MarketingSherpa Blog

Bribe them and buy them. That was an old-school marketing technique to acquire customers when the value proposition of a product just wasn’t strong enough to pull in enough interest of its own.

Do corporate social media accounts face that challenge? While many Facebook pages and Twitter accounts offer strong value (news, humor, insider information, etc.), the average corporate account can find it challenging to develop a following without an incentive.

One incentive that works well for many marketers is a sweepstakes or contest. (While those terms are often used interchangeably, technically the winner of a sweepstakes is decided by random chance, and a contest is decided by skill and competition.)

“Some of the main benefits of a social media-based contest are fast time-to-market, immediate responses/results, low-cost and no-cost program options, and measureable ROI,” said Sandra Fathi, President, Affect. “I have yet to find an organization — business-to-business or business-to-consumer — that would not benefit from some type of online contest.”

Sandra pointed out that even the President is holding an online sweepstakes to help with fundraising efforts.

The goal of online sweepstakes and contests

 While online sweepstakes and contests can help boost your social media following, they can help you meet other objectives as well.

“The goals of any marketing effort should align directly with business goals – and the same holds true for social media promotions,” Sandra said. She provided some example objectives:

• Accelerate social media adoption/participation
• Increase brand awareness
• Generate leads/sales
• Drive product/service usage
• Recognize or reward customers/prospects

However, sometimes it pays to think outside the box.

“For example, we launched the New York Intern Project as a recruiting tool that also provided ancillary benefits, such as doubling our social media following, generating media coverage and new business opportunities with clients who were interested in hosting contests of their own,” Sandra said.

Here are a few mini-case studies to help you visualize successful sweepstakes and contests, and then we’ll review seven steps for launching your own sweepstakes and contests.

Read more…

Noted author, speaker and copywriter Sally Hogshead will keynote this month’s B2B Summit 2012 in Orlando. To whet your appetite for her keynote address, “The Nine-second Attention Span: Selling your brand, and yourself, in social media,” let’s look at her talk from TEDxAtlanta to begin learning how to grab your potential customers’ attention, even though they likely have the same attention span as a goldfish …

Related Resources:

B2B Summit 2012, August 27-30, Orlando

Blandvertising: How you can overcome writing headlines and copy that don’t say anything

Improve Your Copywriting with Help from Social Media: 7 Tactics from David Meerman Scott 

Copywriting: How to improve headlines on landing pages and blog posts

At B2B Summit 2011, keynote Jay Baer, President, Convince & Convert, discussed social media marketing myths. Here are a few excerpts…

Here are a few key takeaways from Jay’s keynote excerpt video embedded above:

0:30 – Myth #3: How B2C uses social media doesn’t apply

3:30 – The overemphasis on Facebook “likes” as a metric

5:06 – Focus on being social, not doing social

If you enjoyed these excerpts, you can watch Jay’s full one-hour B2B Summit 2011 keynote, for free, on MarketingSherpa.

Related Resources:

B2B Summit 2012, August 27-70, Orlando

B2B Summit 2011: 5 takeaways on social media, lead generation, building a customer-centric approach, and more

B2B Social Media: Jay Baer discusses social media ROI and Facebook likes [Video]

TEDxAtlanta – Sally Hogshead – How to Fascinate

Email Summit 2013, February 12-15, Las Vegas

Social Pros 6 – Instagram Lessons from a Giant B2B Company

Before you start an optimization program, you have to be clear on what you are trying to optimize. Or, as Brad Damphousse, the CEO of GoFundMe, a crowdfunding site, puts it, “What’s the one thing that really matters?”

The GoFundMe team determined that, for its site, it had to focus on making it easy for anyone to receive donations. To achieve that goal, the team would have to optimize for both of its customer segments (which are essentially on both sides of the transaction): users asking for donations and donors making those donations.

So, Brad launched a series of A/B tests to help convert more new users and to gain more donations from donors.

Test #1: Sell the service

For the first test, the team mapped out its funnel and identified where leaks were occurring.

Click to enlarge

Read more…

Our job is to help you do your job better. One way we do that is through events, like the upcoming Email Summit 2013 in Las Vegas.

You can help make this event more valuable for yourself and fellow marketers by taking a few minutes to fill out the survey below.

As a thank you, you’ll receive a FREE copy of MarketingSherpa’s 30-Minute Marketer: How to Segment Your Email List for Better Results.

