MarketingSherpa Blog

The news of Facebook’s recent IPO has mostly focused on technical glitches at NASDAQ. But, one question sits in the back of many marketers’ minds: Is this a sign that the social network will not continue its market dominance?

After all, we’ve seen the rise and fall of sites like Friendster and MySpace, along with the constant emergence of new social media platforms like Google+, Instagram and Pinterest.

So, in the midst of all this change, what is the biggest factor you should keep in mind when exploring social media platforms?

Not the social media platform itself, according to Kaci Bower, senior research analyst, MECLABS Content Group, and author of MarketingSherpa’s 2012 Inbound Marketing Handbook. Kaci suggests you focus on your bigger inbound marketing strategy and architecture rather than relying on tying marketing to any one platform, even if it does have more than 800 million different users.

A strategic approach can give you a distinct competitive advantage

Integrating inbound tactics is the marketing equivalent of avoiding sugar and exercising every day, Kaci claims.

“The vast majority of marketers agree it’s critical, but a much smaller percentage follow through,” she says, citing MarketingSherpa’s 2011 Social Marketing Benchmark Report. “Seventy-six percent of marketers believe integrating SEO and social media is essential, but only 47% are actually doing it.

“A 30-point difference is huge,” continues Kaci. “It indicates the challenge of inbound marketing integration — it’s far easier to give it lip service than execute it.”

Lost in the noise

She suspects that is due to the massive amounts of information in the marketplace on SEO, social media and content creation. Consider this graphic that illustrates the complexity of the social media landscape by showing the huge amount of social media marketing and social networking tools and platforms.

Of course, you don’t have to use everything. Just use what works best for your company. As you can see in this chart from the Inbound Marketing Handbook, usage and effectiveness do not always consistently match. For example, two of the most hyped social media platforms – Facebook and Twitter – showed significantly more usage than effectiveness. Meanwhile, blogs may be more effective than many marketers realize.

Read more…

In today’s blog post, I provide four examples of how not to run your email marketing, based on U.S. presidential campaigns. I will also provide four tips for the campaigns on how to improve their efforts, which I think many marketers can learn from as well. I tried to keep this blog post as politically neutral as possible, which turned out to be easier than I thought when I started since  most of the efforts were pretty poor.

The 72-day study of presidential campaign email marketing

I enjoy David Meerman Scott’s use of U.S. presidential campaigns as marketing case studies in his blog posts. I agree with him that the lessons learned can be applied by all organizations. Inspired by this and with my focus  on email marketing at MarketingSherpa,  I signed up on March 7 to receive emails from each U.S. presidential candidate: President Barack Obama, Ron Paul, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum.  (Please note Newt Gingrich did not provide an opportunity to register for email alerts.)

I consider the need for candidates to win over my vote for president of the United States to be a complex sale, and I correlate it with the long sales cycles of B2B organizations. After watching my inbox fill up over 72 days, here is what I discovered from my unscientific study of the candidates’ email campaigns as related to B2B email marketing best practices. Unfortunately, the experiment turned into mostly what not to do.

  Read more…

If you struggle with tracking and measuring the performance of your AdWords or Facebook pay-per-click ads, this blog post is for you.

It’s clear that each product, service or campaign — whether on your site’s landing page or Facebook page — should have multiple ads created to test what appeals to your audience (what they click on). Even better, you should be eliminating the underperforming ad versions and spending the budget on the winners.

It’s easy to create an ad that triggers curiosity and gets the viewer to click, but that is something you can practice when paying for impressions, not clicks. While creating your ads, think why somebody who sees it would click and find your offer/service attractive.

You can play with variations of the subject line, copy and images (for Facebook ads) to test the different combinations; however, the success metric should not be clickthrough but rather conversions on your landing page.

After all, you’re paying Google and Facebook for clicks, but customers only pay you when you earn a conversion.

