Lead Generation | inBlurbs Inbound Marketing Agency

October 13, 2011October 13, 2011

Why Social Media only will NOT bring you any profit

Social media seems to be the universal treatment for anybody who tries to get ahead of his competition and to increase profits.

I have bad news for you: Social media only will not solve your problem! 🙁

What do you really want to achieve from your Social Media activity?

• Are you looking to increase your sales?

• Do you want to improve the customer service?

• Do you want to decrease marketing budget and increase results in the long term?

• Are you trying to create outposts for your business to get in front of your customers?

• Are you looking to expand your reach and strengthen your brand?

• What’s your motivation and what are your goals to get in to social media?

Here are four things you will need to establish parallel with your social media activities:

As social media is a communication channel you need to establish relationships to people you want to talk to. And this does not happen overnight, even not with six or twelve months. This is a long-term task!

The first thing you need to succeed in social media is PATIENCE!

As relationships are not build in a few days and you will need to be there to get into conversation, this can become a time consuming venture.

The second thing you need to succeed in social media is PERSISTENCE!

As all discussion and all conversation a great, very important and to build strong relationships is a main goal, you still will need to keep in focus the return on investment for your activities? You need to measure your doings and the results!

The third thing you need to succeed in social media are realistic METRICS!

Last but not least, you need to generate leads out of your efforts! As you do social media marketing you will pull a lot of visitors to your website. And here it is where you need to have effective landing pages in place to generate leads!

The forth thing you need to succeed in social media are LANDING PAGES and an EFFECTIVE LEAD NURTURING PROCESS!

Not to mention that you need to offer incredible service to your customers to make them love you, to become evangelists of your brand and to talk to their friends and business partners about how awesome your company is.

You only can achieve this by showing that you respect and care about your customers and give them a good feeling when they do business with you!

There was a saying from the times of the Wild West: “God has created human but Samuel Colt made them equal! “

You can apply the same to social media for our time!

With this kind of attitude you can outperform any competitor, no matter of his financial and market power!

—How are your experiences with your social media efforts? I am looking forward to your comment!

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September 29, 2011October 7, 2011

Is Google+ a good bet for your business?

When Google+ was launched some people had the opinion that it will destroy Facebook in a short time period. Within the first weeks which have been running under invitation only to get an Google+ account, Google+ as been able to register more than ten million users.

Some observer had the opinion that a big exodus from Facebook to G+ will happen and maybe Facebook had the same in mind when they begun to close loopholes to expert contacts to Google+.

But this has not happen. Sure users which use Facebook are also on G+ now but no exodus took place.

The last estimations about the number of G+ users go in a range of 40 million and up. With its 750 million and daily growing base of global users Facebook does not need to be scared of G+ yet.

Imagine you went several years back and had the chance to register with Facebook when they had about 40 million users. Can you imagine how big your possible network could grow and how far would be your brands range globally?

This is your chance now to turn the wheel of time several years back and get into the game. Probably this will be your last chance to become part of massively growing social network for the next ten years. Position your business now, before you competitor does!

G+ actually offer personal profiles only but is also experimenting with company profiles similar as Facebook Pages.

The best thing what you can do as a business person or marketer is to register a personal profile with G+ which is now open for everybody and help your employees and coworkers to do the same.

G+ is ruled by the social networking rules too!

Build relationships and communicate in a professional and beneficial way to your Circles! This will help you to increase the number of connection and when the day has come that you can register your business page on G+ than you hopefully have a large and influential audience with which you maintain good relationships. This could jumpstart your G+ Business Page in a very powerful way.

To take action now can make huge a difference for your business. As G+ and social media are no secrets anymore, simply any business is tried to get a share of the cake.

Businesses that wait will be left behind and have to fight an uphill battle reach a reasonable position, but will never overtaking those who came first. That’s for sure!

Here are some simple tips for you to take advantage of G+ NOW!

1. Go to Google and register a G+.
2. Complete your profile and upload a personal picture.
3. Research who of your business partners and other connections is actually on G+ and invite them.
4. Place the G+ widget on your website and blog so your visitors can use this as an opportunity to connect with from there.
5. Look daily through your STREAM and see if you can contribute to your Circles news or if there are interesting information which you could share.
6. When some of your Circles comment your info than this are you weak up call to start the conversation. Ask some open question.
7. If you operate your own corporate or personal blog you could share your latest post in your STREAM.

