Hubspot, a leader in Inbound Marketing, recently surveyed 644 companies to ascertain the state of both Traditional Media (print ads, telemarketing, tradeshows, etc.) & Inbound Marketing. As Hubspot defines it: “Inbound Marketing is a set of marketing strategies and techniques focused on pulling relevant prospects and customers towards a business and it’s products.”

This is part 12 of a 13 part series of blog posts that share bite-size portions of Hubspot’s overall report, “The 2011 State of Inbound Marketing.” If you’d like a full copy of the report, feel free to contact me by clicking here or search for the report by name on Google.

Another way to interpret the graph above is that less than 20% consider their company blog “Not Useful.” That’s a pretty low number. Myspace has taken the biggest hit of all the sites, which I don’t find surprising. If you currently find Myspace useful, I’d love to hear how exactly and what kind of business you’re in.

The social networks seem to be averaging out the same. I consider Linkedin, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter all vital network for an effective marketing plan, if only because they help the name of a person, company, product, service or organization (or all of the above) improve their visibility to search engines.

This is because the online “foot print” of a single website is comparatively small compared to these much larger social networks. By carving out some “real estate” on Facebook and other big social networks, you can “borrow” their visibility for your brand. So make sure the most effective networks above are part of your enterprise social media campaign.

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Interested in learning more about how The Association can help you implement enterprise social media and Inbound Marketing? Visit my resources blog for helpful videos  or fill out a request form here.

Hubspot, a leader in Inbound Marketing, recently surveyed 644 companies to ascertain the state of both Traditional Media (print ads, telemarketing, tradeshows, etc.) & Inbound Marketing. As Hubspot defines it: “Inbound Marketing is a set of marketing strategies and techniques focused on pulling relevant prospects and customers towards a business and it’s products.”

This is part 11 of a 13 part series of blog posts that share bite-size portions of Hubspot’s overall report, “The 2011 State of Inbound Marketing.” If you’d like a full copy of the report, feel free to contact me by clicking here or search for the report by name on Google.

Since all the companies surveyed were already involved in social media, I supposed this data might be a little slanted in favor of that topic. However, it’s still probably pretty accurate to say that most companies are investing more time and energy into a social networking platform of some kind.

Direct mail is taking a huge hit at 50% less importance. I wouldn’t rule it out completely for any effective marketing plan, as it can drive some awareness. I notice that SEO is a close second to blogs, which is only natural as long tail keyword research is a primary factor in the success of a blog and/or website.

For the few companies that don’t have a website yet, I’d wager that your best bet is to start with a blog, if that’s all you can afford. There are plenty of decent (and free) blogging services to use to get your started. I recommend www.posterous.com for ease of use and excellent visibility when it comes to search engines.

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Interested in learning more about how The Association can help you implement enterprise social media and Inbound Marketing? Visit my resources blog for helpful videos  or fill out a request form here.

Hubspot, a leader in Inbound Marketing, recently surveyed 644 companies to ascertain the state of both Traditional Media (print ads, telemarketing, tradeshows, etc.) & Inbound Marketing. As Hubspot defines it: “Inbound Marketing is a set of marketing strategies and techniques focused on pulling relevant prospects and customers towards a business and it’s products.”

This is part 10 of a 13 part series of blog posts that share bite-size portions of Hubspot’s overall report, “The 2011 State of Inbound Marketing.” If you’d like a full copy of the report, feel free to contact me by clicking here or search for the report by name on Google.

Looks like I’ll be spending a lot more time talking about Linkedin in the coming months. Although the network isn’t as large as Facebook, it clearly has the advantage when it comes to B2B models. The only place it takes a major hit is higher education and retail, which actually makes sense.

Personally I find Linkedin more complicated than Facebook, so I gravitate towards that tool. I suspect other small business owners feel the same way. However, if you have a B2B model, best to sharpen your online digital pencil and study up on Linkedin.

Blogging is going to be a good middle of the road tool for any online effective marketing plan, so long there’s a generous helping of long tail keyword research sweetening each post. If you’ve already been blogging for awhile, but aren’t experiencing good conversion rates, the content might need some help with a consumer analysis to dial in on what your target market is looking for.

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Interested in learning more about how The Association can help you implement enterprise social media and Inbound Marketing? Visit my resources blog for helpful videos  or fill out a request form here.

Hubspot, a leader in Inbound Marketing, recently surveyed 644 companies to ascertain the state of both Traditional Media (print ads, telemarketing, tradeshows, etc.) & Inbound Marketing. As Hubspot defines it: “Inbound Marketing is a set of marketing strategies and techniques focused on pulling relevant prospects and customers towards a business and it’s products.”

This is part 9 of a 13 part series of blog posts that share bite-size portions of Hubspot’s overall report, “The 2011 State of Inbound Marketing.” If you’d like a full copy of the report, feel free to contact me by clicking here or search for the report by name on Google.

