Inside Inbound Marketing
by Walter Lis
When Big Data Takes Over The Super Bowl
03 weeks ago
The one-to-one marketing capability that comes from the explosion of big data insights provided online through mobile devices and through social media channels is a game changer. The digital footprint of a consumer is growing at an exponential rate, allowing for a true relevant message to be developed for each individual.
Nowhere is the change being felt more than on Madison Avenue and the traditional “mass media” advertising buys. There’s no bigger mass media stage than the Super Bowl, which this past year reached over 108 million people.
Check out my recent article about the convergence of digital marketing and traditional marketing in the biggest game on earth.
Share and Enjoy
Spending on Digital Marketing Illustrates Significant Knowledge Gap
01 month ago
According to a recent Digital Marketing Spending Survey published by Gartner, the world of digital marketing is quickly dividing into the “Haves” versus the “Have Nots”. Currently companies spend over 10% of revenue on marketing and digital marketing commands approximately 25% of the overall marketing budget according to Gartner.
As you might expect, the level of commitment to digital marketing can have a big impact on the investment attached to the digital realm. Companies that employ a dedicated digital marketer spend nearly 10% more of their marketing budget on digital marketing than those without. This certainly makes sense as all forms of online marketing require technical knowledge that is constantly updating. If an organization falls behind in the digital marketing space, it’s easy to lose efficiency and optimization, which can kill return on investment.
According to Gartner, digital marketing spending averages 2.5% of company revenue, with budgets projected to increase 9% this year. In addition, 70% of companies have a Chief Marketing Technologist who can serve as the tip of the spear in terms managing and monitoring all the subcategories within digital marketing. SEO, paid search, social media, analytics and email mail marketing all have seen exponential growth in the tools and technologies available. They’ve also seen drastic changes within the algorithms that dictate response and success. Having a dedicated CMT to analyze and manage the rapid pace of change only makes sense when 25% of the budget is involved.
Another interesting note within the Gartner report is that up to 50% of digital marketing activities are currently outsourced. This shouldn’t be surprising considering the breadth and depth of razor-sharp skills required to be successful within the various digital marketing subcategories. Although a successful digital marketer needs to be well versed in all aspects of digital marketing, it’s virtually impossible to be an expert at email marketing, social media marketing, paid search AND search engine optimization, among others. If you can build and maintain a consistent knowledge base within all aspects of digital marketing, you’re also smart enough to realize the expertise required to optimize, especially in competitive industries.
Share and Enjoy
The New Era of Digital Marketing Is Here
03 months ago
by Walter
in Online Marketing
With nearly every single action that you take being tracked, databased and subsequently archived, your life history is taking shape in the digital world. Check our my latest article on how the intersection of big data and digital marketing is drastically changing the way CMOs and businesses think and react.
Share and Enjoy
The Key to Developing Digital Marketing Results
03 months ago
If much of digital marketing is a pragmatic, statistically-based science, then developing successful landing pages is an art form. Whether you’re B2B or B2C, developing a quality landing page that converts is among the most essential elements of a high-performing website.
I often use the term “develop” when talking about landing pages since consistent testing and optimization are such a large part of developing a landing page that works. As Anne Holland’s Which Test Won illustrates, it’s virtually impossible to guess what will produce the best performing landing page, so the process of refinement rules.
So where do you begin when judging landing page performance? In Google Analytics, you can start by viewing your top 20 landing pages at Content > Site Content > Landing Pages. The pages with the highest bounce rates will illustrate who’s underperforming and who’s winning. Then it’s time to start testing. Is the page loading quickly? Is your call to action loud enough? Do you need additional content? Is your AdWords traffic to the page segmented properly? Be sure to consult both the winners and losers when looking for clues before and during testing.
As with all digital marketing, it’s a good practice to set up a dashboard for your landing pages to include entrances, pageviews, bounce rate and page value. Assigning a dollar value to conversions is a great way to segment your audience to help define higher value activities and conversions. Then you can prioritize your next steps using a mix of these metrics as they compare to each of your traffic sources.
