A Super Simple Explanation of Inbound Marketing [INFOGRAPHIC]

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As extreme inbound marketing advocates, we love when we see businesses drink the inbound marketing Kool-Aid, eat the inbound marketing dog food, sip the inbound marketing champagne, or just, you know — adopt the inbound marketing methodology. And we love it even more when they evangelize it, as HubSpot Partner The Whole Brain Group has recently done with its new infographic featured below.

So if you’re just catching on to the concept of inbound marketing and are looking for a super simple explanation of how it compares to a more traditional marketing strategy — and how a really effective inbound marketing strategy works — take a few minutes to check out The Whole Brain Group’s rundown.

 (Click infographic to enlarge.)

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Do you plan to incorporate inbound marketing tactics into your overall marketing strategy? If you’ve already started, what success have you had so far?







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An Industry Breakdown of Google’s $100 Million Per Day Advertising Revenue [INFOGRAPHIC]

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$100 million per day? That’s a whole lotta moola. Are you one of the marketers contributing to that big wad of cash? Don’t worry — with smart execution, spending some marketing dollars on advertising is nothing to feel icky about. In fact, PPC in particular can be a great complement to your organic search strategy, and it can even amplify your organic results.

But if you’re interested in how all that dough breaks down, the folks over at Wordstream did some thoughtful analysis and put together a very interesting infographic that highlights where all that money comes from, with an industry-by-industry breakdown. It’s worth checking out. And if you want to hear something promising, when you compare these Q3 numbers to Q2, it turns out cost-per-click has gone down, and clicks and impressions are way up — great news for marketers who are investing in Google advertising. And if you have any questions about the data, Wordstream has also published a great FAQ rundown of how the data was compiled here.

(Click infographic to enlarge.)

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Did any of this data surprise you? How do the numbers break down for your particular industry?







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The Scoop on Facebook Mobile Ads: Are They Working? [Data]

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Back in June, we covered the news that Facebook was finally allowing marketers and advertisers to purchase mobile-only ads. A short two weeks later, some preliminary research was released about the effectiveness of those mobile-only ads. We filled you in on that as well, which indicated that mobile-only ads were generating 13X more clicks than Facebook’s desktop ads.

As much as that piqued our curiosity, I think we can all agree that two weeks’ worth of data is hardly comprehensive enough to confidently gauge effectiveness. But now that mobile-only ads have been around for 4+ months, the data has had a bit more time to stew (mmm … stew). I digress …

Yesterday, Mashable published an article that explores some of the more recent findings about Facebook’s mobile ads. Let’s take a look at what they uncovered so you can make a more informed decision about whether Facebook mobile ad spend makes sense for your business — you know, if you’re considering it.

4 Facebook Mobile Ad Options for Marketers

So when we say “Facebook mobile ads,” what exactly are we talking about? There are actually four different types of Facebook mobile ad options available to marketers, and they all appear directly within users’ News Feeds (as opposed to the display ads you might see in the sidebar of the desktop version of Facebook.com):

1) Sponsored Stories

These ads recommend brand pages or content to users based on their friends’ activities (social context). For example, you might notice “Pages You May Like” or other suggestions to Like certain brand pages your friends are already fans of, as you can see in the screenshot below (courtesy of Mashable).

 

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2) Page Post Ads

Your second mobile ad option is Page Post Ads, which are larger ad units than Sponsored Stories and include a call-to-action to Like the page at the bottom of the ad. Page Post Ads aren’t dependent on social context; in other words, advertisers can target them to appear in News Feeds of users beyond fans and their friends. These ads can feature photos, offers, questions, videos, events, or links, as in the example below from Inside Facebook.

 

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3) Promoted Posts

Another option for Facebook mobile advertisers is Promoted Posts, which allows you to promote your Facebook Page’s organic updates to friends of your fans — people who don’t necessarily already Like your page. That’s why, as a user, you might see a post from a brand you’re not a fan of appear in your News Feed; it’s because one of your friends has Liked that page. Here’s how it might look on a mobile device, also courtesy of Inside Facebook:

 

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4) Mobile App-Install Ads

Finally, Facebook also offers Mobile App-Install Ads. With a look similar to Sponsored Stories, these ad units recommend games and apps instead of brand pages. When a Facebook user clicks on one of these ads, they are prompted to install apps on their mobile devices via iTunes or the Google Play store. Similar to Page Post Ads, these ads require no social context. Here’s how they’d appear on a mobile device:

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Data on Effectiveness of Mobile-Only Facebook Ads

Now that you know what your mobile ad options are, I bet you’re wondering about that performance data we mentioned earlier in this post. Here’s what some advertisers are experiencing, as reported by Mashable:

  • Nanigans (a company that purchases Facebook ads for clients) has experienced clickthrough rates on Sponsored Stories that are an average of 12 times higher on mobile than on desktop on average (similar to the preliminary data we covered back at the end of June). They’re also 45% less expensive
  • For Mobile App-Install ads, Nanigans also reported that its ecommerce clients have found that, post-click, those who download retailers’ apps often spend more money (and spend more often) compared to desktop visitors. In fact, people who make their first purchase on mobile are 2.5X more likely to make a second purchase, and they spend 8X as much money with a retailer over time. 
  • Ecommerce website Fab (a client of Nanigans), saw a 5X better return on its Mobile App-Install ads than any other mobile app download ad it placed on other networks, including Google and Yahoo!. In fact, 10% of people who join Fab from its iPad app make a purchase in the first week (compared to 3% on the web).

Seems like mobile ads are still generating some impressive results for advertisers, even after they’ve had time to stew.

Why Are Mobile Ads More Effective?

So, why are mobile advertisers experiencing so much more success with mobile ads compared to their desktop counterparts? Here are some theories:

1) They’re in-line with other Facebook content in the News Feed.

All of the above-mentioned Facebook mobile ad units are served in mobile users’ News Feed, making them much more prevalent than a lot of other desktop ads. On Facebook’s web/desktop version, for instance, advertisers have additional options, including the display ads you see in Facebook’s sidebar. Because these types of ads are much easier to ignore and thus less effective, it’s important to understand that they would bring down the effectiveness of Facebook desktop ads as a whole, even though some particular ad options on the desktop (e.g. Promoted Posts) do only appear in News Feeds on the desktop version, and are thus much more effective than Facebook display ads.

