Over 6,000 people (including Klik Marketing!) Thursday attended a webinar on The State of Inbound Marketing in 2012. Hosted by HubSpot’s CMO Mike Volpe and Inbound Marketing Manager Melissa Miller, the session outlined findings on “permission-centric” inbound marketing channels from a survey of North American marketing professionals conducted in January.

The HubSpot report reveals some serious advantages of spending more of our budgets on inbound marketing. Not only are inbound marketing leads less expensive, they are also more likely to convert to a sale:

• Average cost per lead for inbound marketing-dominated businesses: $135 dollars. Meanwhile, the average cost for business primarily using outbound marketing rang in at $346 dollars per lead!
• 89% of marketing professionals say that they will either maintain or increase their budget for inbound marketing this year
• 47% of respondents said they will increase their marketing budgets. Of those, over half said this was because of their past success with inbound strategies.
• Of those not planning on increasing their inbound budgets, 62% said it was because of the bad economy and 21% cited a change in management. Only 4% said it was due to past success with outbound strategies.
• SEO leads have a 14.6% close rate, while outbound leads only close the sale 1.7% of the time.

 “Even the people not increasing their spending on inbound, there are other factors driving it,” noted Mike. Melissa and Mike let us in on some interesting quotes from the respondents regarding outbound marketing failures. One individual had zero return on an outbound marketing campaign.

“This past year we spent a few hundred dollars on a door hanger marketing campaign, we got zero response.” – A small professional services business

Another said that the worst mistake his company made was attending trade shows which provided no return on investment. On the other hand, a marketing professional at a manufacturing company raved about the benefits of social media and blogging.

“The best thing we’ve done is embrace social media, establish a blog and convince the ownership to embrace inbound marketing.” – Manufacturing company

Small businesses, defined in the report as having 1-5 employees, said that they planned to spend a whopping 43% of their lead generation budgets on inbound marketing.  

 “Small businesses are leveraging inbound budgets more than large businesses,” said Melissa. Large businesses plan to spend only 21% of their budgets on inbound marketing.

Mike added that if you want the most efficient marketing budget, you should focus on inbound and ROI. But as your business grows, you will start to have other objectives, like branding, that might require other outbound media channels.  

Blogging and Social Media

The webinar emphasized the strengths of blogging and social media as part of an inbound marketing campaign. In the survey data, blogs were most frequently cited as having a below average cost per lead. 

In the past four years, businesses have more than doubled their spending on blogging and social media. The HubSpot report noted a correlation between the frequency of blogging and return.  

 “The most successful category is those who blog multiple times a day,” said Melissa. 92% of companies that blog several times a day reported acquiring a new customer because of their blog. A surprising 25% of respondents said that their blog was “critical” to their business and 81% said that they viewed their blog as being “useful” or better.

Melissa and Mike acknowledged that though social media generates leads, it should be judged for appropriateness in relation to the industry. For example, one marketing professional said that he didn’t target social media because his client sells expensive software to banks, and those bankers don’t spend a lot of time on social media sites.

Generating great blog content isn’t easy, said Mike. The biggest problem for companies starting a blog is that they don’t know what to write about. One of the easiest ways to get good ideas is to consider the type of questions you are getting from leads and customers on a regular basis. Plus, the blogs will get more traffic because they are addressing keywords for which users are already searching.

Mike told webinar attendees that blogging is difficult, but that we should be glad it is.

“The more content the better. No one said that these things are easy. But we did say it works. The reason why it works is because not everyone can figure out how to do it.”

If everyone knew how to blog well, Mike added, “The entire internet would be flooded with this kind of stuff.” This gives us an advantage in using this strategy proven to convert leads into customers.  

The HubSpot hosts also said blogs should be integrated with social media to be effective.

“It’s important to remember that a lot of these techniques tie into each other,” said Mike. “A lot of the effectiveness [HubSpot has] had with social media is because we have a strong blog to support that social presence.”

During a question and answer session, Mike and Melissa responded to Twitter comments asking how to effectively use a blog to increase leads and sales. Mike said that blogging “gives you great content to use within social media.” It also helps to attract more people to your website through SEO by creating content with keywords, and attracts links with relevant content. The effectiveness of your blog can be measured by the number of page views and inbound links for each of the articles you write.  

Blogging Musts:

• Include a call to action at the end of every blog. Point people to a lead generation form
• Share blog content on social media outlets – Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Klik Marketing’s team includes SEO professionals and copywriters who can effectively manage your blogging and social media needs. Request an SEO Quote Today!

The Klik Blog is written by Klik Marketing founder and President Eric Fransen. Eric has been involved with the Internet Marketing industry since the late 1990’s.

The days of black hat SEO are gone. And while SEO strategy certainly isn’t dead, the release of Google Panda, the Google algorithm that crowned quality as king, ensures that meta stuffing isn’t the best way to climb to the top of the SERPs. It appears that Google is moving steadily in this direction of rewarding high-quality sites with real content, rather than sites with keyword-heavy articles and tags. As SEO experts try to think of more and more ways to get any old site in the #1 spot, Google is creating more and more ways to make its crawler more intuitive so as not to be ‘tricked’ by those tactics.

How does Google define the quality of a webpage? 