I use the Unbounce landing page tool to help manage much of the development and testing process. It provides a quick and easy framework for testing performance of new fields and page components while providing really faster reporting. Unbounce has also added some solid functionality to pass your leads to marketing automation and CRM tools such as Hubspot and Salesforce.
Share and Enjoy
Are Your Landing Pages Optimized for Humans?
05 months ago
When developing an ecommerce page layout or landing page, it’s easy to lose perspective on how your potential customer experiences the world that you’ve created. As the person in charge of creating and optimizing the return from your product or service offering, your mission is to bring together the various components into a single source.
However, it’s the process of creating a page or website with the most efficient return from a business perspective where digital marketers can sometimes lose their way, sacrificing the experience and ultimately, the trust of the human being they’re selling to. Many of the tools available to digital marketers can add value to the customer, but only when used in the proper context.
Create an offer or upsell for a non-complementary product, and risk losing the trust of your potential customer. For your visitor to jump through multiple unnessary hoops within your interface and there’s a good chance they lose their patience and leave your site.
This recent video from Google does a tremendous job illustrating this delicate usability vs landing page optimization dance by bringing the experience away from the digital, into the “real” world.
Share and Enjoy
Is Email Marketing Still Worth The Effort?
06 months ago
by Walter
in Email Marketing
According to a recent study by Internet security technology company Commtouch in Q3 of 2012, nearly 74% all email sent was spam. Over 87 billion spam/phishing emails are sent around the world every day and 1.9 billion of those messages was sent with malware attached.
Despite those disappointing numbers, email marketing is still a leading tool for B2B digital marketers looking to create and maintain a one-to-one relationship. A highly targeted, well constructed and uniquely valuable email is still a great way to communicate with your audience.
As with nearly all digital marketing channels, successful email marketing is not easy. Four major hurdles, and their applicable metrics, that marketers have to manage include:
- Email list quality (bounce rate)
- Opening of the email (open rate)
- Take action within the email (clickthrough rate)
- Take action on the landing page (conversion rate)
Misjudge your target in any of these four stages and you’re out of luck. A recent study by marketing services provider Epsilon indicated that the average email open rate was 25.6% for 2012 Q2 while the clickthrough rate was just 4.4%. Certainly these numbers can fluctuate a great deal across industries and due to a number of additional factors.
However, the real takeaway from these figures is that the need to test and optimize each individual component such as subject lines, body copy and calls to action is more important than ever. B2B email marketing is still an excellent tool when used with a disciplined, pragmatic approach.
Share and Enjoy
The Big Data Future of Digital Marketing
010 months ago
In many respects, most inbound marketers have been involved with big data long before it was called big data. What is big data? It’s a term that describes databases or datasets that grow so large that they become awkward or difficult to work with.
Digital marketing is based on tracking customer likes and dislikes. The continued growth of these analytics in digital marketing is a given and it’s driven by our hunger to track more data points about more products and even more potential customers. In fact, it’s doubtful there will ever be too much data for true inbound marketers because the ability to parse data efficiently and effectively is actually what separates the good from the great in this space.
Start from the beginning, when a new website is launched and when the Google Analytics code, or other analytic alternative, gets added to the site. Your next step is to set up your goals, funnels and tracking URLs within your log file tracking tools. Follow that with 8-10 social channels, all of which provide a steady stream of data that needs to be monitored. Add all the analytics of your email marketing campaigns to the top of this mix and you’re almost halfway there.
Now it’s time to track your reach on other’s sites. You’ll want to track your backlinks and your keyword rankings along with any kind of social mention. Don’t forget to include your paid search analytics, especially the information based on your keyword rankings, ad copy and split tests. Hopefully you’re using some sort of landing page optimization platform so you can monitor your variants and their response. In addition, whether you’re a B2B or B2C marketer, you should be using some sort of marketing automation software so you can monitor your lead generation and lead nurturing data.
If these various pieces of the digital marketing pie dissuade your interest in the topic, you’re probably not long for the new era of big data within digital marketing. However, if the thought of an unending stream of structured and unstructured data floats your boat, you may be in the right place.
The big data future is here for digital marketing and the opportunities are limitless. The victors in this game will undoubtedly be similar to previous eras. Figure out how to manage and extract valuable insights from this knowledge base, and you’ll be way out in front.