Therefore, it’d be interesting to know how this data breaks down when just comparing the effectiveness of mobile News Feed ads to desktop News Feed ads — excluding the desktop display ads. Back in June, for instance, we saw from a TGB Digital study that desktop News Feed ads were generating a 0.588% CTR at $0.63 CPC compared to mobile News Feed ads, which were generating a clickthrough rate of 1.14% at $0.86 CPC. This translates to 1.93x the CTR for mobile News Feed ads than desktop News Feed ads — and not at a huge cost.

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This shows that mobile ads were still more effective than desktop News Feed ads back in June … but is this still the case now?

2) Facebook mobile is cleaner; there’s not as much to compete with.

There are a lot fewer bells and whistles on Facebook’s mobile apps. There is no sidebar content to compete with (because there are no sidebars), and everything is generally less cluttered, focusing users’ attention mainly on what’s in their News Feed. This gives mobile ads a lot more face time with users.

3) They’re still novel.

Mobile-only ads are still fairly new and novel to users, and some of the clicks they’re generating may be owed to users’ curiosity or confusion about the new feature, as well as users clicking on ads accidentally. On the flip side, as a result, clicks may be less qualified, resulting in subpar post-click results. Marketers should keep this in mind as they’re tracking the performance of their Facebook mobile ads.

Should Marketers Invest in Facebook Mobile Ads?

As the data shows, it might just be worth experimenting with mobile advertisements. The mobile market is only growing, and Facebook reports that 60% of its users are mobile users, up from about 47% a year ago. Furthermore, mobile ad units are generally significantly less costly on average than print and online ads. According to former Wall Street analyst Mary Meeker’s annual internet trends presentation, the effective cost per thousand impressions (CPM) for desktop web ads is about $3.50, while the CPM for mobile ads is just $0.75.

That being said, marketers are advised to proceed with caution. Because mobile ads are placed directly in the News Feed, Facebook will have to be careful not to overwhelm and bombard its mobile users with ads, which may result in a scaling problem as Facebook limits the number of ads it shows. And when competition for Facebook ads rises, so will their cost.

If you plan to experiment with Facebook mobile ads, keep best practices in mind. Be specific in your targeting, and track your results compared to your ad spend.

Have you experimented with mobile-only Facebook ads? What results have you seen thus far? Are they more effective than your Facebook desktop ads?

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43% of Small Businesses Spend 6+ Hours Per Week in Social Media [INFOGRAPHIC]

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If you’re a small business owner, I’m sure you can easily relate: Your head is likely adorned by quite a few different hats on any given day. So when it comes to social media, it’s no wonder so many small business owners have been slow to incorporate this newish channel into their overall marketing strategy. Let’s face it: Social media can be quite the time suck!

But hey … small businesse are catching up, as is evident from this new infographic from the folks over at VerticalResponse, brought to our attention by Marketing Pilgrim this morning. The infographic highlights how small businesses are using social media — how much time and money they’re spending, which social networks they’re focusing on, and the challenges they’re facing. Turns out a big chunk — 43% of small businesses — are spending at least 6 hours per week on social media, with a large focus on Facebook (90% are using it) and Twitter (70% are using it). As for social networks like Google+ and Pinterest, to quote the infographic, “not so much.” Check out the full infographic below for more interesting stats.

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What statistics from this infographic stand out to you about small business’ social media usage?

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How Automated Workflows ‘Work’: A Simple Setup Guide

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“Everything in moderation.” When applied to marketing automation, it’s the perfect mantra. Even though marketers must be careful not to over-automate, marketing automation can be a great way to manage and nurture your leads so they’re more sales-ready. But did you know it can even help you tackle administrative marketing tasks, too?

With the concept of workflows — series of automated actions that you can trigger to occur based on a person’s behaviors or contact information — all of this is possible. Workflows go beyond email and take simple marketing automation to the next level, allowing you to send emails, update contact information, add or remove contacts from lists, and trigger email notifications. But how exactly do you set up an automated workflow? How do workflows … well … work? In this post, we’ll walk you through the typical setup process of workflows, which you can then use to set up various lead nurturing workflows … and beyond!

Keep in mind that the way you set up your workflows may vary depending on the tools you’re using. But for the sake of all being on the same page, this article will explain how a typical setup process works using HubSpot’s Workflows tool as our recurring example.

Step 1: Choose a Starting Condition

In order to create a workflow, you need to provide a starting condition, or criteria which, if met by a given lead, will trigger the workflow to begin for that lead. HubSpot’s Workflows tool, for instance, provides three options for a starting condition:

  • A form is submitted
  • A smart list is triggered
  • No starting condition

1) A Sample Workflow When a Form Is Submitted

The first option is to trigger a workflow when a given form is submitted. This is useful when you want to send emails to follow up to a specific download on your site. For example, let’s say you have a landing page with a form to download a specific ebook. Maybe you want to set up a nurturing campaign to engage the people who download this ebook with more content about that specific topic. You can create a workflow with emails tailored to these topics and automatically enter any lead that downloads this ebook into that workflow. Here is an example of what that setup might look like:

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2) A Sample Workflow Triggered By a Smart (Dynamic) List

You can also trigger a workflow when a lead is added to a certain list. You can design these lists to include only leads that meet certain criteria for contact properties or behaviors. In HubSpot, you can create Smart Lists, or lists based on specific criteria that dynamically update to include any leads that come to meet that criteria:

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For example, you could create a Smart List of leads who have visited your website a certain number of times, or a list of leads who have requested a free trial of your product, or a list of leads who live in Texas and have fewer than 50 employees, etc. You can use any information from your contacts database to create these Smart Lists, and then trigger workflows based on those. This gives you a wide range of possibilities for the rules you can set up for each of your workflows.

3) A Workflow With No Starting Condition

Lastly, you should also be able to set up a workflow that doesn’t have a starting condition. This simply means that you only want to add contacts to the workflow manually. For instance, if you host a conference or another type of marketing event and want to create a workflow for the leads you drive from it, you might upload that list and add it to the workflow on its own. Or, if you engage in a co-marketing initiative, you can import a list of opt-ins and nurture them with a specific set of emails.

