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With the rise in popularity of social media and its use for marketing, there has been some debate about whether email is dying in the face of social media.  In fact, <a title="Ben & Jerry's decided to drop email marketing in favor of social media” href=”http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/6217/Ben-Jerry-s-Drops-Email-marketing-In-Favor-of-Social-Media.aspx” target=”_self”>Ben & Jerry’s recently decided to drop email marketing in favor of social media in the UK.  

Just because social media may be a new addition to your marketing mix doesn’t mean email marketing should be eliminated.  In fact, <a title="social media" href="http://www.hubspot.com/marketing-webinars/small-business-social-media-case-studies-archive/” target=”_self”>social media can help to enhance your email marketing efforts.

Luckily, it looks as though marketers are starting to figure this out. As reported by eMarketer today, in an April 2010 survey by email marketing agency, eROI, two-thirds of US marketers are now integrating social media into their email marketing campaigns.  In addition, email marketing and social media marketing solution provider, StrongMail indicated that the percentage of marketers who had integrated social and email (or planned to this year) is 71% worldwide, based on June 2010 research.

Other Key Research Findings:

• 71% of business executives surveyed worldwide indicated they were promoting their Twitter, <a title="Facebook" href="http://www.hubspot.com/marketing-webinars/webinar-archive-how-businesses-are-using-facebook” target=”_self”>Facebook or other social media presence in their email marketing messages (Source: StrongMail research).
  
• 63% of those surveyed said they were enabling email recipients to share email content with their social networks (Source: StrongMail research). In eROI’s April research earlier this year, the survey revealed a slightly smaller proportion of US marketers — 59.1% — using “share with your network” buttons.
  

<img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" src="http://blog.hubspot.com/Portals/249/images/emarketer_emailmarketing.gif” border=”0″ alt=”eMarketer email marketing research chart” hspace=”3″ vspace=”3″ />

• When surveyed about the types of social media tools integrated in email marketing, 91% of marketers incorporating social media into email marketing used Facebook in their campaigns, followed by Twitter at 83.9% and LinkedIn at 48% (Source: eROI research).

Marketers: Use Social Media to Complement Email marketing

As a marketer, you shouldn’t undermine the importance of email marketing — email is an effective lead generation tool.  If you’re still not convinced, <a title="read this great guest post" href="http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/5822/Are-You-Ignoring-Email-marketing-Because-of-Social-Media.aspx” target=”_self”>read this great guest post we published about why email is so important.

Instead of dropping email for social media, use social media as a way to complement your email marketing efforts.  Without social media, the limit of your email marketing campaigns depends on the size of your email list. When you incorporate social media into your emails, you’re essentially expanding the potential reach of your email campaigns beyond that list.  By adding social media, you’re enabling email recipients to share and spread your content to people who aren’t on your email list.  How great is that?

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We see this happen time and time again: In the midst of managing a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign, marketers get bogged down in the details of the campaign without paying attention to what actually matters.  What actually matters? PPC return on investment (ROI), of course.  If you’re managing a PPC campaign, you need to understand how all the little bits of data can play together and help you achieve a better ROI.  To do this, you should consider a few things:

• What are your priorities? Your priorities tend to reflect on what you’re being measured, and we hope you’re being measured primarily on generating high quality leads.  If you’re not, perhaps you need to examine why.  Do you have a long enough sales cycle that you can get a more immediate measure from number of leads generated or click-throughs?  Whatever your priority is, keep that in mind throughout measuring your campaign.  You should be asking yourself the question, “Am I getting closer to my goal?”
• What words are you going after? One of the biggest PPC mistakes we see is when folks go after expensive, popular words rather than long-tail, more relevant ones.  Should you really go after “running shoes” when your product is only peripherally related to them? Probably not.
• When you tweak, what are you tweaking for? We have seen people add random lingo in order to increase their relevance score without thinking about what phrases would generate quality traffic for them.  Perhaps you are obsessing about impressions, but never getting any click-throughs.  Make sure you aren’t optimizing for clicks without making sure the visitors would be quality leads.  It’s very easy to fall into the “I must do better at one metric” trap without keeping your high-level goals in mind.
• Are you paying attention to your ads? It’s easy to get caught up in the words you’re targeting and let your ads languish.  Are you aggressively A/B testing your ads?  If you’re not, you can do this easily in AdWords by running two ads per campaign in balanced views (don’t let Google manage impressions for you), and when you have a good number of impressions each, pause the one with fewer click-throughs and write a new one.  Lather, rinse, repeat.  You should also always remember that effective ads include offers–in essence, they’re calls to action.
• Where are you sending your traffic? One of the most common PPC errors is to dump all the traffic onto your main homepage.  A better idea is to send them straight to landing pages so that you can get that click (that you paid for) to convert to a lead much sooner!

Overall, you have to keep your eye on the prize when it comes to PPC.  Make sure you’re not getting lost in the budget, impressions, and clicks weeds–what do these little things matter in the big picture of generating quality leads?  PPC involves so many little details and tweaks, that it’s incredibly ea.  Keep your goal in mind and keep working at it and you’ll be sure to improve your lead quality.

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When businesses give away something for free, they often get a lot in return from their fans or customers. One of the benefits of business blogging is that it establishes trust and thought-leadership. For example, even though HubSpot is an Internet marketing software company, we share lots of free advice on our <a title="Internet marketing Blog” href=”http://blog.hubspot.com” target=”_blank”>Internet marketing Blog.

Contributing a post to a blog other than yours is another way of giving away something small for free, but getting more in return. In this post, I’ll share some practical tips on how to approach guest blogging, and how to get the most out of it.

Benefits of Guest Blogging

Reach New Audiences

A post on your company blog will go out to all your subscribers. They might share it with their friends through social media, and you might gain some more interest or even subscribers. However, publishing on someone else’s blog lets you reach out to a whole new audience. A guest post is an opportunity to let a new group of people find out about your expertise and blog.

Public Relations & Branding

Guest blogging should be a win-win situation. It should benefit both you and blog to which you are contributing. This is how public relations works, and guest blogging is yet another offering to help establish these connections. It also puts these connections on public display, which can build your brand’s authority.

By giving to and connecting with your industry’s blogging community, you can also get people to help fill your blog with content. The rule of reciprocity says that if you do something for someone, they are more likely to do something for you.

Gain Inbound Links

Gaining external links from relevant and authoritative websites is a powerful way to improve search engine rankings. With your guest posts, you should have your bio with a link back to your website or blog. If appropriate, you can also put links to other blog posts or resources your company offers in a guest blog post.

While inbound links are a benefit, don’t look at this as the only benefit. Being a guest on someone else’s blog is like being a guest at their home, and you should respect that they have their own goals, which are not to promote your company.

How to Guest Blog

Approaching a blog for a guest post is not difficult. Most blogs have a contact form, and some even have an ‘invitation to blog for us’ form. You can also join My Blog Guest, an online community that helps you find guest blogging opportunities.

Before approaching a blog for a guest post, make sure the blog satisfies the following criteria:

Relevance

If you’re blogging already you should know your own audience. You can also get a feel for the audience of other blogs by reading a few of their articles. Your guest post should not compromise your own goals. Try to target blogs in which there is an overlap between your audience and theirs.

Blog Quality

You will gain more in terms of all the factors mentioned above if you do a guest post on a more influential blog. This can be a mainstream blog, or a prominant niche blog in your industry. Either way, you can run a blog through Blog Grader and better understand its influence.

Make Guest Blogging a Part of Your marketing Strategy

Guest blogging is an opportunity that many bloggers neglect. Of course, you should not lose your focus on regularly producing great content on your own blog. At the same time, if you follow the guidelines above, you can make guest blogging an effective way to improve your brand, search engine optimization, and audience.