And as you are waiting for the G+ Business Page to come you have the opportunity to get into G+, build your circles, expand your reach and set you and your business in advanced position. And this all with no pressure or any deadlines!

–How about you, how do use G+ actually? I am looking forward to your comment.

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September 26, 2011October 7, 2011

SHOCKING: How to Destroy your Business Reputation? BUY leads!

Today as I went through LinkedIn a group got my attention. It was the group about Online Lead Generation which I am a member of and where I contribute if there is a topic where I can help?

But today I went through the posts and I thought OMG, they are talking about buying leads. The word “Business Suicide” went through my brain.

Especially one provider caught my attention and I went to look into his background. This provider claimed to „generate thousands of real time leads in just about every vertical”!

Puhh I thought, this is a tough proposition and let’s see what’s behind them! I checked his website and guess what?

– An Alexa Rank of only 2,170,186 (means about 5 -10 unique visitors daily)
– 13 Google Indexed Pages (lesser pages means, lesser chances to get indexed and found on the search engines)
– Only 92 Backlinks (Qualified back links are one of the SEO strategies to get found, the more the better)
– No Corporate Blog (content marketing through blogging is the key to get found and to get leads)
– No presence in social media: no Facebook Business Page and no Twitter (43 percent of all online consumers are social media fans or followers, if you are not there you are missing them)
No Web DNA…. (maybe a ghost 😉 )

I asked him two question, I am curious if I will get any educated answer.

Q: How did you establish a business relationship to those leads?
Q: Why should those leads do business with the people who buy those leads from you?

Disussion Update

If you like to follow this discussion on LinkedIn, you can find it here.

Why did I done this you might ask?

Simple answer: I was shocked by that proposition made there and more shocked me that businesses believe this kind of fairytales and put their business on risk without to know what they are doing!

To buy leads is a waste of time and money and WILL harm the reputation of your business FOR SURE!

When you buy leads it is the same like you open the yellow pages and start cold calling from A-Z.

The people you reach do not know YOU, they did not requested to be contacted from YOU and they did not explained an interest in YOUR products and services previously!

By buying those leads – their addresses and bother those people you only show one thing, that your business has no USP and your products and services have no value for them.

You ask why?

If it would be the opposite you wouldn’t be dependent on paid leads! Instead of you would generate leads and customers automatically!

Boooom. You don’t like what I say!

So before you think about to pay for addresses, you should ask yourself why do you need to buy them and why do you not generate enough recommendations and leads from your existing customers actually?

To purchase leads is only a drip onto the hot stone. This will not solve your long-term issue and will not bring you closer to your business goals.

The opposite is the fact: The longer you depend on bought leads the more your chances will decrease to gain a competitive advantage!

Believe it or not you will loose business in the long term!

Stop buying leads and start build relationships. Build trust and credibility through content publishing (blogging) and two way conversations in social media. This is where you can generate highly valuable target leads with an PROVEN up to 55% conversion rate.

Start inbound marketing strategy by starting your own corporate blog ASAP!

69% of Businesses Attribute Blogging to Increased Leads [Data]

Inbound marketing is the marketing strategy that focuses on getting found by customers when they research online for products and services your business also has to offer.

With inbound marketing businesses earn their way to the customer, by publishing helpful information on a blog, in social media and forums.

Inbound marketing includes Blogging, Social Media, Lead Conversion, Lead Nurturing and Closed-Loop Analysis.

Inbound marketing can help you to:

A. Save up to 62% of your marketing budget.
B. Stand out of your competition.
C. Generate a massive amount of leads.
D. Get up to 55% higher lead conversion rates.
E. Increase your customers and sales.

“Get seen and you get visited! “

— How about you? How are your experiences with bought leads?

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September 24, 2011October 7, 2011

How to Take Advantage from Mobile Marketing & Location Based Marketing

Is mobile marketing recently a part of your inbound marketing strategy?

More and more people worldwide use mobile devices daily to access the web, to shop and to network on social media sites. Social sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn have apps out there to make it dump easy to communicate and update the network from the run.

To ignore this growing mobile marketing trend could be a very dangerous failure for your business!

To get your piece of the pie from this trend the first thing you need to do is to optimize your website and email communication for mobile use!

Did you thought about to make use of mobile apps to improve your location based marketing?

Services like Foursquare are best examples how businesses use location based marketing to reach a wider audience.