So, whether the goal action of your customer is a lead or purchase, follow these five easy steps to start measuring your ads’ performance today:

  Read more…

On the latest episode of Marketing Research in Action, I discuss research about content marketing from MarketingSherpa’s 2012 Search Marketing Benchmark Report – SEO Edition (free excerpt at that link), with Ninan Chacko, Global Chief Executive Officer, PR Newswire …

Here’s a look at what Ninan and I discussed. Feel free to use these links to jump straight to that point in the video.

1:06 – Webpages

1:38 – Social media (other than blogs)

2:28 – Press releases

4:34 – How a press release should look in 2012

6:35 – Using a press release to promote other content marketing channels

8:22 – The benefit of cross-media integration

And here is a closer look at that data from the SEO Benchmark Report …

 Content marketing products, by organization size

Related Resources

Brand TV: Using Video to Engage Audiences (via PR Newswire)

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

Public Relations: Getting corporate data out of subject matter experts heads and into quarterly trend reports increased media coverage 261%

Combining Email, Search, Social and PR for a Content Marketing Campaign: 6 Tactics to Generate Surge in Visitor Traffic

MarketingSherpa’s 2012 Search Marketing Benchmark Report – SEO Edition

Content marketing is an important strategy for both consumer and B2B marketers, and it’s a major component of inbound and email marketing as well.

One issue that probably receives less attention than deserved is content scraping. This is a particular problem with easily digested material such as blog posts, whitepapers and articles.

Less than scrupulous website owners will go to your site, scrape your content and repost your work to their website.

This hurts your content marketing strategy in two major ways: one, it dilutes your brand awareness because some people will find your content on someone else’s website; and two, it essentially confuses search engines with the duplicate content and negatively affects your SEO.

To find out more about content scraping, and learn some tricks to combat the practice, I spoke with Rami Essaid, co-founder and CEO of Distil, a company that protects websites against unauthorized scraping.

As you might guess, this topic is near and dear to Rami’s heart, and he provides insight into how it happens and what you can do proactively to protect your content.

MarketingSherpa:  Tell me why content marketers should be aware of, and concerned about, content scraping.

Rami Essaid:  Marketing has shifted toward content marketing as the medium to drive traffic to websites. The reason it’s so powerful is because it provides valuable information to the end user, and allows marketers to brand within the content along with sending out the company’s message.

By having that content diluted and copied around the world, you are not able to capitalize on one hundred percent of the market reading your content.

When you think about any time you put something out there and it gets copied, scraped and duplicated, people are consuming it all around the world, but they are not consuming it from you, and you are losing the effectiveness of all of that hard work that you put into that content marketing.

  Read more…

“It’s not enough that we win; all others must lose.” – Larry Ellison

Personally, I disagree with Larry, and I think that the focus should be on the customer winning. Hopefully that’s often through your product or service offering, but sometimes your competitors can serve customers looking for a solution better than you can. In those cases, I think all parties (your company, your competitor and your customer) are better served by acknowledging that.

In fairness, Larry Ellison is the fifth richest man in the world, so if that’s how you keep score, he has much more credibility than I. On the other hand, he was paraphrasing Genghis Khan with his quote, so I guess it all depends whom you want to emulate with your marketing.

Learning from the competition

But, whether you agree with Larry or me (or even Genghis), I’m sure that we can all see the value in better understanding what competitors are doing.

So you can conduct a competitive analysis for the obvious reasons — to bludgeon the competition and raze their villages. However, you can also conduct a competitive analysis to help you better communicate with your customers about how you can best serve them (and even tell them what you can’t do) while perhaps honing the fine art of “coopetition.”

Moreover, a competitive analysis is an especially helpful tool to help you craft your value proposition.

Free competitive analysis templates

To help you conduct a competitive analysis, we’ve created a few free templates loosely based on the Summary Competitive Analyses we conduct for our own Research Partners here at MECLABS.
Read more…

In our most recent episode of Marketing Research in Action, I discussed how lead nurturing could help your B2B marketing efforts with Jen Doyle, Senior Research Manager, MECLABS, based on data from her 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report (free excerpt here).