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Want to learn more about publishing a blog on your business website? <a href="http://www.hubspot.com/marketing-webinars/blogging-for-business-webinar-archive/”>Download the free webinar to learn how to create a thriving inbound marketing blog.

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Are you taking advantage of best practices when it comes to promoting news about your business on Facebook?  Now you can check with Facebook’s new Facebook + Media page, which launched Monday.  The new page — geared toward journalists but with implications for all <a title="businesses on Facebook" href="http://www.hubspot.com/marketing-webinars/webinar-archive-how-businesses-are-using-facebook” target=”_self”>businesses on Facebook — includes best practices, tools to drive traffic and other insights for promoting news on Facebook.

To determine the best practices compiled on the page, Facebook analyzed 100 top media sites that use Facebook’s social plugins.

Okay — so you may not be a media company.  But if you publish news about your company on Facebook, Facebook’s new page should be very applicable to you.  While the Media Page offers advice to journalists for driving traffic on Facebook, it also includes tips for driving engagement and interaction.  If you’re a marketer, these tips can be especially helpful as you try to increase interaction on your business’ <a title="Facebook" href="http://www.hubspot.com/facebook-for-business-marketing-hub” target=”_self”>Facebook page.

Social News Best Practices for Marketers

Check out our marketers’ guide to Facebook social plugins if you’re unfamiliar with them.  Then review some of the most applicable best practices for marketers we pulled from Facebook’s new Media Page.  Here they are!

To drive audience and interaction:

• Implement the Like Button social plugin on your website.  Implement the version that includes thumbnails of friends, enables comments, and place it at the top and bottom of articles and near visual content like videos/graphics.  According to Facebook, websites that followed these best practices experienced 3-5x greater click-through rates on the Like Button.
• Publish to users through Pages and Like button connections. (Click here to find out how.)  Status updates asking simple questions or encouraging a user to Like the story have 2-3x the activity.  In addition, stories that are published in the early morning or just before bed have higher engagement.
• Run promotions on your Page using FBML tabs.

To increase engagement:

• Implement the Activity Feed and Recommendations social plugins. Place these plugins above the fold of your website and on multiple pages to generate more engagement. Sites that placed the Activity Feed on the front page as well as other content pages received 2-10x more clicks per user than sites with plugins only on the front page.
• Planning a live event, webinar or webcast? Use the Live Stream box to capture real-time engagement. 
• Keep your pages timely and regularly updated with fresh content to keep people engaged.  Update the status on your page often.

Don’t forget Insights!

• Facebook offers basic insights into your Facebook page’s growth, fans and interactivity via Facebook Insights.  Your page’s Insights Dashboard will provide metrics to help you understand and analyze trends within user growth and demographics, consumption of content, and creation of content.  Keep track of your business page’s performance to determine what works, what doesn’t and learn how best to engage your fans.

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The next time you are bombarded with popup ads and spam, Team Inbound will come to your rescue! With the help of Greta Get Found, Chris Convert, Annie Analyze and of course, Captain Inbound, the marketing world will be a better place!

Watch marketing hero Captain Inbound defeat the Sultan of Spam to save the day in HubSpot’s new animated cartoon web series.

The Adventures of Captain Inbound: Episode One

Character Voices:

Captain Inbound:@jlopin
Greta Get Found: @repcor
Chris Convert: @OneAndOnlyCJ 
Annie Analyze: @Cortenberg
Sultan of Spam: @vleckas
Narrator: @andrewtquinn
David Meerman Scott: @dmscott (as himself)

Animated by Eric Guerin (@EricGuerin)

Did you enjoy the animation? What other marketing animations have you liked?

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The following is a guest post by Peter Rastello, the founder of Inbound Market Link, an Inbound marketing agency specializing in helping small and medium, B2B and B2C businesses to succeed on the internet.