Which online social network to use is a question that often comes up.  To some degree I don’t think it matters as it will help give your name exposure. But when it comes to customer acquisition, it appears clear that your business model is the determining factor.

Does your enterprise social media campaign include Linkedin and Facebook? Which one is the most effective for your business model?

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Interested in learning more about how The Association can help you implement enterprise social media and Inbound Marketing? Visit my resources blog for helpful videos  or fill out a request form here.

Hubspot, a leader in Inbound Marketing, recently surveyed 644 companies to ascertain the state of both Traditional Media (print ads, telemarketing, tradeshows, etc.) & Inbound Marketing. As Hubspot defines it: “Inbound Marketing is a set of marketing strategies and techniques focused on pulling relevant prospects and customers towards a business and it’s products.”

This is part 8 of a 13 part series of blog posts that share bite-size portions of Hubspot’s overall report, “The 2011 State of Inbound Marketing.” If you’d like a full copy of the report, feel free to contact me by clicking here or search for the report by name on Google.

So you’ve started a blog and just don’t have the time to post frequently? Well, you’re in good company. The majority of companies surveyed blog weekly. The minority blog daily. Face it, it’s tough to come up with good, unique content.

We use a system I call Topic Optimized Marketing. While it does all the technical aspects right, like the utilization of long tail keywords, is also makes the implementation of a corporate social media plan easy. About as difficult as sending an email, once the content is created.

In other words, if you can log in to Gmail and send an email, you could use Topic Optimized Marketing. And so can all your employees or ghost writers. It even allows your customers to post stories and successes to your blog with the click of a button.

Worried about random posts and rants from customers? Relax. The whole system is moderated and only approved content appears on the system.

Regardless of what platform is utilized, the main thing is to create content and post it frequently.

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Interested in learning more about how The Association can help you implement enterprise social media and Inbound Marketing? Visit my resources blog for helpful videos  or fill out a request form here.

Hubspot, a leader in Inbound Marketing, recently surveyed 644 companies to ascertain the state of both Traditional Media (print ads, telemarketing, tradeshows, etc.) & Inbound Marketing. As Hubspot defines it: “Inbound Marketing is a set of marketing strategies and techniques focused on pulling relevant prospects and customers towards a business and it’s products.”

This is part 7 of a 13 part series of blog posts that share bite-size portions of Hubspot’s overall report, “The 2011 State of Inbound Marketing.” If you’d like a full copy of the report, feel free to contact me by clicking here or search for the report by name on Google.

If a company is going to expect new customer acquisition using organic search with the use of blogs, the best bet is to gear up for posting weekly as a minimum level of activity. Ideally a company would post multiple times per day, but often this isn’t possible for a new business just breaking into the brave new world of social media.

If you can move from posting monthly to posting daily, the chances of acquiring a customer through blogging increases by about 30%. I think that’s worth the effort!

Having trouble coming up with content? Get a long list of long tail keywords that are applicable to your activity, and base your campaign around those words. The list will give you ideas of what to blog about that people are actually searching for right now. When you do write articles, write long pieces on each topic you can break up into smaller posts. It’s easier mentally!

Already blogging? How do you come up with content for your  enterprise social media campaign?

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Interested in learning more about how The Association can help you implement enterprise social media and Inbound Marketing? Visit my resources blog for helpful videos  or fill out a request form here.

Hubspot, a leader in Inbound Marketing, recently surveyed 644 companies to ascertain the state of both Traditional Media (print ads, telemarketing, tradeshows, etc.) & Inbound Marketing. As Hubspot defines it: “Inbound Marketing is a set of marketing strategies and techniques focused on pulling relevant prospects and customers towards a business and it’s products.”

This is part 6 of a 13 part series of blog posts that share bite-size portions of Hubspot’s overall report, “The 2011 State of Inbound Marketing.” If you’d like a full copy of the report, feel free to contact me by clicking here or search for the report by name on Google.

In what appears to be an attempt to level the playing field, small business are investing less in outbound marketing, and turning to blogs and social media to decrease the overall cost of lead generation. Blogging and social media is a long-range approach, however, so if you are just starting out in social media, be sure to clarify how fast you expect results.

Sometimes results are immediate, especially if you have a large personal network already that can be leveraged into referrals and an increased network, quickly. But if your company just started, or if you are re-inventing yourself and just starting, it’s probably going take 6-12 months for your corporate social media campaign to kick in with some kind of decent ROI.  Maybe longer.

Are you planning on making the switch this year to a more concerted effort with blogs and social media? Plan on having a robust content creation strategy that utilized long tail keywords within the content. Blogs will allow you to leverage the content the most effectively when it comes to showing up well on Google.

There are loads of tools to help you implement an effective marketing plan using these new modern tools. As long as they are based around content and keywords, you should make progress.

 Click this button to Connect

Interested in learning more about how The Association can help you implement enterprise social media and Inbound Marketing? Visit my resources blog for helpful videos  or fill out a request form here.