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Step 2: Trigger the Desired Actions

Now we get to the meat of the workflow — the sequence of actions that it triggers. Much like starting conditions, there are several different types of actions you can initiate with your workflows:

  • Setting a contact property value
  • Sending an email
  • Adding a contact to a list (or removing them)
  • Sending an email notification

1) Setting Up a Contact Property Value

As we discussed earlier, workflows can be used to change or update information about your leads in their contact records. This gives you an extremely easy way to conduct mass updates to your database, rather than manually making changes to each lead record, one at a time. Let’s say you have a handful of new contacts that you want to mark as subscribers in your database. You can simply create a list of these new contacts and enter them into a workflow that updates their lifecycle stage property value to “Subscriber.”

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For example, maybe you have a contact field that indicates whether or not a lead has requested a demo of your product. You can immediately set these contacts apart in a way that demonstrates they are high-quality leads. For instance, you can create a workflow that essentially says, “If a lead’s ‘Demo Requested’ property value is equal to ‘True,’ change that lead’s lifecycle stage to ‘Marketing Qualified Lead.’” In this case, you have a starting condition of a Smart List (as a member of a Smart List of people who request a demo) and an action (set their lifecycle stage value to ‘Marketing Qualified Lead‘).

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Or maybe you want to create a workflow that changes specific pieces of contact information of your contacts. For instance, you can take a list of leads whose company name value is blank, and change them all to the value ‘unknown.’

2) Sending Automated Emails

The second type of action that you can trigger in a workflow is sending an email. This is probably the most intuitive use case for workflows because it allows you to nurture your leads with a targeted series of emails. For example, with HubSpot, you can take emails you’ve already created and save them specifically for automation, which then allows you to select those emails when you’re setting up a workflow. So now, you can create each of your emails ahead of time, and build workflows to schedule these emails to be sent in the order you want and with the timing of your choice. You can include as many steps in a workflow as you’d like — you can build a nurturing campaign with two follow-up emails and another one with six follow-up emails, etc. The campaigns can span five days, two weeks, or three months, etc. No matter how you choose to set them up, your workflows will take the pain out of lead nurturing by simplifying and automating the entire process.

3) Add a Contact to a List (Or Remove Them)

The third type of action that a workflow can perform is adding a contact to — or removing a contact from — a list. This is another great organizational tool to simplify the way you handle your lists of leads by automating the otherwise manual process. For example, you might be hosting a webinar and have a landing page with a form that lets people register for that webinar. You could set up a workflow that takes any leads who submit that form and adds them to a list of webinar registrants. Again, here you have a starting condition (submits webinar form) and an action (add to webinar registrants list). Couldn’t get much simpler than that!

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4) Send Email Notifications

The last type of action you can add to a workflow is sending an email notification. This feature allows you to send a notification to a specific address the minute that something important happens to one of your contacts. This has a vast number of possible uses. You could set up a notification email to alert a sales representative when someone submits a key form, like a pricing information download or a bottom-of-the-funnel offer. You can also use this feature to notify a sales rep when a lead becomes sales qualified, hits a specific lead score threshold, or when any other property on their contact record changes.

You could even set up a notification for your social media manager to trigger when a lead who is a “social media influencer” comes into the system, based, for instance, on their Twitter follower count. Workflows make it easy to keep track of these important changes, so you know which of your leads are warmest, and can act on that information immediately.

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The great thing about workflows is that you can add multiple actions to a given workflow in whatever order you choose — and they don’t all have to be the same type of action! You could create a workflow whose starting condition is “submits webinar form,” in which the first step is “add to webinar registrants list,” the second step is “update lifecycle stage to ‘Lead,’” and the third step is “send demo offer for webinar registrants email.” Now you’re all set to perform three distinct actions for every single lead that fills out that form, without having to do a thing once you’ve set up that simple workflow.

Step 4: Set Time Delays

Workflows should allow you to select the timing of each action they trigger. For every step you add to a workflow, you can say something like, “I want these leads to receive this email two days after they fill out this form, and the next email five days after that.” You can update contact properties or add them to a list as soon as the leads are entered into the workflow by setting the time delay to zero. You can spread out the actions over as much time as you’d like, and specify timing down to the number of days, hours, or even minutes.

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Time delays are unique to each individual lead. So when John Doe enters your workflow on a Monday, he’ll get the email two days later on Wednesday, but Mary Jane, who entered the workflow on Tuesday, will get the email two days after her workflow began, on Thursday. You weren’t really going to send John an email on Wednesday and send Mary a separate email on Thursday on your own, were you? That would be a total pain. You probably would’ve just picked one of those days to send the email to the entire list of your leads, and sacrificed the effectiveness of aligning the timing of your marketing with your leads’ needs.

With workflows, you can just schedule everything to send automatically, and you don’t have to worry about keeping track of who needs to get what on which days. And more importantly, you can time your marketing based on what’s best for your leads, not what’s easiest for your busy schedule.

Step 5: Identify Your Preferred Settings

The last main component of a workflow is its settings. There are various settings you can arrange to refine the way your workflows operate, and you can use these to your advantage to make your workflows more effective. In HubSpot’s Workflows tool, for example, one option is to set your workflow to execute steps on business days only. If you don’t want to be emailing your leads on the weekends, you can turn this setting on, and it will override the time delays you’ve selected when necessary. In other words, any steps that are scheduled to occur on a Saturday or Sunday (say, an action is set to trigger one day after the previous one, which occurred on a Friday), will be rescheduled to occur on Monday.

You should also be able to modify your settings to execute steps only within a certain time range. In HubSpot, for instance, this setting also overrides the time delays you’ve selected when necessary. Let’s say you’ve done some research into the effectiveness of your email marketing, and you’ve found that your highest clickthrough rates occur in the morning. With this in mind, you could set your workflows to only send emails between 7 a.m. and 12 p.m. If your time delays are set to send an email in the afternoon, the workflow will reschedule it for the following morning.

Are you leveraging workflows to make your marketing more effective? What unique workflow ideas have you put into play?

This article is an excerpt from our ebook, Going Beyond Email: How to Use Workflows for Better Lead Nurturing. To learn more about how to do smarter lead nurturing with workflows, you can download the ebook for free here.

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Why You (Yes, You) Need to Create More Landing Pages

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“Who, me? More landing pages, you say? But I’ve already got some of those floating around my website.” Sure … BUT WHERE ALL THE LEADS AT?!

Several months back, I wrote an article about why landing pages are an indispensable part of marketing. And for all you marketers out there who have been going inbound for a while, you probably ‘get’ why they’re important. But are you creating enough of them to really scale your lead generation efforts? For many of you, probably not. Let’s find out why — at least in the case of landing pages — more is better.