If you are a marketing professional in charge of your small/medium sized business’ (SMB) Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Inbound marketing, you are not alone. According to <a href="http://www.marketingsherpa.com/1news/chartofweek-07-06-10-lp.htm”>marketing Sherpa, SMBs spend roughly 20% more on staff salaries to handle SEO & internet marketing  than do large sized businesses who tend to out-source this activity. For this reason, it is critical that SMB marketers focus carefully. Here are the abbreviated <a href="http://www.inboundmarketlink.com/effective-marketing-online-whitepaper/”>10 steps to effective marketing online:

1. The Importance of Google – with approximately 80% of all searches being conducted via Google, it is critical to primarily focus SEO effort on this search engine. Yahoo and Bing, are less important but still an important part of search engine marketing.
2. Keyword Selection – Pick keywords that are relevant to your business but also fairly easy to rank for. Look for multi-word phrases or ‘long-tail keywords’ as they are usually less competitive
3. Content is King – Prospects are more likely to buy from you if you are a thought leader, so establish yourself as one by creating extraordinarily helpful content. Take decisive action to ensure prospective customers are attracted to your site as a place to find answers.
4. Generosity is Also King – Another key part to attracting customers is your generosity in giving away information, access to tools, etc., which also earns you inbound links which improves your search engine rankings.
5. Social Media – Focus on the top three social media venues: Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Remember, ‘be real’ and ‘be there’ to help the community rather than to push products.
6. Calls-to-Action – It’s important to provide something of value that solves a problem for visitors  in exchange for their contact information. Often traffic will not be ready to buy right away, but a tempting call to action will lead them down the sales funnel.
7. Landing Pages – Everything that has been done to draw qualified traffic to a site, from improving SEO, to generating great content comes to a head in the landing page. Leads should be confronted with an inescapable case for them to leave their carefully guarded personal information on the form. Having one offer, recapping benefits, and a short form are all key.
8. Lead Nurturing – follow up calls to action with a ‘thank you’ email and a lead nurturing campaign that further entices leads down the sales funnel with additional  free offerings– this is a free opportunity to keep touch with a lead.
9. Tracking Progress – Effective Inbound marketing is all about experimentation. Select a strategy based on experience with customers and industry to get people to both visit and convert on the website. But anticipate that initial assumptions about keywords, or what it takes to get traffic to convert will not be right (or not right enough) and changes will need to be made. For this reason, it is essential to have a complete internet analysis tool-suite to help figure out what’s working and what’s not.
10. Patience & Tenacity – It’s easy to become discouraged and frustrated if Inbound marketing is approached as a point solution. In reality, it’s a long term strategy only rewarding those who approach it with patience and tenacity

This was a condensed version of the full white paper, <a href="http://www.inboundmarketlink.com/effective-marketing-online-whitepaper/”>The Ten Essential Steps to Effective marketing Online which you are invited to download for free.

(image by: ExtraNoise)

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Facebook recently passed 500 million users and now is adding an important new feature to its platform. Today, the social networking platform released Facebook Questions. This new feature allows users to ask questions to the “entire” Facebook community. As companies like Yahoo and LinkedIn have used a Questions feature for years, this is not an unprecedented addition, but it highlights the possibility for individuals to communicate in a new way with people outside of their direct Facebook network.

According to Mashable, Facebook Questions will allow users to do a few things:

• Photo questions: Users can post pictures of objects that they have questions about or have problems identifying and then can receive answers from other users.
• Simple Polling: This is a big one for marketers. Now that a Facebook user can quickly create a poll to answer a question, the amount of available data to mine for industry and business insight will increase.
• Tagging: Tagging is the method Facebook uses for organizing questions. The point of tagging is to allow users to easily discover new questions and answer the ones relevant to them.
• Following: Users who want to keep track of certain answers can “follow” a question to see responses as they get added.