Share and Enjoy
What is Google Knowledge Graph?
011 months ago
Google’s recent Knowledge Graph introduction presents a significant adjustment to their search algorithm and their approach to search results presentation. In summary, the Knowledge Graph presents an overview of the search term with additional content and suggestions from Google. Here’s a brief video overview that explains what they’re looking to accomplish.
This change will impact all websites and the results displayed on Google. For the purpose of blog posts, it’s a safe bet to assume that your posts must now give more value than what the searcher originally intended to look for. It also means that thin blog posts, those that are mere rewrites of what already can be found elsewhere isn’t as valuable from a search engine optimization perspective as it was previously.
Here are some additional considerations when creating blog posts…
- Consider deeper topics for in-depth content, think documentaries rather than short, traditional news reports
- Answer as many important questions within your content as possible
- Stay away from direct linear writing – a blog post that has no dimension or depth will soon be dead. Always think of how you can add additional depth to your content
- Think of the impact of your article say a month from now, a year from now, the blog posts that will still have some sort of value at that time will continue to exist
Share and Enjoy
New Inbound Marketing Education Tool Saves Time
11 year ago
Over the past decade, the one primary constant with digital marketing is that the rate of change increases exponentionally. As technologies change, marketers adapt, search engines adjust and businesses succeed or fail depending on their ability to identify and manage change.
Keeping up with what’s happening in digital marketing can often prove to be a job within itself. Lee Iacocca’s famous time management quote applies today now more than ever, “If you want to make good use of your time, you’ve got to know what’s most important and then give it all you’ve got.”
One terrific new tool to stay plugged-in with digita marketing is inbound.org, which was developed by Rand Fishkin, co-founder of SEOmoz and Dharmesh Shah, co-founder of Hubspot. The site uses crowdsourcing to aggregate the top digital or inbound marketing articles posted online. Users then can vote and help promote the most meaningful and useful articles to the top of the list.
To stay current with my marketing education, I’ve previously invested a great deal of time either parsing through a massive list of articles in my Google reader, or through hundreds of Tweets from my “marketing experts” list. Much of that informational inefficiency is now gone as I use the power of the crowd to find the best of the best, in terms of digital marketing knowledge sharing.
Fishkin and Shah are looking to bring the communities of bloggers and marketers together who write about non-paid channels like SEO, social media, content marketing, conversion rate optimization and other inbound or digital marketing tactics. The site launched in February and has been a huge success and a great tool to help educate yourself in the most time-effective manner currently available. Visit inbound.org today and stay up-to-date efficiently.
Share and Enjoy
Local Online Marketing Factors for Small Businesses
11 year ago
Local online marketing for small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) has certainly taken a higher priority now than ever before. In fact, this is a booming marketplace for local SEOs and digital marketers who are looking to carve themselves into this niche.
Since digital marketing changes at an accelerated pace as compared to many traditional marketing methods, it’s important to understand what’s moving the needle right now, as opposed to what’s worked in the past. When I’m asked to work with a local SMB, I like to consult David Mihm’s annual local search ranking factors survey as a basis point when creating a plan of attack.
Mihm’s local search ranking factors list utilizes 30 of the best minds in the business to rank what’s most important right now in local search marketing. In addition, he lists what’s more helpful this year versus what’s losing strength for marketers.
Among the most recent top ten recommended search factors are four items on your Google Place page. Google has definitely increased the relevance of local Place pages, so it’s now essential to properly manage the content that is included on your page, making sure it exactly matches the information you’re providing to other information providers.
Four additional items in Mihm’s top ten list relate to content on your website. Having consistent, crawlable contact information on your site including physical address and phone number is a must. Another factor is the page rank of your site, which is dictated in large part to the quantity and quality of your content. This is now truer than ever with the recent Google Panda freshness updates.
The final group from Mihm’s top ten covers off-place, off-site factors such as citations and inbound links. Both of these initiatives are essential, yet come with a large investment in time. Implementing a content, citation and link-building program is where a local SMB could really use a local marketing expert. Local marketers who take this burden away in a cost-effective manner could see a long line to their door in the months and years ahead.