Some facts:

People are increasingly use mobile devices to access content on the web!

In March 2011, nearly 39% of US mobile subscribers were browsing the internet using their mobile device. That’s up by 2.2 percentage points from just 3 months prior.
Mobile apps are almost as popular as browsers; 37% of subscribers used downloaded apps.
Subscribers are also increasingly using social networks on their phones. In March, 27.3% indicated they used a social network on their mobile phone, up from 24.7% just 3 months prior.

Source: HubSpot

Actually about 30% of companies who are using Mobile Marketing do strategic lead generation through this! With only one third of the companies you and your business still have wide opportunities to position in this area!

As this trends evolves more and more businesses get ready to get there communication done in the mobile and location based marketing area, you should not wait to get active here. Otherwise you are put on risk to get left behind.

An uphill battle later could cost you more than to be with the trend now!

Further sources:

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September 20, 2011October 7, 2011

Social Media Marketing Daily Tasks or How to eat an Elephant?

Most people who are interested to market their business on the web and especially in social media become overwhelmed of the necessary tasks which need to be done to achieve any serious results.

They feel that they need to handle an avalanche of information and requirements to get the necessary steps done.

And I fully agree with this. Inbound marketing which also includes, content creation as blogging and marketing this content through social media channels is a very time consuming business!

As any other marketing activity you cannot expect to do all the necessary tasks at once. You also need a strategic plan where you set timeframes to do your necessary inbound marketing tasks and which you can stick to. Discipline is a key factor!

Above in the title I ask how to eat an elephant? This is very simple, bit by bit!

As any other work you need to split your inbound marketing in daily tasks. You have five working days you can use. You need to determine how much time you can invest daily and from this point you can start.

Inbound marketing includes Blogging, Social Media, Lead Conversion, Lead Nurturing and Closed-Loop Analysis.

Content creation – blogging

As blogging is a key factor for lead generation we suggest to blog no matter which kind of other content you have or want to publish!

Which kind of content is the best fit for your target audience, your buyer personas?

Can you reach your audience with video, eBooks, reports, whitepapers, and pictures, blog commenting or any other piece of content?

Find out which kind of content has the best opportunities in your industry, and this does not mean it must be the same old way like your competitors do it! Be creative. When you competitor does eBook, than you can do video! When they do video than you can do eBooks! To get ideas and inspiration just look through other industries how and what kind of other content thy produce.

Social Media / Forums

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and industry related forums are great place to get seen from your future clients. These places are also great to improve your of page SEO. When you are active there, means when you get into the conversation and share your content there than you increase your chances to found in the search engines!

Lead Generation / Conversion

Content creation and social media marketing are great tools to drive interested visitors to SEO optimized landing pages (lead capture pages) to get them into you database to follow up and to make them paying customers through the time.

Lead Nurturing

As you generate leads you should stay in touch with them. But avoid sales pitches. Instead of do the same which whom you have generated your leads. Inform them with interesting and share worthy content, solve problems, answer questions and simply stay in touch with them, stay visible!

Closed-Loop Analysis

Analyze your doings to determine where your lead and revenue coming from measure refine and improve your content creation, social media marketing, lead nurturing and analysis.

Repeat this process above!

Example: The daily inbound marketing tasks!

Monday

Facebook 15 minutes
Twitter 15 minutes
LinkedIn 15 minutes
Forums 15 minutes

Check email / Leads 30 minutes

Blog commenting 30 minutes

Draft blog article 30 minutes

Tuesday

Facebook 15 minutes
Twitter 15 minutes
LinkedIn 15 minutes
Forums 15 minutes

Check email / Leads 30 minutes

Blog commenting 30 minutes

Draft blog article 30 minutes

Publish blog article 30 minutes

Market blog article in social media

Wednesday

Facebook 15 minutes
Twitter 15 minutes
LinkedIn 15 minutes
Forums 15 minutes

Check email / Leads 30 minutes

Blog commenting 30 minutes

Draft blog article 30 minutes

Thursday

Facebook 15 minutes
Twitter 15 minutes
LinkedIn 15 minutes
Forums 15 minutes

Check email / Leads 30 minutes

Blog commenting 30 minutes

Draft blog article 30 minutes

Publish blog article 30 minutes

Market blog article in social media

Friday

Facebook 15 minutes
Twitter 15 minutes
LinkedIn 15 minutes
Forums 15 minutes

Check email / Leads 30 minutes

Blog commenting 30 minutes

Draft blog article 30 minutes

Check analytics 15 minutes

Refine tasks 30 minutes

———

To effectively profit from your web marketing efforts you should plan to invest about 2.5 hrs. daily and more, this depends on your business goals.