Facebook Questions is public and will be open to everyone. The feature is currently in beta and only available to a portion of Facebook users prior to its release to all users. Brands that have Facebook pages will be allowed to answer questions.

marketing Takeaway

Today, Facebook made its platform more valuable to marketers. marketing on Facebook has been challenging because of privacy and a clear separation of profile and business pages. Facebook Questions provides a new way for businesses and prospects to communicate and discover one another in a relevant way. LinkedIn Questions has long been a valuable tool for B2B marketers and it is likely that Facebook will be used in similar ways but on a larger scale.

As a marketer, it is critical you understand that Facebook Questions or any other questions platform is not a place for advertisement. Instead, this new feature provides an environment for contributing value and relevance to potential customers and establishing trust between them and your business. As people start using this feature, look for questions and tags relevant to your business and provide answers to questions that you have the experience and expertise to answer.

Do you plan on adding Facebook Questions into you social media marketing plan?

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Karen Wickre is a long-time business communicator, wordsmith & media specialist. Karen grew up in Washington D.C. She has worked for a variety of media and/or branding companies, including Siegel & Gale, Upside Media; the gaming company, 3DO, and of course, Google.

Karen has worked at Google since 2002, specializing in business writing and media relations. Karen first launched Google’s corporate blog back in 2004. Today the company has digital embassies for virtually every product. This armada spans dozens of blogs, Twitter profiles, YouTube and more recently, Facebook. She also developed Google’s corporate strategy using Twitter in 2009; in the first six months, @Google gained more than 2 million followers, making it one of the largest corporate Twitter accounts.

We were able to ask Karen a few key questions about business blogging as preview ahead of her participation at <a title="Connected marketing Week” href=”https://event.on24.com/eventRegistration/EventLobbyServlet?target=registration.jsp&eventid=228925&sessionid=1&key=65B39620AC3D9CA2ECCE53E3463D9E5E&sourcepage=register” target=”_blank”>Connected marketing Week:

What is the most important thing a company new to blogging should do?

Read other business, news, corporate blogs to get a feel for all that’s possible. Some are personal (ie an executive writes it), some are collaborative. Some blogs are all about ‘thought leadership’ and others are more about customer service and best practices. The main thing to do is get familiar with a wide variety (there is no single right way to do this), and begin to consider what *you* would want to say. 

What questions do good business blog posts answer?

Posts don’t literally answer questions so much as establish ground for the company. Do most posts offer useful or unique information? Do they reflect the company’s values and interests? Do they demonstrate the people behind the company/products?  Collectively, these are the things a good company blog should do.

How do you get people from across the organization to contribute to a business blog?

You have to start with people who are comfortable with writing and editing on the fly, and who have an editorial sense. People who can think broadly enough about what content your blog can encompass. I often advise creating an editorial calendar that people can track and contribute to with ideas – customer stories, presentations from events, commentary, feedback, industry trends, etc. Generally, broader rather than more narrow is a good approach. Don’t just wait till you have a big announcement.  However, the more often you post, the higher the demand for resources. The people who work on it day in and day out MUST be at ease. If it feels like homework or takes too many revisions, they’re not the right ones to do it.

What should be the metrics for business blogging success?

Tangibles: unique visitors, length of time on page, linkbacks, etc – these are all fine to have. I would consider adding Twitter if for no other reason than to further extend the reach of your posts – tweet each new one – but of course Twitter itself is good for much more than that. Beyond that, if comments or other feedback is enabled, then be sure to mine that and respond. The more interactive questions and calls for participation will also yield metrics.

Karen will lead a special webinar as part of <a title="Connected marketing Week” href=”https://event.on24.com/eventRegistration/EventLobbyServlet?target=registration.jsp&eventid=228925&sessionid=1&key=65B39620AC3D9CA2ECCE53E3463D9E5E&sourcepage=register” target=”_blank”>Connected marketing Week. This webcast will cover the latest trends in corporate blogging, Google’s unique take on blogger messaging, and Karen will give webcast participants opportunities to ask her their most pressing blogging questions!