Hubspot, a leader in Inbound Marketing, recently surveyed 644 companies to ascertain the state of both Traditional Media (print ads, telemarketing, tradeshows, etc.) & Inbound Marketing. As Hubspot defines it: “Inbound Marketing is a set of marketing strategies and techniques focused on pulling relevant prospects and customers towards a business and it’s products.”

This is part 5 of a 13 part series of blog posts that share bite-size portions of Hubspot’s overall report, “The 2011 State of Inbound Marketing.” If you’d like a full copy of the report, feel free to contact me by clicking here or search for the report by name on Google.

It’s interesting to me that PPC and Telemarketing suffered almost exactly the same amount of decrease percentage wise. It also appears that companies are opting for a face to face experience by investing more in trade shows. Perhaps that also explains the rise in Blogs and Social Media, since the online options are actually similar to meeting face to face.

Social media mimics to a 24/7 party. When you’re at a party, and you meet someone new under the roof of a trusted friend, it tends to be easier to accept a new relationship with a stranger. The profile information available online from social networking sites allow us to “meet” another person online and get even more data than we might obtain in person. Before we buy, we want to make sure we are headed in the right direction, and social media allows us to mine some of the relationship-type information we like to have before setting up an appointment to meet.

Are you increasing your spend on a blogging and corporate social media campaign this year? That would include the time you spend on it. Even if you aren’t paying someone to blog for you, the time you spend is worth money. What’s your estimated increase of Inbound Marketing Budget (time or money) in 2011?

 Click this button to Connect

Interested in learning more about how The Association can help you implement enterprise social media and Inbound Marketing? Visit my resources blog for helpful videos  or fill out a request form here.

Hubspot, a leader in Inbound Marketing, recently surveyed 644 companies to ascertain the state of both Traditional Media (print ads, telemarketing, tradeshows, etc.) & Inbound Marketing. As Hubspot defines it: “Inbound Marketing is a set of marketing strategies and techniques focused on pulling relevant prospects and customers towards a business and it’s products.”

This is part 4 of a 13 part series of blog posts that share bite-size portions of Hubspot’s overall report, “The 2011 State of Inbound Marketing.” If you’d like a full copy of the report, feel free to contact me by clicking here or search for the report by name on Google.

For the purposes of Hubspot’s survey, 9 channels of marketing were defined and each company participating in the survey defined how much of their lead generation budget would be spent on each one. The channels were defined as follows:

Inbound  Channels        Outbound Channels        Not Classified

PPC                               Direct Mail                        Email Marketing

SEO                               Telemarketing                   Other

Social Media                   Trade Shows

Blogs

Since email can be used both as Inbound and Outbound, it wasn’t classified as either. Inbound Marketing is clearly the winner here, but I predict that outbound won’t completely go away. One other outbound channel that is not listed at all is direct response TV ads. Since The Association is a film and video production company, we are trying not to take offense!

More and more the lines between advertising and inbound marketing are melting together. A web page often has advertising on it as well as Facebook share buttons options to comment, etc. Facebook provides ads that target people based on their likes, dislikes and even provides a way to “customize” your ad experience.  Who knows? In a few years, advances in long tail keyword research may result in an advertising experience so slick, we don’t regret having a constant stream of advertising.
 Click this button to Connect

Interested in learning more about how The Association can help you implement enterprise social media and Inbound Marketing? Visit my resources blog for helpful videos  or fill out a request form here.

Hubspot, a leader in Inbound Marketing, recently surveyed 644 companies to ascertain the state of both Traditional Media (print ads, telemarketing, tradeshows, etc.) & Inbound Marketing. As Hubspot defines it: “Inbound Marketing is a set of marketing strategies and techniques focused on pulling relevant prospects and customers towards a business and it’s products.”

This is part 3 of a 13 part series of blog posts that share bite-size portions of Hubspot’s overall report, “The 2011 State of Inbound Marketing.” If you’d like a full copy of the report, feel free to contact me by clicking here or search for the report by name on Google.

The question in my mind is, if over half the company’s involved in Inbound Marketing are increasing their budget, where does that leave the companies that are not involved at all? I run into companies all the time that just haven’t started participating.

Obviously there is a pretty significant barrier for 71% in terms of the economy.  I guess. But since many of the tools are free to use, how inaccessible can inbound marketing be? I’d be very curious to know what kind of corporate social media campaigns these companies are running that the cost is prohibitive. Interestingly, only 3% say they are decreasing their Inbound Marketing budgets due to past success with Outbound Marketing! ONLY 3%! That’s a pretty low number.

Is your company increasing spend on Inbound Marketing? If your company has an outbound marketing campaign, what do you find is most successful? What challenges does your company face in either area?

 Click this button to Connect

Interested in learning more about how The Association can help you implement enterprise social media and Inbound Marketing? Visit my resources blog for helpful videos  or fill out a request form here.