You also can split this work to different persons in your company.

— What do you think and how get you the daily web marketing tasks done?

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September 13, 2011October 7, 2011

10 Great Ways How to Reach Global B2B Customers with LinkedIn

LinkedIn has about 100 million users from all over the world and the majority of 56% comes from outside the US.

As the biggest business related social network, LinkedIn offers large opportunities for B2B to get in touch with future and to stay in touch with recent business partners.

LinkedIn offers a wide toolset of features to get seen from future business partners. To list all of them would lead to far. But let me mention some which you can use right away.

For your profile:

You personal profiles are the first stage you have to reach. Register with LinkedIn and complete your profile. Take care to use keywords related to your business. This makes it much easier for the search engines to index your profile and for future customers to find it during their research online.

-Twitter stream

You can add your Twitter stream to your LinkedIn profile. This stream can encourage visitors of your to become more curious about what you do.

-Publications

Ad your publications and a web link where your profile visitor can read or download them. So you can lead visitors of your profile directly to landing page to get them registered as lead.

-Ad your blog

Here you can add your blog RSS feed and all blog articles you publish will also be visible on your personal LinkedIn page.

-Recommendations

A great way to capture attention is when other people talk about you and your qualities. Her you have the opportunity to ask for recommendations of your network members you already have worked with. This can increase your credibility with people who did not know you before.

-Additional Information

Here you can add your websites with up to three links, your Twitter with up to two links and your interests which can be made of keywords to get better found from search engines.

LinkedIn Company Pages:

This is where you can introduce your company to the LinkedIn audience.

-Overview

Here you can write a brief description about your business and how it benefits the future customer.

-Recent Tweets / Recent Blog Posts

As in the personal profile you can add your Twitter account to make your Twitter stream visible on LinkedIn as well and your corporate blog to show your blog articles on your LinkedIn company page.

-Careers

Here it is where you can post jobs on LinkedIn to find candidates on the world’s largest professional network.

-Products & Services

This is my personal favorite of all LinkedIn company page features. Here you have the great opportunity to introduce your products and services to you audience. You can add a description and a picture of the product or service. This is a valuable opportunity on the world’s largest professional network with it 100 million users!

-Analytics

To know what’s going on your LinkedIn company page is important for you. By this analytics tool you get a clear picture what going on, on your company page. So you can measure, observer and improve your LinkedIn marketing.

Keep in mind that all of the above described features are for free. The only thing you have to do is to make seriously use of them. By seriously use those above features you empower your LinkedIn to a powerful business outpost for your company. An additional toolset of chances to get attention, visitors to your website and business leads to increase revenue and profit.

It is as simple as that! Get on LinkedIn be persistent and serious about the goals you want to achieve from your LinkedIn marketing time investment!

–What do you think about LinkedIn for business? I am looking forward to your comments below.

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September 6, 2011October 7, 2011

Ten Simple Steps to make Twitter your Business Leads Machine

Social media has become an important communication channel for businesses online. Its importance is growing by the technology developments for social media analytics which enable businesses and there for marketing responsible employees to exactly show the ROI of social media marketing to their executives!

Companies increasingly embrace social media and the other important strategies like content marketing and real time marketing an

Social media sites like Facebook with its more than 750 million users, Twitter with its more than 280 million users and the business network LinkedIn with its more than 100 million users offer wide opportunities for businesses, not matter if they are B2B or B2C, to get seen and to get in touch with their future customers.

One billion humans are online world wide and when you take a closer look at the numbers above you can clearly see that it looks like that almost every online user seems to be active in social med.

That leaves only one conclusion, that your future customer is active in social media as well! Which leaves a second conclusion, that your competitor is their also!

Take look at this Social Media Infographik:

“53 percent of people on Twitter recommend companies or their products in their tweets.”
“42% of companies active on Twitter report that they have got new customers through Twitter.”
“Dell was the first company which published their results of Twitter marketing. They made eight million dollars from their Twitter marketing within one year.”