Why You Need More Landing Pages

First, I’m going to throw some brand spankin’ new data at you, straight from our Marketing Benchmarks From 7,000 Businesses report, which you can download in full here for free. Just have a look-see at the graph below:

 

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While most companies don’t see an increase in leads when increasing their total number of landing pages from 1-5 to 6-10, companies do see a 55% increase in leads when increasing their number of landing pages from 10 to 15. And look how that leads index number spikes even more when a company has 40 or more landing pages on their website. And here’s how it breaks down for B2B and B2C businesses:

 

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While both B2B and B2C companies seem to benefit from having more landing pages, it seems to be even more advantageous for B2Bs to hit that 40 landing page threshold.

As you can see, it’s hard to deny there’s a pretty strong correlation between the number of landing pages you have on your website and lead generation. But why is this so? Here are four good explanations why the more landing pages, the better your leads number.

1) More Landing Pages Means More Conversion Opportunities

Quite simply, the more landing pages you have on your website, the more opportunities you have to convert site visitors into leads. There’s also a huge SEO benefit to having more landing pages, which can have an impact even before visitors land on your website. Think about it: The more landing pages you have, the more landing pages will be indexed in search. And if a searcher stumbles upon a search result that directs them straight to one of your landing pages, you’ll have essentially cut out the extra step of a visitor perusing your site and needing to click on a call-to-action to get to that same landing page. In other words, the pathway from discovery to conversion has much less friction. And do you know what happens when there’s less friction? You generate more leads.

2) More Landing Pages Means More Variety

You’ve all heard that saying, “variety is the spice of life,” right? Yep — it applies to marketing, too. Consider it from your visitors’ perspective. Say you’re visiting a business’ website, and you surf on over to its “Resources” section (you know, where a business might organize all its offers and their respective landing pages). Now let’s also say that “Resources” page only features 5 — or even 10, according to the research cited above — offers because, well, those are the only offers this particular business has available. And maybe none of those offers really appeal to you, because well … there’s just not enough variety. So you go on your web browsing way, abandoning the site without converting on anything. And hey, the same thing will happen if that business only has CTAs for a few offers placed throughout your website or promoted via their other marketing channels. If none of them tickle your fancy as a visitor, you’re probably not going to convert.

In a nutshell, don’t let this happen to you. Creating more landing pages means you’ll have a wider variety of offers for your visitors to convert on and for you to promote, which leads us to reason number three …

3) More Landing Pages Means More Marketing Collateral

The more landing pages you have, the more offers you’ll have to fuel the rest of your inbound marketing efforts. Remember, content is the heart and soul of any successful inbound marketing strategy. Without it, you’d have nothing to email your contacts, nothing to share with your social media fans and followers, nothing to promote through your website calls-to-action, nothing by which to get found and rank for your keywords in search. The more offers — and landing pages to house those offers — you have, the more (and more effective) inbound marketing you can do. And because reason number two (variety) is also a big factor in this, the more landing pages you have, the more prospects you’ll be able to capture as leads for your business.

4) More Landing Pages Means More Targeting Opportunities

Segmentation matters — and not just when it comes to email marketing. But when you identify various different buyer personas and segments within your audience, you have the opportunity to better appeal to those different audiences’ interests and needs with more targeted and relevant offers. And to leverage this savvy thinking, face it: You need more landing pages. So what naturally ends up happening for marketers who build up a big arsenal of 40+ landing pages, is they start to create more segmentspecific content that, because it’s highly relevant to different parts of their audience, is much better able to convert visitors into leads.

How to Increase the Number of Landing Pages on Your Site

“I get it, I get it: More landing pages is better. But how can I go about cranking out more of those bad boys?” So glad you asked!

1) Invest in a Landing Page Creation Tool (And Control Over Your Website)

Let’s address one of marketers’ biggest landing page creation roadblocks first. According to MarketingSherpa’s Landing Page Handbook (2nd edition), the number one reason businesses don’t use landing pages is because their marketing department doesn’t know how to set them up, or they are too overloaded. If you’re nodding your head in agreement, you absolutely positively need to invest in a tool that enables you to quickly and easily create optimized landing pages. This involves taking control of your website, so if it takes you weeks to get a landing page created (or even just edited) because you have to go through some third party resource like a webmaster to make changes for you, put an end to that as soon as possible. Inbound marketing requires agility, and you’ll never become an agile marketer if you’re dependent on someone else to get things done for you. Plus, I hear HubSpot has a pretty sweet and easy-to-use Landing Page tool (*wink wink*).

landing pages create and test resized 6002) Create More Offers

I’m just gonna give it to you straight. You can’t just go around slapping together a ton of new landing pages, no matter how motivated you are to reap those “more is better” results. You’re going to need offers (and good ones, at that) to go along with them. Keep in mind that landing pages are simply the gateways for your marketing offers, so in order to increase your site’s number of landing pages, you need to increase offer creation, too. And don’t get me wrong, this is going to take you some time and effort, but it’s also absolutely necessary if you want larger gains in lead generation.

Before you start creating new offers, take a look at the offers you already have, and identify where you might have some holes. Do you have offers to suit prospects at each different stage in your marketing and sales funnel? Do you have offers in a variety of different formats (e.g. webinars vs. ebooks vs. templates vs. videos, etc.)? Do they cover various different topics your target audience cares about? Once you’ve identified what your holes are, then you can start filling in the gaps. To learn more about offer creation, check out this blog post about how to create marketing offers that don’t fall flat.

3) Tweak the Offers You Already Have to Cater to Individual Personas

Okay — so you’re going to have to create a bunch more offers to leverage the lead-gen power of an increase in landing pages. But here’s a little saving grace: not all of these offers need to be created from scratch. In fact, if you already have a few general offers on your hands but also know that you have a few different buyer personas that you market to, one great way to increase your number of offers (and as a result, landing pages) is to tweak your existing offers to cater to each of your different personas. As you’re doing this, reposition the content and create a landing page that caters to that persona’s individual needs, problems, and interests; adjust the offer’s formatting, depth, and length; modify language and tone; and incorporate industry/persona-specific examples — all of which we elaborate on in this very post about how to tailor offer content to suit individual personas.

And once you have a variety of persona-specific marketing offers, then you can segment your prospects by persona and nurture them with the right offers through tools like email marketing, or dynamic CTAs on your various web pages.