Here is a look at some of the research Jen and I discussed with direct links to that part of the video.

0:38 – Organizations that are engaged in lead nurturing realize higher ROIs on their lead generation efforts.

Click to enlarge

2:01 – Top tactics for creating engaging lead nurturing content

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5:40 – Frequency of lead nurturing touches

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Related Resources

Email Marketing: The importance of lead nurturing in the complex B2B sale

Lead Nurturing: Pilot campaign increases conversion 32.6% with automated emails

Lead Nurturing: You could be losing as much as 80% of your sales; here’s how you keep them

MarketingSherpa Webinar Replay — 5 Key Components for Establishing and Optimizing Lead Nurturing Campaigns

Dennis Dayman, Chief Privacy and Security Officer, Eloqua, has been a hands-on participant in the ongoing online privacy debate in Washington, D.C.

After his recent trip to the Capitol, I interviewed him to give MarketingSherpa blog readers an inside look at the current political process involving proposed privacy regulations here in America as well as find out about some conversations he had with officials from the European Union.

Frankly, I was surprised how much behind-the-scenes information he revealed.

The White House and the Federal Trade Commission have publicly supported the self-compliance efforts promoted by the Direct Marketing Association, the Council of the Better Business Bureaus, the Digital Advertising Alliance and other groups.

And, for marketers either based in Europe or conducting business on the continent, the EU directive should become much simpler very soon, according to Dennis.

In the U.S., a number of legislative actions will probably reach the floor for a vote, but are not likely to pass.

Dennis has been lobbying the lawmakers on Capitol Hill. His position is that security is an issue worth addressing, but that privacy — right now — is better handled at the enterprise level. The playing field just simply changes far too fast for any effective legislation, Dennis says.

  Read more…

I’m a fan of gallows humor. So, as a Borders shareholder (until it went bankrupt), I love the sign a Borders store employee posted as the chain was going out of business …

Sorry
No Public Restroom
Try Amazon.com

It’s hard to deny that e-commerce has significant advantages over the traditional brick-and-mortar store:

• Lower overhead and inventory costs
• Open 24/7, often to any customer in the world with a connection
• High gas prices that convince customers to drive less
• No sales tax (although that playing field will likely level in the near future)
• The ability for customers to easily find what they’re looking for, comparison shop, and respond to offers

But now it’s time for B&Ms to fight back … at least when it comes to that last advantage. As this infographic created by Kaci Bower, Senior Research Analyst, MECLABS, shows, 72% of smartphone users look for information on the go.

Click to enlarge

Read more…

Bluewolf is a professional services company that provides consulting on enterprise agility. A campaign designed to promote its employee knowledge through social media with a gamification element to encourage participation — “B2B Social Media: Gamification effort increases Web traffic 100%, employee collaboration 57%” — was featured in last week’s B2B newsletter.

Bluewolf’s very innovative usage of Pinterest did not fit into the case study, so I wanted to use this blog post to show what you can learn from its efforts.

Pinterest is one of the hottest social channels right now. Here are two data points from a Shareaholic.com study and information that Pinterest is publicly sharing:

• Pinterest’s user base is only 7% of Twitter’s, but the platform sends more total referral traffic than Twitter
• With a mere 1% of Facebook’s user count, Pinterest sends 13% of the traffic that Facebook does

At the moment, consumer marketers are making more use of this platform than B2B marketers. However, Bluewolf offers a great blueprint on how B2B marketers can take advantage of Pinterest.

Bluewolf’s main Pinterest page shows the variety of boards the company is sharing on the platform.

Corinne Sklar, VP of Marketing, Bluewolf, says the company found a natural home with Pinterest because the platform is very visual and is also suited to sharing content, two areas where Bluewolf’s marketing is very invested. She adds that Pinterest also encourages viral sharing of that content. Read more…