Twitter has more than 280,000,000 users worldwide. So it seems that about 28% of the global online population is on Twitter. These people are all potential future clients for any branch of industry.

Do not cheat yourself by trying to convince yourself that your customers are not on Twitter. For sure they are, so you should hurry to get in touch with them there before your competition takes this opportunity because while you are hesitate.

So what can you do to take advantage of Twitter for your business?

1st Register with Twitter and complete your profile and customize it.
2nd Start to observe the conversation related to your industry. To do this you should download and install TweetDeck. Set you brand name and look if it is mentioned. If mentioned, respond in real time if necessary.
3rd Go to Google Alerts and set Alerts for your name, your company brand, your products, your best customers and your top ten competitors. These alert will be delivered directly to you email box as news appear. This keeps you updated and by the way you monitor your brand name mentions, which offer you the opportunity to respond in real time if necessary.
4th Lookout for your competition and invite their followers to your Twitter.
5th Connect with your audience on Twitter and start the conversation.
6th Share interesting and helpful content. Not only yours but other content from other sources as well.
7th When you publish your own content include a call to action which directs your reader to dedicated landing pages.
8th Do Twitter exclusive specific promotions for your Twitter followers. Direct them to landing pages for lead generation.
9th Promote your Press Release on Twitter. To learn how take a look at HubSpot how they have published a PR on Twitter with its 140 characters.
10th Incorporate effective landing page for lead generation. This will ensure a steady flow of fresh business leads for your sales team.

Incorporate the above for your Twitter marketing, test, measure and refine.

Take look at this Twitter Infographik:

— How are your experiences with Twitter for marketing and lead generation? Leave your comment below.

Further impotant resource:

Shockingly, Twitter Users Don’t Mind Its Ads
‎Was Biz Stone Wrong to Leave Twitter?‎
The case against an Apple TV set

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August 31, 2011October 7, 2011

Overtake 33 Percent of your Competition by Measure your Marketing ROI

If you are in B2B than this data could be very interesting for you! Moreover if you read them backwards you can learn how to overtake about 33% of your competition by simply measure your marketing ROI.

A new research done be Sagefrog Marketing Group and reported be eMarketer found out that about 33% of B2B companies did not track return on investment (ROI) at all.

Do you measure your marketing ROI? If not yet you should do it as soon as possible. To measure the marketing ROI is easier than you think.

What does this mean to your business when you are selling primarily to B2B?

When you actually are able to measure your marketing ROI effectively this could mean that your marketing department is working closely with your sales department to generate and to close leads. This also means you have set efficient CRM and follow processes to support your lead to customer conversion, measurement and reporting.

But if you have not already done these steps above than you will need to rethink your business strategy if you want to overtake about 33% of your competition by apply these simple tasks and processes to your business.

To apply powerful marketing ROI measurement you will need to invest time, effort and money. You will need to do an audit of your whole business and recent processes to learn where you stand at the moment.

From this point you can do a plan to execute your pathway to marketing ROI measurement and to overtake the mentioned 33% of your B2B competition. But be aware that your competition is also not sleeping and they read the news and such reports like this as well. So you should start right away to improve your market position.

Here are some quick steps you could do make your marketing ROI more visible:

– Measure your traffic and the traffic sources.
– Find out which of your pages attract the most traffic and the how long the visitors stay on those pages.
– Optimize those pages and include effective business lead generation tactics on those pages. You could do call to action and you could offer more bonus info by registration through a short form.
– Use technologies like marketing automation software to help you to do the things smarter.
– Segment the generated leads to track the best and most successful lead sources.
– When you push a new lead to your sales, than they should touch the lead ASAP and report the recent lead outcome. They should do this with an effective CRM. By the way Microsoft Excel is not an effective CRM system. Instead of you could use one of the several very high qualities and less cost hosted solutions on the market.

Hosted CRM Solutions:

– Track the way of each lead from the visit at one of your websites, the registration on a landing page, the push to a sales person, through the lead nurturing process and the closing.
– Establish reliable and track able communication ways between marketing and sales so things can be improved in real time.
– Make the reporting of these data and the recent marketing ROI to a real time task to hold your marketing transparent and all people involved accountable for the results.

With these activities you will be able to see from which marketing activities and sources you gain your best ROI and to improve your recent marketing tasks to increase your revenue.