4) Repurpose Content You Already Have

While we’re on the topic of tweaking existing content, don’t overlook the fact that there are a lot of different ways to create new offers using content you already have, saving you the time and effort of building a brand new offer from the ground up. Some great offer ideas pulled from our article, “The Time-Crunched Marketer’s Guide to Creating Lead-Gen Offers” include creating a blog bundle by pulling together a compilation of your best blog posts around a given topic, making a data compilation of interesting industry research and data you’ve already collected, turning an educational PPT presentation you’ve given into a downloadable PDF or a live webinar, recording an interview, creating an FAQ-driven ebook, etc.

Do you have enough landing pages on your website? In what other ways can you increase landing page production?

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How to Sex Up Your Google Search Results With Authorship Info

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Have you ever been cruising through Google’s search engine results pages to find that certain results are paired with a thumbnail-sized profile picture of the content’s author? Ever wonder how you could make it so your picture accompanies listings for the content you’ve authored? Then boy is this post for you!

Through Google Authorship, Google allows you to associate the content you’ve published with your Google+ profile, pulling your profile image and other information into the search engine results for the content you author. The catch? While the process for applying is relatively simple, there seems to be no clear rhyme or reason to whose authorship requests Google chooses to approve. That being said, the application process is easy enough that it’s worth applying. In this post, we’ll cover exactly why this new feature is beneficial to marketers, explain the simplest way to apply, and disclose some Google-related nuances you should know before embarking on the application process.

Why Apply for Authorship?

In a nutshell, having authorship benefits makes your search engine listings sexier — in addition to giving them a heightened sense of credibility, professionalism, and transparency. Let’s take a closer look at the screenshot shown at the top of this post, picturing a particular search engine results page (SERP):

 

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Ask yourself — which results stand out? Probably the two with accompanying author images, right? And if your eyes did gravitate toward those two listings, it’s pretty easy to understand the benefits. In addition, listings with author images and information attached will likely benefit from a perception of credibility and appease any suspicions of spammy content.

Those two listings aren’t at the top of this particular SERP either. This means Authorship could give your content a much better fighting chance against other results that might organically rank higher. This is particularly noteworthy considering not many users have taken the opportunity to apply for Authorship, making it well worth it to apply sooner rather than later when, well … everybody’s doing it.

And while there haven’t been any data-driven reports to surface on the benefits of Authorship yet, we’ve anecdotally seen a noticeable improvement in the ranking of HubSpot’s content that has been associated with our various authors. In other words, it’s very possible that Google is rewarding Authorship users with improved search engine rankings. If you’re a content creator, that’s not a bad perk, huh?

Finally, achieving authorship status also entitles you to even more data and statistics about the performance of individual authors’ content in search results. You can read more about that from Google here.

How to Apply for Google+ Authorship

Convinced it’s worth taking a few minutes out of your day to apply for Authorship? Here’s how to do it:

  1. Make sure your Google+ profile page has a profile photo that is a recognizable headshot.
  2. Make sure you have an email address (for example, jdoe@hubspot.com) on the same domain as your content (hubspot.com). If you don’t have an email address on the same domain, Google has an alternative method for linking your content to your Google+ profile. Learn how here.
  3. In the “About” section of your Google+ profile, add that email address so it’s easier for Google to associate your Google+ account with your domain.
  4. In addition, make sure each article you publish on that domain has a clear byline identifying you as the author (for example, “By John Doe” or “Author: John Doe”).
  5. Furthermore, make sure that byline name matches the name on your Google+ profile.
  6. Visit Google’s Authorship page, and submit your email address to Google. Regardless of how many articles you publish on this domain, you’ll only need to go through this process once. 
  7. In the “About” section of your Google+ profile, make sure the profile discovery box, “Help others discover my profile in search” is checked.

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Once Google approves your Authorship request, your Google+ profile will update with the domain on which you’re a content contributor in the “Contributor to” section of your Google+ profile (as pictured below). By default, it will also automatically make your email address visible to the public. If you want to keep your email address private on your page, you can change its visibility here.

 

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You may also receive an email confirmation from Google once your request for Authorship has been approved. It took about six days for Google to confirm my Authorship request.

 

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That being said, it took longer for other members of HubSpot’s marketing team to receive Authorship status, and some still have yet to be approved, so it’s hard to know how Google is prioritizing approvals. And as we mentioned before, according to Google’s Authorship information page, “Google doesn’t guarantee to show author information in Google Web Search or Google News results,” which explains why some of our authors haven’t yet been approved.

If Google does grant your Authorship request, you’ll start noticing that the search engine listings for content you’ve authored will start to be accompanied by your Google+ profile image, as in the example below:

 

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Furthermore, you’ll notice that the “by [author name]” link called out above in red sends people to your Google+ profile page, and the “more by [author name]” link called out in blue directs visitors to a more detailed page that lists the various indexed content authored by you, as you can see in the example below:

 

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Remember — if your website/blog has multiple contributors, it would behoove you to encourage your various authors to apply for Authorship. This way, even more of the search engine listings for your website’s content will be associated with its individual author.

Some Notes About Google’s Nuances

Many of you are probably aware of Google’s various little nuances, and those of you out there who have ever undergone a name change (myself included) — or whose business uses Gmail for its employees’ corporate email accounts (again, myself included) — are probably all too familiar with the headaches involved in linking and merging multiple Google accounts. Be mindful that if you do suffer from the unfortunate problem of multiple accounts (in addition to content that has been published under different names), Google doesn’t exactly make it very easy to sync the Authorship of all your articles to one single Google+ account.

While Google has released a tool that enables you to transfer connections from one Google+ account to another and set it as the default destination, Google mentions that Authorship information and Google+ business pages that you manage with your source account will not get transferred to the destination account. In fact, I’ve personally come to refer to this particular scenario as “Multiple Google Account Hell.” My recommendation is to try to connect your Authorship with the Google+ account on which you have the most connections … and to cross your fingers that Google improves and streamlines this process in the future.

Furthermore, while this post explains the simplest way of applying for Authorship, there are other routes you can take. In fact, the folks over at Search Engine Land were kind enough to publish an extremely comprehensive and technical article about those other options here.

If you’ve applied for Authorship, have you noticed a boost in your search engine rankings?







