be allowed at work, no matter how relevant your searches might be because of it.

If you are a B2B marketer and office workers are your target, it might be a while before you need to worry about social media integration interfering with the SERPs in your niche.

This isn’t to say that it’s not important to have a social media presence, it still is. Social media can be a fantastic resource to find people who are interested in your niche and provide a great way to interact with customers who are interested in your services.

The integration between the social networks and the search engines is still in its infancy, as are social factors being used as a ranking factor, but this can be expected to grow in time as Google seems to be finally embracing Facebook and Twitter.

What is important to bear in mind however is to treat each announcement from Silicon Valley on its own merits and apply every change that will affect your niche as you see fit. Jumping on every bandwagon will simply be a waste of time and resources, so before you get excited about the next big announcement, make sure that it is actually applicable to you, and more importantly, your target audience.

How does  social media helps your B2B search? I am looking forward to your comments below!

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About the author:

Alan Grainger is an in-house B2B web marketer and manages the SEO for The Corporate Gifts Company, a leading UK specialist in the business gifts sector. He writes articles exploring the issues faced by the B2B web marketer, giving an “in the trenches” view from an in-house SEO department.

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They expect information which can help them to solve their problems for free.

They do not expect and they do not want be bombarded with sales pitches.

An email list is a very valuable asset for a business and I am sure you do not want to damage or even to destroy this valuable asset.

Now you could ask how I can profit from this asset. When I can’t profit from it is only a liability which costs me time and money to maintain, without having any profit from it!

Sure you can make profit with your email list you have invest time and money to build it.

And guess what, the same way you have attracted those subscribers to subscribe to your email list. Through publishing great content, which is helping your email subscribers solve their problems.

That’s why they are willing to invest their valuable time to read your newsletter.

And if you send sales pitches you could abuse their trust and make them unsubscribe from you list. So your efforts to generate those leads would be wasted.

The better way is to proceed with your strategies of publishing great content and make them feel that you care about them and that you are willing to offer solutions to their problems.

And if you make your email newsletter content exclusive to your subscribers, for example you offer videos which only they can see first, special whitepapers they get much time before it’s been published to the masses, the get the chance to ask questions which will be featured and answered in this exclusive circle, etc. then you will gain the credibility and the trust which make you free to ask for a sale.

Your audience will ask you if they can buy from you, because you have gained trust and credibility with your subscribers. And this is a much wiser and in the long term profitable way to do lead nurturing.

Marketing takeaway tip: You should not try to sell to your subscribers. Instead of provide great problem solving exclusive content. Show that you care about them. Then they will care about you too.

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Marketing is all about good relationships with your targeted audience.

Inbound marketing benefits for B2B

• Up to 60% lower cost per lead.
• Up to 55% higher lead conversion rates than outbound marketing.
• Much better measurable than outbound marketing.

Inbound marketing benefits for B2C

• When you listen to conversations you can collect valuable marketing data.
• You become able to expand your REACH in social media to capture leads and drive sales.
• You will build a great community that is loyal to your brand.

Social Media Marketing (SMM)

Social media marketing key advantages:

• Easily accessible to anyone.
• Increase of brand awareness.
• Facilitate conversations with the customer.
• Inexpensive platform to implement marketing campaigns.
• Direct feedback from customers
• Direct feedback from targeted markets

Social Media Optimization (SMO)

• Product and service development.
• Recruiting.
• Employee engagement and turnover.
• Brand building.
• Customer satisfaction and relations.
• Business development

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO may target different kinds of search, including:

• Image search
• Local search
• Video search
• Industry-specific vertical search engines.

The main aim of using these sites is to effectively make subscribers to reach companies website by using latest marketing strategies like blog advertising.

Using social media for lead generation

Any Business organization produces a product in order to make profit from those product users.

As the product produced by a business is meant for particular group of users, identifying the users of the product on social media is easy as it has millions of users. This helps in improving product as well as building more leads by promotions to particular group of people.

1. Write what the users want rather than what you want: Writing a good content on the page of social media should be useful to the users rather than for the business organizations. As the users believe in building a good relationship based on friendship rather than business, more priority should be given to the user’s needs and automatically it will improve business services.

2. Promote your products in a friendly manner: Ask followers of your network to visit the business site of your products in a friendly manner by giving them details about the qualities and features of the product and services provided by the organization. By promoting various offers and discounts, companies can also ask them to recommend other friends who are really interested on buying those products.

3. Collect valuable feedback of your customers on the products of your company: Social media can be also utilized for collecting valuable feedback of your customers by knowing their needs, desires and expectations about the quality of the product. This can improve the quality of products and there by sales of the particular products.

4. Provide special online discounts to the customers who visit the site:
This will help in bringing new customers and also will increase the number of sales of the product through online marketing.

5. Upload videos and audios: Uploading of videos and audios of products will be helpful in explaining the features, service of the product and organization. This will be helpful in knowing the working of the product for their customers.

6. Making a good number of followers for your site: This can be done only with following others and tweet their tweets and asking them to retweet your page like thus making a good number of followers. You can also provide a link to your website or blog and request them friendly to visit your site so that the visitors can become customers of your products.

7. Following competitors of your industry: By doing this you can find good number of customers who are interested in similar products. You can attract these customers towards your products by providing more competitive price and quality than your competitors.

8. Making a list of visitors as well as customers who visited your site: By this you can know on which type of content or advertising strategy attracted the most of the visitors to turn to your site. This also helps in providing information about the new products or service provided by your organization to your customers by collecting their contact details like email ID’s.

9. To conclude try to build a friendly relationship rather than commercial relationship: It is not definite that every visitor of the site may turn down to be the customer. So even though they do not make purchases you should be in a position to provide the information what they are searching for through your site.

By this you can build a good relationship and increase the brand value of the organization.

Some other good articles related to social media and lead generation are given below
Social media and lead generation
Presentation on social media and lead generation
5 ways B2B companies can use social media for lead generation

Let me know what you think and comment below. I’d love to hear from you.

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