 Who better to advise us on this subject than Google itself? The search engine’s staff has been making noise for some time now about websites that create a poor “user experience.” Those sites are usually advertisement-laden and provide little useful information to the visitor based on the key words they were searching for. And Google has tweaked its algorithm to penalize them. Characteristics of a strong webpage in Google’s eyes include: non-recycled content with relevant information, recently posted content and fewer advertisements located on the top half of a page.

Where does Content Marketing Fit in With SEO?

If you only update your site once a month, people don’t have any reason to visit it more often than that… Innovative content has the power to tell relatable stories and the fluidity to travel easily throughout the internet. It will naturally earn you link juice, keep visitors on your site for longer periods of time and help you brand your site, which will earn you higher rankings in the SERPs. Creating content with these characteristics will require a good deal of creativity.  

Here are some strategy tips for creating your content marketing plan:

• Figure out where you will promote your content – website, Facebook, Twitter, guest post on another blog?
• Research your competitors. Where are they posting, what keywords are they targeting, what type of content are they producing?
• Decide what type of content you will be creating. Try to use a mix of content that appeals to different types of viewers. An article can be enhanced with an informational video or chart/graphic explaining some concept in the content. Perhaps an editorial cartoon?

Strategies for Developing Content Ideas

The key here is creating something that people will want to share. That means posting lots of new content that your visitors will find intriguing. Here are some ideas to help you get your creative juices flowing:

• Create a how-to video for your product or service
• Film videos of your expert staff answering questions submitted by site visitors
• Analyze several recent pieces by well-known bloggers or experts and give your own commentary
• Create a poll on your site and then use the results as a hook for an article or blog
• Get an interview with an expert or popular blogger and post the it on your site Q & A style
• Attend a conference or webinar, summarize what you’ve learned and give your own opinions about the programming
• Download Feedreader (a search feed aggregator) and set up Google Alerts for pertinent keywords in your field to try to spark ideas

For small businesses, it is important to first do research to learn about the people you are marketing to in your community. Ask your customers about their interests and try to keep them satisfied by frequently posting new content to answer questions you think they might have or give analysis on topics they care about.     

Once you’ve created original content, consider it a prime SEO real estate and do your best to optimize it without interfering with the quality of the user’s experience.  Then you’ll have a powerful package of great content and SEO.

The Klik Blog is written by Klik Marketing founder and president Eric Fransen. Eric has been involved with the Internet Marketing industry since the late 1990’s.

Advanced SEO and Social Integration by Roy Morejon and Brandon Uttley, Command Partners

Roy and Brandon are two of Charlotte’s top social media gurus. There presentation is on: There are a few ways to think about SEO and how it connects to other pieces of your marketing strategy. Increasingly, social media and SEO are becoming more closely aligned. A lot of the work we do in social get rewarded with more exposure for our businesses in the search engines. Even Google is making big efforts lately to focus on higher quality content and content that people react to in positive ways. How we rank in search engines can be an integral part of our inbound marketing system.

• Content Marketing is the backbone of all social media and search engine optimization today. 
• Social Sharing is Driving Growth
• We are in the midst of a massive shift online from search and intent to social sharing.

How do you compete with strong sites? A fresh burst of links may provide exceptional value. It will allow a page to overtake a high authority website for a short or even a long period of time. SEO is an amplifier and catalysts to social media and content marketing.

Where to Start?

• You need to make sure your website is suitable so that google can see your website properly.
• Google now has social analytics. Need to use the Beta Version of Google Analytics. You can see Social Engagement, Social Actions, Social Pages. For more information go to http://bit.ly/gasocial
• Google Profile Integration – Google allows you to see what “they see” in regards to content you are sharing. See google.com/s2/search/social.

What’s Working? Most Important Social Media Factors

• Trust Factors – Everything you do online should be done to increase the trust others have in you. 
• Google – Social Authority – An author’s authority on social networking sites is influencing traditional SEO. Social shows authority, not relevance.
• What are the Social Signals? How Google and others are quantifying social networking authority as a ranking factor within traditional search engine results pages. 
• Facebook Optimization - Fill out all page profile information completely. Because of Facebooks Social Graph all information on Facebook has the potential to be indexed. 
• Twitter - Tweeted links get discovered and indexed quickly.  Tweets from high-authority accounts get lots of RTs act as links (Google & Bing)
• Slideshare - Slideshare is great to use. Very good for long-tail keywords. Multiple opportunities for keyword placement. 

Jeanne Hopkins from HubSpot had a great introduction. It’s all about leads at HubSpot. 45K Leads last month. Wow!

It’s time to Rethink Marketing! Inbound Marketing is a fundamental shift in how we relate to potential customers. Jeanne says “Stop Pushing”. People are on the “do not call list”, they skip ads on TV, they unsubscribe, etc.  ”Start Attracting” leads through relevant, useful, easy-to-find content. 

Stop forcing and start responding to how people make decisions. Adapt to their interests and timelines. Inbound marketing you pull, earned, own, attract and asset. Hubspot blogged 6 months before they started company. They are still receiving leads from blog posts 6 years ago. You don’t want to be “the ad”. You want to be the “content” around the ad. Publish everything! 55% more website visitors for companies that blog. 

Tips for Content

• Talk about the industry, not yourself
• Use lots of different media