Related Resources:

Email Summit 2013 in Las Vegas, Feb. 12-15, 2013

Email Summit 2012: Top 5 takeaways from the industry’s largest research-based event

Email Summit: Integrating mobile, social and email marketing channels

To help you improve your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts, here’s a quick tidbit for your Friday from the MarketingSherpa blog …

SEO is usually seen as some complex, magical, always evolving formula you need to master. And, while the constant changes to Google’s algorithm (so there’s this Panda all hopped up on Caffeine …) is enough to make your head spin, Optimization Summit 2012 attendee Matt Brutsché of Austin Search Marketing advises marketers to start by focusing on the basics – meta tags.

  Read more…

Organizations target quality, but they don’t pay for it. That is one of the latest discoveries from the MarketingSherpa 2012 Lead Generation Benchmark Report (free 10-page excerpt at this link). Let’s take a look …

Click to enlarge

“In the past, it may have been acceptable to assume that if an organization can lower their upfront cost-per-lead, they will also increase lead generation, improve ROI and drive revenue,” said Jen Doyle, Senior Research Manager, MECLABS.

“This makes sense when calculated on a spreadsheet, but when rolled out in an evolved marketplace with an empowered buyer, it’s going to take a lot more than simply lowering the cost-per-lead to achieve the goals of today’s CMO.”

So how can you balance cost and quality of leads?

  Read more…

In looking to improve the site search on MarketingSherpa (the site is 13 years old, and we have 2,991 case studies and articles, so an effective site search is crucial to helping you find marketing industry information to help you do your job better), the tech team here at MECLABS has explored different site search tools.

The team identified three predominant site search methods:

Method #1: Install a search engine on your own server                

In our case, we were specifically looking at PHP scripts, since we use that on MarketingSherpa.

In general, there are two types of PHP or Perl search engine scripts. One will search your entire website for the relevant article each time your visitor invokes the search engine. The other creates an index of your site, and only searches the index when the visitor uses the engine.

The former is easier to configure and use for the newcomer, but it quickly becomes sluggish when your website grows big. The latter is more efficient, but often requires you to remember to re-index your site each time you change your pages.

Advantages:

• Customizable page results
• No third-party advertisements
• Re-index as needed
• Re-indexing your site does not increase your bandwidth utilization, unless the script accesses your site via HTTP

Disadvantages:

• Need PHP support on Web server
• Will need to be able to edit PHP to configure your site search tool

Some PHP Search Engine scripts:

• Sphider
• PHPDevel Search Engine
• TSEP Search Engine Project

  Read more…

“Content is the best sales tool in the world.”

After exploring his analytics, Marcus Sheridan, co-owner, River Pools and Spas, discovered that potential customers who viewed 30 pages on his website had an 80% closing rate, compared to the average closing rate of 15-20%.

Alongside Luke Thorpe, MECLABS’ Multimedia Specialist, I grabbed Marcus before his Email Summit 2012 keynote, to hear his ideas of content tipping points.

You can see Marcus Sheridan’s full keynote, along with seven other sessions on the MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2012 DVD.

Related Resources:

Most Emails Stink as a Sales Tool. Here’s Why… (via The Sales Lion)

Content Marketing and SEO: The world doesn’t need another blog post

Brand-side Marketing How-to: 6 content marketing lessons learned from a B2B IT company

Overall Content Marketing Strategy Leads to 2,000% Lift in Blog Traffic, 40% Boost in Revenue

Marketing Intelligence: 3 ways to better serve your customers (and your bottom line)

According to Web.com, 84% of small and medium businesses saw an increase in business activity due to their mobile marketing efforts.

This got me thinking … how could mobile marketing help another segment that, much like SMBs, often has limited budgets and time to invest in new marketing tactics – non-profit and cause-based marketers.

So, I asked a few experts in the industry, and they shared a few basic considerations to help you with your mobile marketing efforts …

Consideration #1: Determine if you need a mobile app

Apps have gotten a lot of buzz lately, but they are not the only way to reach a mobile audience.

“Building a mobile app, a good one at least, isn’t cheap,” said Amy Sample Ward, Digital Advisor, Good360.

You might want to start by optimizing your website and email marketing for mobile first.

“Be sure to update form pages for signing up or donating so that people aren’t turned off when they can’t even make out the fields and complete the page,” Amy said.

Once you’ve optimized your current presence for a mobile audience, how can you decide if an app is a logical next step?

“See if mobile views and navigation, opens and clickthroughs on emails, etc. go up as you mobile-ize those areas of content,” Amy remarked.

“The second indicator is the unique content or service an app would provide,” she added. “Unless you have information or data that people will want to access regularly and will actually help them in their day-to-day life, an app probably isn’t a fit.”

“For example, if you are an organization working on clean water access and conservation, an app that shares facts about water is not interesting, nor is it helpful. An app that helps people geo-locate and navigate to places where they can refill their water bottle for free is very helpful and reinforces an organization’s mission.”

  Read more…