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12 Revealing Charts to Help You Benchmark Your Business Blogging Performance [NEW DATA]

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Most inbound marketers understand that business blogging is a critical part of a comprehensive inbound marketing strategy. But how frequently does a blogger need to publish content in order to make a true dent in their marketing results? Furthermore, how does that vary between B2B and B2C companies, and smaller and larger businesses? Wouldn’t it be great to have some blogging benchmarks to go by?

You’re in luck, my friend, considering HubSpot just released its Marketing Benchmarks From 7,000 Businesses report, which provides helpful benchmarking data gathered from HubSpot’s more than 7,000 customers who do inbound marketing every day. In this post, we’ve pulled 12 charts and graphs that highlight some valuable blogging benchmarks to help you get on the right track with your business blogging efforts.

For higher quality versions of the following charts — in addition to even more data about the traffic/leads ROI of marketing assets like landing pages and social media — download our free report, Marketing Benchmarks From 7,000 Businesses.

The Effect of Blogging Frequency on Website Traffic

The first of our blogging benchmarking charts highlight the impact that the number of monthly blog articles a business publishes has on inbound traffic — overall, divided up by B2B and B2C companies, and split up by company size.

 

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After seeing these charts, you’ve probably never been more convinced that when it comes to the effectiveness of blogging in driving traffic to your website, frequency matters. In fact, according to the charts above, companies that blog 15 or more times per month get 5X more traffic than companies that don’t blog at all. And if you’re a small business, increasing your blogging frequency can move the needle even more. According to the third chart, small businesses (1-10 employees) tend to see the biggest gains in traffic when they publish more articles.

Make a commitment to regularly publishing content to your blog to reap the biggest rewards in terms of website traffic. To learn more about how you can boost your blogging frequency by never running out of blogging ideas again, check out this blog article.

The Effect of Blogging Frequency on Lead Generation

The following three charts feature the impact that the number of monthly blog articles a business publishes has on inbound leads — overall, divided up by B2B and B2C companies, and segmented by company size.

 

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As you can see, blogging frequency matters not just in terms of the impact blogging has on driving traffic to your website. It’s also critical when it comes down to the effectiveness of blogging in generating actual leads. In fact, companies that increase blogging from 3-5X/month to 6-8X/month almost double their leads. And if you still need to be convinced that you should start a business blog to begin with, keep in mind that B2B companies that blog only 1-2X/month generate 70% more leads than those that don’t blog at all. In other words, blogging even just a little bit can make a big dent on your leads goal if you previously weren’t blogging at all.

To get the maximum amount of leads from your blogging efforts, check out our ultimate guide to mastering blogging lead generation.

Blogging’s Overall Impact on Website Traffic

Our next three charts emphasize the overall impact of blogging on inbound traffic. In other words, how does the total number of blog posts you’ve published to your business blog — past and present — affect traffic?


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Remember, because the articles you publish get indexed in search engines and shared through channels like social media, the impact your business blog has on traffic isn’t just limited to the articles you publish this month. By committing to regularly publishing blog content, over time you’ll have built up a powerful arsenal of content, with each article you publish creating another inroad to your website.

Not convinced? As indicated by the charts above, an average company will see a 45% growth in traffic when increasing total blog articles from 11-20 to 21-50 articles. And for all you B2C companies out there, keep in mind that B2C companies see a 59% increase in traffic after growing total blog articles from 100 to 200 total. Sure, blogging is a big time commitment, but sticking to it can generate tremendously valuable marketing results.

Blogging’s Overall Impact on Lead Generation

The last of our blogging benchmarking charts show the overall impact of blogging on inbound leads. That is to say, how does the total number of blog posts you’ve published to your business blog — past and present — affect lead generation?


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In a nutshell, making your blog a long-term asset by publishing a lot of content over time makes a big difference. This is evidenced by the fact that the average company with 100 or more total blog articles is more likely to experience continued lead growth, and even more compelling — companies with over 200 blog articles generate >5X the leads than those with 10 or fewer.

Are you making a big enough commitment to blogging regularly? To get more helpful benchmarking data about the effect of marketing assets like landing pages and social media on traffic and lead generation, download your copy of our free benchmarking report here.

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The Business Blogger’s Ultimate Guide to Mastering Lead Generation

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Your blog is, without a doubt, one of the most powerful inbound marketing tools at your disposal. In fact, it’s practically a marketing Swiss army knife: it enables you to regularly publish content, boost your website’s search engine optimization, establish your industry thought leadership and expertise, and it also provides content fodder for your other marketing channels such as social media and email marketing.

But one of blogging’s biggest benefits is in its huge potential for lead generation and reconversion. So if you’re not taking advantage of all the lead generation opportunities your blog offers — and then optimizing those opportunities — you’re likely missing out on a huge piece of your company’s lead gen pie.

But have no fear! In this post, we’ll walk you through all the various lead gen opportunities you can take advantage of on your blog, and even give you some great tips for optimizing those opportunities to make sure you’re squeezing every last lead out of your business blog.

8 Lead Gen Opportunities for Your Business Blog

On Your Blog’s Homepage

There are three main opportunities to generate leads from your blog’s homepage — using top and/or bottom banner call-to-action (CTAs), sidebar CTAs, or through links to landing pages in your top nav, sidebar, or footer. These options will be visible whether your readers are visiting the homepage of your blog (e.g. http://blog.hubspot.com) or checking out the permalink of an individual blog article (e.g. http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/33734/20-Common-Social-Media-Marketing-Myths-BUSTED.aspx).

Because these types of CTAs will be shown to visitors no matter what article they’re reading, it’s very important to either feature offers that you know are successful among a broader audience of visitors, or offer a variety of offers that most visitors would find at least one or two appealing. Use your landing page analytics to determine which of your top-performing offers have the best mass appeal and popularity, and feature CTAs for those offers on your blog’s homepage.

Here’s a closer look at how these types of CTAs might appear on your blog:

1) Top/Bottom Banner CTAs: These CTAs span the entire width of your blog’s homepage, so design them with those wide dimensions in mind. For HubSpot’s blog, we’ve found that banner CTAs that stand out from the rest of the page tend to perform the best. Choose bold background colors that pop out from the rest of your page. Select the offer for any top banner CTAs carefully, as these are the most prominent CTAs displayed on your blog’s homepage.

 

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2) Sidebar CTAs: These are smaller CTAs that appear in the sidebar of your blog’s homepage. While they’re a little bit more hidden than your banner CTAs and tend to generate a lower clickthrough rate, they can give your blog a little lead gen boost. Again, design these sidebar CTAs with their smaller width in mind.