Marketing takeaway tip: To measure your marketing ROI is the same thing as check a course of a ship at high seas. If you do not check your course in your business you will not be able to reach your goals on the long term. Stop relying on luck or your experience. It’s a real time world where things happen and change within minutes. There is a lot of technology out there to help you. Set yourself in the position to see your business in real time. This helps you to make decisions in real time as well. To know where your marketing budget is going and what you get out can make the difference between to overtake the 33% of your competition or to get left behind and lose the game!

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August 19, 2011October 7, 2011

Social Media puts your business at risk! Are you prepared?

The marketing technology company Alterian found out that 80% of companies struggle to analyze their social media data.

As social media marketing is estimated to increase in the next twelve months by up to 25% companies should have clear how the online – social media conversation can impact their brand. Not taking the effort to monitor social media conversation can result in the risk of failing to engage with potential new and existing customers on the web!

How about your business?

Are you monitoring social media to know what conversation is going on about your company?

How do you monitor the web to know in real time what’s talked about your company, your products and your competition online?

No matter if you want to be a part of the conversation or not, conversation about your brand is happening on the web with or without your participation. But when you decide to become a part of the conversation this can offer tremendous opportunities to gain trust and credibility with your audience.

In social media people are talking and an average Facebook user has about 130 friends and they have an average of 130 friends and so on. Good news can spread fast in social media and reach new potential customers. Bad news spread faster.

You need to have a plan how to interact with you audience in good and bad times. You also need to listen and to know what is talked about your brand on the web.

To know what people are talking about gives you the opportunity to jump in to the discussion and explain your point of view. Another underestimated opportunity of listening online is, you get deep insides of your target audiences needs.

In other words they tell you what and which kind of product they deserve and what they are willing to pay for. So you can offer special tailored solutions to your audience and increase business and revenue, only by listening – monitoring.

The customer honors companies which show that they care about their needs and which are willing to communicate.

The ability to know what’s going on and to communicate in real time with the target audience is a powerful credibility builder and supports your branding online.

By knowing what your target audience is thinking and deserving from you sets you in a powerful competitive position. You save time and money for research and you can bring custom tailored products and services to your audience much faster than your competition!

What do you think? Are these above good reasons to start listening – monitoring social media and the web?

To start monitor what’s been talked about your business you can use some free tools:

SocialMention

Like Google Alerts but for social media.

Receive free daily email alerts of your brand, company, CEO, marketing campaign, or on a developing news story, a competitor, or the latest on a celebrity.

Google Alerts

Monitor the Web for interesting new content

Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic.

Build your dashboard with Google Reader

Effective social media monitoring starts with a dashboard.

A good way to build a dashboard is Google Reader. The only thing you need is to subscribe to the RSS feeds of blogs and news sites related to your business and industry, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and you got all at one place. If something comes up which mention your brand or any other interesting news than it appears on your dashboard.

How do you monitor the web and social media? How are your experiences in social media conversation with your customers?

Further important resource: Social media monitoring stumps most businesses: Report

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August 4, 2011October 7, 2011

Show me the social media Return on Investment

The Return on Investment of social media is measurable and this is much easier than you think.

There for you need the right platform which displays all tasks, traffic, lead sources and includes them into CRM and financial software.

To get this done social media needs to be seen as part of an integral strategy called Inbound Marketing.

Inbound marketing includes Blogging, social media, Lead Conversion, Lead Nurturing and Closed-Loop Analysis.

Inbound marketing is the marketing strategy that focuses on getting found by customers when they research online for products and services your business also has to offer.

With inbound marketing businesses earn their way to the customer, by publishing helpful information on a blog, in social media and forums.

A seriously executed Inbound Marketing strategy saves up to 62% of the marketing budget and increases lead conversion rate by up to 55%.

A study done by the “MIT – Massachusetts Institute of Technology – Sloan Institute” has discovered that businesses which use Inbound Marketing can reach up to 13% revenue growth in a time period of 18-24 month, depending on the target market.

To get measureable results and even your up to 13% revenue growth for your business out of Social media you need to do some more things than only to have a Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn account.

Social media is a communication channel. So you need to communicate with your target audience!

About which topics you should communicate with your audience? Simply about anything related to your market which solves your audiences’ problem!

To do this effectively a corporate blog can be a great way to publish helpful information and start the conversation through blogging and on social media as well.

You should also consider to distribute helpful and share worthy information in any channel where your audience could do research online for products and services in your industry.