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Paid search is a complement to organic search, not a replacement.

At HubSpot, we always stress the importance of creating valuable content to strengthen presence on search engines and generate high-quality website traffic. The importance of organic search, however, does not imply that paid search is entirely valueless. Paid search may target audiences different from those drawn from organic search and thus maximize your reach to potential customers. In addition, paid search can serve as testing stone for keywords to optimize for organic search. If your website is new to search engine optimization and you don’t know which keywords will draw higher conversion rates, you can quickly test the popularity of different keyword phrases using Google AdWords campaign and later specialize in more popular ones for organic search.

Paid search can be expensive, but with careful design, you can maximize the effectiveness of your Google AdWords campaign. Integrating expert insights from the Service Marketplace providers, here are 3 strategies to increase conversion rates from your paid search advertisements:

1. Consistent keyword focus both lowers cost and increases quality site traffic.

When the keywords you stress in a Google AdWords closely match the content on the subsequent landing page, Google will view your site as providing quality search result and assign your website a higher Quality Score. As a website that makes money from optimizing high-quality, relevant content, Google is incentivized to award quality search results, which it does by charging you less money. Another major advantage of focusing on the same sets of keywords on Ad copy and a landing page is that it tends to generate quality website traffic—for the same reason. Prospects interested in the keywords you bid for will likely stay engaged if they find similar content on the landing page and have a higher likelihood to convert to leads.

2. Change default settings because what Google perceives as a successful ad does not necessarily match your business objectives.

For your convenience, Google sets default for many fields. Default settings, however, don’t necessarily work best for your business objectives. For example, geographical area is set to United States and Canada, automatic bidding is on, ad rotation (which allows you to alter the frequency of showing different ad campaigns) is set to “show better performing ad more often.” If you target only customers from specific geographic areas, covering the entire United States is a waste of money. Even if you intend to attract customers from all over the world, it is still a good idea to test in which states your ad generates the higher lead conversion rate and thus performs most cost-effectively.

The latter two—automatic bidding and ad rotation—are how Google makes extra money to your detriment. Automatic bidding saves you some work, but the price of convenience is your loss of knowledge of how your bidding price changes. The algorithm Google uses is behind the screen, and you can be spending more money than you need to achieve the same results. Another thing to keep in mind is that Google’s definition of a successful ad can be different from yours. Better performance means more clicks to Google, while your standard might be higher conversion rate.  If you set ad automation to “show better performing ad more often,” it’s possible that you eliminate a campaign that generates 5 clicks with a 100% conversion rate in exchange for one that generates 100 clicks that generate only 2 leads. Know your objectives and stay in control. The screenshot below shows what NOT to do.

3. Test your ad from multiple dimensions to find the combination that maximizes its effectiveness.

As mentioned, paid search can become a heavy ongoing expense. Maximizing the return of each dollar you spend is therefore a smart way to reduce marketing cost. One of the strengths of Google Ads Dashboard is that you can create multiple ad campaigns in a matter of seconds. Using different campaigns, you can test the exact same keyword phrases targeted at different locations to determine which areas are your products or services “hotter”; alternatively, you can try different keyword phrases in the same regions.

Time of the day and day of the week may also matter to your ad’s success. Some people set a time range on when the ad can be displayed, but that invariably leaves the rest of the day or the week out of your experiment, and you will never get to know if your ad might achieve better results with these untested time ranges. As a result, we encourage you to let your ad run uninterrupted during the experimental stage and then target criteria that yield high lead conversion rate or other business goals.

What other suggestions do you have for kick-starting your Google Adwords campaign?

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Learn how to break your Google AdWords addiction! <a href="http://www.hubspot.com/marketing-webinars/get-off-google-adwords-ppc-archive/”>Download the free video to learn how to use inbound marketing to generate leads and break your dependence on programs with recurring expenses.

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