 

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3) Top Nav/Sidebar/Footer Links to Landing Pages: You can also leverage any links in your top navigation, sidebar, or your blog’s footer to send direct blog traffic to landing pages. On HubSpot’s blog, for example, we use the links in our top navigation to send visitors to targeted landing pages that provide top-performing offers for the main topics we cover on our blog.

 

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Within Individual Articles

In addition to your blog’s homepage, lead gen opportunities abound within the blog articles you publish themselves. In fact, these are some of the more effective ways to leverage your blog for lead generation, because you have the ability to better target readers based on the articles they’re reading, which are the types of articles and topics that interest them.

For example, if you’re a unicorn breeder who typically blogs about 3 main topics — unicorn diet, unicorn grooming, and unicorn fitness/exercise — your blog articles will probably fall under these three main categories. If a reader is reading an article specifically about unicorn diet, you have the opportunity to feature a CTA for an offer specifically geared toward that very topic. Remember: relevancy increases conversion rates!

Let’s take a look at how these different types of lead gen opportunities might play out on a blog:

4) End-of-Post CTA Buttons: Your blog visitor just got finished reading your article about what not to feed your unicorn. What better time to promote your hit ebook, Everything You Need to Know About Healthy Unicorn Diets? The beauty of end-of-post CTA buttons is that they help you leverage the reader’s interest in that very topic — or a related one. Be sure to choose a CTA for the most relevant offer pertaining to the specific topic you’re blogging about for the best success with end-of-post CTA buttons. In terms of design, optimize these buttons for the width of your blog articles.

At HubSpot, again, we’ve found that bolder end-of-post CTA buttons that stand out from the rest of the content tend to perform best, but you should experiment with different designs to see what works best for you and your readers.

 

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5) Top/Mid-Post CTA Buttons: Besides end-of-post CTAs, you can also experiment with other placement of in-post CTAs if you want to take a more “in your face” approach. The key is to try to do this as unobtrusively as possible. Don’t go overboard — be subtle, and make sure the offers you’re promoting here are educational-focused so you’re helping, not annoying, your readers.

 

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6) Anchor Text Links to Landing Pages: Not every lead gen opportunity on your blog has to be achieved through button-based CTAs. Anchor text links to landing pages can be a great way to sprinkle a little lead gen fairy dust into the actual copy of your blog post — and at the same time, help you to optimize your landing pages for search! Link some of the keywords to relevant landing pages, as you can see in the first example below, which links to the landing page for our ebook on dynamic content. You can even be a little bit more obvious about it using a text-based call-to-action to download the offer, as you can see in the second example below.

 

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Off Your Blog

That’s right! There are opportunities to generate and reconvert leads from your blog even if a visitor isn’t physically hanging out there. Here are a couple of good ones to note:

7) In RSS Readers: Let’s face it — there is probably a good chunk of your blog readers who consume your blog content without actually visiting your website. People who subscribe to your blog via RSS may choose to add your blog’s RSS feed to an RSS reader like Google Reader, eliminating the need to ever come back to your blog. Don’t miss out on capturing these types of readers as leads! The good news is, if you’re already optimizing your individual articles themselves for lead gen using in-post CTAs, your blog will automatically be lead gen optimized for folks’ RSS readers since the full contents of the post will get pulled into those readers. Easy as pie! Furthermore, if you’re a HubSpot user, you can even customize your blog settings to add an additional CTA to your RSS footer, which automatically displays at the end of every post in RSS.

 

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8) In-Blog Subscriber Email Notifications: So what about all your email subscribers who read your new articles in full directly in their inboxes? Don’t worry — you can capture them as leads, too! And again, if you’re already optimizing your individual articles for lead gen, there’s no additional work needed on your part here either, since any CTAs or anchor text links will automatically get pulled into the email, too.

9 Ways to Optimize Your Blog’s Lead Gen Potential

Okay, so let’s say you’re already taking advantage of all these various blog lead generation and reconversion opportunities. What can you do to give it a little boost? Optimize, that’s what! Here are nine ways to improve you blog’s lead gen potential once you have the basics in place.

1) Replace Old CTAs With CTAs for New Offers

Offers, no matter how evergreen they are, tend to get stale and decrease in effectiveness after a while. If you’re using the same few CTAs over and over, there’s no doubt about it your overall conversions on that offer will decline. Make it a regular practice of updating old CTAs with new CTAs for new offers to keep your audience converting. This of course means you’ll need to be creating these new offers, too.

2) A/B Test CTA Designs

The design of your CTAs can also make or break whether visitors click. Experiment with various CTA designs to find out what resonates best with your audience. A/B test CTA button design elements like button color, language, imagery, tone, etc. to optimize for the most powerful CTA design. (Note: HubSpot customers can easily A/B test CTAs using HubSpot’s CTA tools.)

3) Refresh Designs Regularly

Just as it’s important to update the offers you’re featuring in your blog CTAs, even A/B tested and optimized CTA design can also get stale when used over and over again since readers get used to designs and train their eyes to gloss over them. Regularly refresh your CTA designs to keep readers on their toes, whether that means hiring a designer, outsourcing design work to an agency, or experimenting on your own with something like PowerPoint or HubSpot’s CTA builder.

4) Implement Smart CTAs

Most businesses will find that their blog tends to attract a lot of new traffic to their website. This makes sense, since articles commonly get indexed and found in search engines or shared through social networks. Because this is the case, it’s safe to assume that very top-of-the-funnel offers like educational ebook and webinars would make great blog CTA fodder, since most of your new visitors probably know little about your business and are just starting to get to know you.

That being said, don’t dismiss the fact that your blog also attracts repeat visitors (particularly if your content is top notch!). These repeat visitors may be a little bit more qualified (heck — they may already even be leads), and it might make sense to show them different CTAs based on what you already know about them. Enter Smart CTAs, or dynamic CTAs that enable you to automatically display different CTAs based on information about a lead and better nurture them with content that appeals to their specific interests and needs. To learn more about how to leverage Smart CTAs, check out this comprehensive blog post guide.

 

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5) Experiment With CTA Placement

Perhaps mid-post CTAs just end up annoying the heck out of your readers, or just never get clicked. What happens if you move up that sidebar CTA so it’s above the fold on your blog’s homepage? What if you had not one, but two sidebar CTAs? Experiment! You’ll never know how your audience reacts if you don’t try different things.