When your audience researches for products and services from your industry they go to Google first. Here they are able to take a closer look to different topics for their search term.

Everything, here all the search results appear for the requested keywords.

Images, here all the search results which appear for the requested keywords and are related to any picture published to the web.

Videos, here all the search results which appear for the requested keywords and are related to any video published to the web.

News, here all search results which appear for the requested keywords and are related to any news published to the web.

Shopping, here all search results which appear for the requested keywords and are related to any shopping published to the web.

Books, here all search results which appear for the requested keywords and are related to any book published to the web.

Blogs, here all search results which appear for the requested keywords and are related to any blog article published to the web.

Discussions, here all search results which appear for the requested keywords and are related to any discussion published to the web.

When you go through these search options, than you can discover communication opportunities, to position yourself where your competition actually is not active.

Simply type in your company URL address and see what’s coming up under these above search options about you.

When you are done, repeat this with your best competitors URL address.

Marketing Takeaway Tipp: Discover creative ways to reach your target audience to set you apart of your competition.

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July 29, 2011October 7, 2011

The pros and cons of promoted Tweets

More and more advertising money is shifting to social networks. Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter offer various opportunities to advertise a company targeted to their audience.

Twitter announced to start displaying promoted tweets in user streams. Twitter is also planning to release a self-service platform later this year. Facebook and LinkedIn already have self-service platforms where business can showcase their brand message, products and services.

Pros of paid advertising

Paid advertising allows you to place your ad there where your community is so that you reach this community instantly. You save time because you do not need to develop relationships and do interaction with people. But this will not instantly led your business to a loyal customer base.

Pros:

Instantly visible: You are instantly visible as long as you want to be and with the keywords you have chosen.
Keywords control: you have your keywords under control and choose which to use and which not.
Flexible budget: You can start paid as with any budget.
Cheap: As it customizable you can choose how much and how long you want to spend.
Measurable results: You can track your spending and your results. Lead to customer quote, etc. and have a good picture of your returns.
Wide reach: you can instantly reach a wide user base of millions who are already looking for products and services you also have to offer.
Quick: You can set up a paid ads campaign very quick.
Target your location: When you are a local business it makes more sense to target your local area. With paid ads you are in full control that should see your advertisement.
Time frame: You can set the start and the end of any campaign. You are not obligated on long term agreements.
Mobile: As more people are on their favorite social networks though their mobile devices, you can also reach them through paid ads.

Cons of paid advertising

As you have no relationship with your audience in these communities where you place your ads, it can become difficult to attract them to your business even if your ads are fancy. Only a good relationship to your target audience leads you to a loyal customer base in the long term.

Cons:

You can’t buy authority: Even ifyou have a high ad budget; you do not have the relationship and authority to your audience.
You can’t buy credibility: Through paid ads you get seen but when they visit your website. What will they find? Is there anything what can increase trust and credibility?
Paid traffic costs money: As long as you want results out of paid traffic you need to do paid advertising. In the moment you stop, your constant stream of leads will stop instantly as it has begun!
Keywords battles: As you are not the only person who understands the opportunities of paid ads, others will also try to get the most popular keywords. A keywords battle begins and prices for those keywords increase massively! So a single click to your website can cost you a large sum of money! And there is no guarantee that this click will convert into a lead or in a paying customer!
Brand recognition: As you buy your audiences attention through paid ads you can imagine they will not be very willing to listen to what you have to say. This could let you look like a lazy and budget oriented company without a personal face. So your brand could suffer!

Marketing Takeaway Tipp: Paid ads on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter offer various opportunities to advertise a company targeted to their audience. Paid ads should be used in a context of a clear marketing strategy which includes blogging, social media and social web marketing, premium content creation and real time marketing and PR. Only than paid advertising can serve you as a valuable source of new business leads an customers!

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July 27, 2011

Quality Lead Generation through Blogging

Business online are now planning new strategies for promoting their business online. As main target of any business is lead generation and customer feedback, they tend to research for new techniques and tools to improve their business. One of the best way to generate reputation among your online customers is through business blog.

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.

July 12, 2011October 7, 2011

5 Easy steps to get found on Google from your potential customers

Businesses online uses latest marketing strategies to enhance their customer base through Web Marketing.

They are ready to increase marketing budgets for newer and more efficient methods of attracting customers which can generate huge business leads.

Before getting started with the whole stuff of sales and marketing ideas one has to find answers for the questions like, who would be the target audience?

How to contact to the interested parties on time and in which specified manner so that better results could be attained?

You should not underutilize your resources in any case. Just concentrate all your attention to the sales and marketing for the existing and prospect customers only.

Following are given 5 easy steps to be followed by Marketing Websites to get success in their job:

Step 1: Find the target population you want to tap in for your business.

Step 2: Identify the marketing strategy that best suits your business. Identify the right marketing strategy helps in decreasing marketing budgets and ensuring success for your business.

Step 3: Start promoting your business through cheaper and efficient marketing strategies. If you are new or looking for more advanced marketing strategies, you can hire an inbound marketing expert who can help you in identifying the best marketing strategy to increase sales.

Step 4: Get your traffic. Traffic is genuinely the fuel to provide business leads and sales, so keep an eye on it by helping them following you. Cost per click and free article marketing can be used to keep the traffic coming to your website.

Step 5: Build relevant back links or you can say links with relevant anchor text. This helps you reach top pages of search engines for your business website.

Marketing Takeaway Tip: Success of business online depends on how successfully your business strategies are implemented. Start generating leads using inbound marketing strategy or hire inbound marketing experts for your business and see the increase in your business sales.

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July 11, 2011October 7, 2011

Attract your buyer persona with article marketing to generate more business leads

Article marketing or we can say content marketing is a very interesting way to attract customers online.

Article marketing is a great way to generate business leads for your businesses.

Writing customer attractive articles helps in bringing new customers for your business and by generating quality leads.

How Article marketing works for your business

Article marketing doesn’t cost much, what it costs is just effort and to invest knowledge about how to write in the best possible manner.

Content writing or article writing can be done by a hired professional also in lieu of some fee. Giving them information about your business and article requirement helps in getting some quality articles done that are related to your niche.

Small business owners can also hire writing professionals or recruit them, so that they could compete with the competitors more effectively as they will then have in-house writers always available.

How to promote your business using Article marketing

Promoting your business using article marketing is easy if you know what’s required to attract readers to your site. Some basics of article marketing to generate more business leads are:

— Subject line of the article should be attractive for target audience
— The articles content must be precise and up to the point
— Closing of your article should help readers get a final decision about particular product or business

Once you start using article marketing, you can reach to top pages of search engines for your keywords and also start generating huge leads for your business.

Marketing Takeaway Tip: Article marketing for small businesses is successful if you are able to identify your buyer personas and write content which is of value for them. Article marketing and keyword marketing goes hand in hand and you should be aware of your keywords which can help your business reach top pages of search engines and to get found of your target audience.

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July 8, 2011October 7, 2011

Why to connect your corporate blog with social media

Connecting your blogs with a platform where you could attain more exposure sounds extremely interesting for any type of business.

Building and maintaining online blog helps you in staying current with the social trends. Having business blog helps your business to be updated in social media to get seen from your audience and to generate business leads.

How to promote your brand in social media using a blog?

Getting a thirty-foot tall billboard to promote your brand is really very expensive for any business. Connecting your blog with social media helps you to get closer to your audience on the major social media sites such as twitter, facebook and LinkedIn.

Blogs helps in generating targeted web traffic for your business. Targeted web traffic is directing more interested prospect to your landing pages and your chances increase to convent those traffic to leads and customers.

Business leads generated through inbound marketing are 62% cheaper and have an up to 55% higher conversion rate!

Tools to connect a corporate blog with social media

Blog tools available on social media sites can increase the effectiveness of content marketing. Businesses have the opportunity to get their blog articles seen on the right place where their audience is located.

There are many tools such as ping.fm, dlvr.it, tumblr, posterous which automatically updates social media sites when you publish a blog post in these blogs. Getting your blog in synch with social media sites helps in generating more leads for your business.

Social networking sites have hundreds of millions subscribers connected to them all the time, thus using those sites as a platform to promote your blog content would be very helpful to get seen and visited from your target audience.

Facts about corporate blogging!

Companies who blog get:

Up to 55% more Traffic.
Up to 97% more Inbound Links.
Up to 434% more indexed pages in search engines.

Studies show that 57% of companies who blog get customers through their blogging effort!

Marketing Takeaway Tip: Blogging connected with social media helps in generating business lead. A corporate blog helps you to stay in touch with your customers and readers, to collect feedback and keep your audience updated.

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