6) Optimize Landing Pages

Okay, so you’ve got some killer CTAs all throughout your blog, and people are totally clicking on them. Fantastic! So why the heck is your blog’s visitor-to-lead conversion rate so darn low? If you notice that your blog’s conversion rate is dismal, yet your CTAs clickthrough rate is stellar, then you likely have some landing page problems. Don’t neglect to optimize your visitors’ post-click experience. Spend some time diagnosing, analyzing, and optimizing your visitors’ landing page experiences. After all, if they don’t ever fill out that landing page form, all your blog lead gen optimization work is all for naught. Furthermore, make sure your blog’s CTAs are well aligned with the landing pages they’re promoting. The quickest way to facilitate landing page abandonment is by promising on thing on a CTA and sending visitors to a landing page that promotes something different.

7) Increase Blog Traffic

Hitting a lead gen plateau? Another way to increase your blog’s lead generation is not to focus on improving conversion, but rather to focus on generating more traffic. And if it’s net new leads you’re after, this means attracting new visitors. If you’re attracting a lot of repeat visitors who have already converted, it’s only natural that the new leads you generate from your blog will start to dwindle. Our new ebook, How to Grow & Scale Your Business Blog, offers some helpful tips for attracting brand new visitors to your blog. Some great tips include increasing the quality and reach of your blog content, seeking guest blogging opportunities, increasing the reach of your social media presence, and leveraging your evangelists.

8) Increase Blogging Frequency

Blogging frequency is an important part of the blog lead gen equation. In fact, according to the latest research compiled in our Marketing Benchmarks From 7,000 Businesses report, companies that increase blogging from 3-5x/month to just 6-8x/month almost double their leads. Furthermore, an average company will see a 45% growth in traffic when increasing total blog articles from 11-20 to 21-50 articles, and the average company with 100 or more total published blog articles is more likely to experience continued lead growth. Remember, the more articles you publish, the more reasons there’ll be for visitors to come back and convert!

9) Convert Casual Blog Readers Into Dedicated Subscribers

Don’t overlook the importance of convincing your casual blog readers to keep coming back to for more. Convert your readers into dedicated subscribers who become fans and evangelists of your content, and share your blog articles with their networks of potential new visitors. To learn about the various steps you can take to convert visitors into subscribers, check out this post.

What other opportunities can you take advantage of to grow the lead gen potential of your business blog?

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Facebook Launches Global Pages to Simplify Brands’ International Facebook Presence

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Are you a global business that sells to customers on an international scale? Have you struggled with the agonizing question of whether to set up multiple social media accounts on each social network to better support your various marketing initiatives geared toward different international markets? Well as it turns out, Facebook feels your pain.

Yesterday, Facebook announced the launch of Global Pages, a new structure to business pages for global brands aimed to provide a better, localized experience for international brands’ prospects and customers. The new structure consolidates a business’ global Facebook presence into one place while still providing a localized experience.

How Facebook’s New Global Structure Works

The idea is, rather than a global brand maintaining one general, broadly targeted Facebook page — or juggling multiple Facebook Pages set up for each different international market — that brand can instead maintain and promote one centralized Facebook Page URL. Visitors to that page will then get routed to the most appropriate version of a page based on their home country, where they will see a localized version of the page, which the administrator can customize to include different cover photos, profile photos, applications, milestones, ‘About’ information, and news feed stories.

The global marketer can set up their Global Pages structure to create localized pages for the specific markets (i.e. single or multicountry regions) they’re targeting. They can also set up a default page that all other users outside of these specific markets get directed to. If you’re familiar with LinkedIn’s targeted Product and Services Page variations within their Company Pages, Facebook is implementing a similar idea: Users get redirected to the version of the page that’s best suited for them based on their geographic location.

 

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Okay — so what’s the difference between a global marketer just setting up and customizing different Facebook Pages? In one word: centralization.

3 Key Benefits of Global Pages

  1. A Centralized Facebook Presence: No matter which version of the page a visitor gets routed to, all visitors will see the same page name (translated into their local language), fan count, and ‘People Talking About This’ counts.
  2. A Single URL: Rather than having to promote a different page URL for each localized page, global brands will be able to promote one single URL in all of their marketing efforts to promote their Facebook presence, since page visitors will be automatically be redirected to the appropriate version of the Page based on their goegraphic information.
  3. A Centralized Global Insights Dashboard: Rather than having to check the Facebook Insights for multiple pages, administrators of the main Global Page will be able to check Insights for all page variations in one centralized dashboard.

But What if I Already Have Multiple Pages Set Up?

It’s easy to see how this new feature can help global social media marketers who already manage one general page, eliminating the pain of geo-targeting every status update and page post — but what about the marketers who have already set up completely separate, country-specific Facebook Pages for each of their target international markets?

According to Facebook, it is possible for admins of multiple pages to transition to the new Global Pages structure, citing examples such as the global Walt Disney Studios team working on Frankenweenie, who were easily able to migrate their country-specific pages for France, Ireland, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States to the Global Pages framework. Other brands, including the Holiday Inn and the Kit Kat team from Nestle have also successfully transitioned their various localized pages from regions around the globe to the new structure.

And that’s not all …

Facebook Also Promises Improved Global Benchmarking Data in the Future

Within Facebook’s announcement, the social network also mentioned they’re working on ways to make it easier for global marketers to measure their specific, localized audiences in each country — which will include country-level fan counts for both Global Pages as well as pages not yet transitioned to the new framework (coming later this year in its public API).

In addition, Facebook is working to provide a way for marketers to benchmark their brand against competitors, enabling global marketers to measure and analyze how each localized market is performing and compare that data on a country-specific level with other Facebook pages via Facebook’s API. 

Great News for International Marketers

This seems like a no-brainer for businesses who cater to a global audience. No more agonizing over whether to divide their Facebook presence in order to appropriately cater their content and updates to their inidividual, localized segments of their audience. No more time spent fiddling with geo-targeting every single status update. No more splitting up the overall reach and impact of their Facebook presence.

To get started with Global Pages, Facebook indicates you’ll need to get in touch with your Facebook client partner or account manager to discuss. If you’re not already working with Facebook, you can contact Facebook marketing solutions here.

To learn more about how to effectively implement a global social media marketing strategy, download our free ebook, The Complete Guide to Global Social Media Marketing.

If you’re a global marketer, will you explore Facebook’s new Global Pages offering?

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