Auteur: Dan Slagen

We all want our sales and marketing teams to be working in perfect harmony, with each department having a full understanding and respect for each other’s processes. We imagine a world where Marketing has a clear understanding of exactly what their sales team needs, and provides a perfect lead handoff from Marketing to Sales in every scenario.

While this is what we all want for our company, it’s rare that it actually happens. The truth is, aligning Sales and Marketing (what we like to call SMarketing) is hard. It’s a living evolution that needs to be tweaked and updated often to ensure that the most up to date strategy is always in place.

The problem with always trying to fix the relationship between Sales and Marketing, however, is that it’s difficult to change process all the time, not to mention time consuming. But there’s good news! With most sales and marketing teams, there are three overarching themes that tend to arise time and time again, and if you can address these three, you’ll find most of your problems solved.

3 Dangerous (But Common) Hurdles Sales and Marketing Must Get Over … Together

1) The ‘Misconceptions’ Hurdle

 

 

Have you ever started a new job in marketing and immediately been warned about how the sales team is a mess and full of complainers? Have you ever started a new job in sales and immediately been warned about how the marketing department generates low quality leads and expects sales to perform magic with the leads? It’s pretty typical actually, that each department strives towards its own goal, and refuses to work together, think bigger, and drive the overall strategy together.

2) The ‘Misalignment’ Hurdle

Historically, companies have aligned org charts, seating arrangements, and teams by job function. This usually means that the marketing team will sit together, the sales team will sit together, and the services team will sit together. While the managers of each function may be effectively communicating (although often even that’s not true), the rest of the employees tend to work in a silo and often don’t have much constructive communication with the other department. The occasional fight will surface regarding a lead not handled well by Sales, or a bunch of junk leads sent over by Marketing. Bitterness ensues, and nothing is accomplished.

3) The ‘Misleading’ Hurdle

For the most part, it’s safe to say that whether you work in Sales or Marketing, you have a goal hanging over your head. Whether it’s a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annual goal, you have some goal that you’re reaching for and are held accountable to by your manager. What often isn’t clear, though, are the details of these goals and how you’ll be able to reach said goals. When Sales and Marketing have separate goals that were created without an understanding of what the other department’s goals are, it’s unlikely that they’ll be working towards a common achievement that will benefit both departments.

Why These Misunderstandings Are Dangerous

1) The Danger Around ‘Misconceptions’

A lot of the danger around departmental misconceptions is the impact you’ll see on your company’s culture, and employees’ willingness to work together. If other departments don’t trust each other, they’ll rarely work together … and when they do work together it won’t be pretty. Having a “he said, she said” culture isn’t efficient, and has no place in today’s work environment. From a P&L perspective, every company has a revenue goal that they’d like to hit on an annual basis. With all the competition and distractions in today’s society, it’s exceptionally dangerous not to have a relationship between Sales and Marketing in which common goals and strategies are shared, agreed upon, and updated as needed.

2) The Danger Around ‘Misalignment’

If your sales and marketing teams are misaligned, the biggest danger will start with communication, and will cascade down to a bevvy of other problems. These problems tend to center around:

• Types of leads being sent to who, when, and why
• How leads are being worked, and when
• What the handoff from Marketing to Sales looks like, and how leads should be approached  

These are dangers that your sales and marketing teams shouldn’t be overlooking. After all, your end goal is to get the best leads possible in the hands of your sales team so that they can do what they do best. Without having a common understanding of how to get the best possible leads to Sales and how the leads should be handled once they get there, you’re both putting your company at risk for failure.

3) The Danger Around ‘Misleading’

It’s reasonable to think that most marketing departments have a monthly (or weekly, quarterly, annual) leads goal that they strive to hit. What isn’t clear, though, is what types of leads marketing needs to generate, or what the best types of leads would be to generate. It’s also reasonable to think that most sales departments have monthly (or weekly, quarterly, annual) sales goals that they need to hit.

Again though, what isn’t always clear is what the process or strategy is going to be to work the leads. With these uncertainties across Sales and Marketing, confusion often sets in and leads are either not worked, not worked in time, not worked the right way, or the leads aren’t relevant to sales, leaving everyone frustrated and below goal.

How to Fix It All

1) Fixing the ‘Misconceptions’

The goal should be “SMarketing,” a harmonious combination of Sales and Marketing in which each department understands the other, and has a respect for the way the department runs. Of course problems will surface between the departments, but having a general liking and mutual respect for one another will help ensure that problems are sorted out dialectically rather than through argumentative confrontations. A few ways to help foster this harmony include:

• Education – Host lunch and learns where Marketing and Sales explain to one another what’s going on in their respective worlds. Educate new employees on both Sales and Marketing, regardless of which team they’re joining.
• SMarketing Meeting – Hold a weekly or monthly meeting (depending on your needs) involving all members of Sales and Marketing. Show each other what you’re working on, why, and what the benefit will be for the team. Have time for Q&A, and to talk about lead goals and progress.
• SMarketing Management Meeting – On a weekly basis, get the sales and marketing managers together and have the hard conversations. As long as the mutual respect and understanding is in place, those hard conversations that used to end up in yelling matches can often be settled with much more ease.
• Spend Time Together – Have members of your marketing team sit with members of your sales team, and vice versa. Have them spend time together, listen to calls together, understand marketing campaigns together, and ideally spark conversations that will help each team improve their performance.
• Make it About the Company, Not the Department – At HubSpot, if we don’t hit our sales and marketing goals for a particular month, nobody goes to the bar to celebrate. It isn’t about marketing hitting their goal or sales hitting their goal, but rather about the company hitting its overall goal.
• Grow Up and Get Along – Most companies and departments function from the top down. Often, whatever the head of the department thinks, the direct reports will think. So if the head of marketing speaks poorly of the sales team, that type of thinking will start to resonate throughout the marketing team. If you’re leading your marketing or sales team, be a positive leader. Work with the other department and engender a constructive relationship for all employees so that they can see Sales and Marketing are in the fight together.

2) Fixing the ‘Misalignment’

Misalignment starts with team structure. Most departments are set up by job function:

 

 

Instead, consider shifting to a persona-based team structure, in which Sales and Marketing (and Services, ideally) work together so that each segment can be serviced to their specific needs:

 

 

For instance, at HubSpot, our teams are aligned based on employee size because from what we’ve found specific to HubSpot software, this works best for our company and our customers. For instance, through research, experience and persona based profiles, it’s become clear to us that Marketing Mary is different that Enterprise Erin. If we want to sell to Marketing Mary, then we first need to understand how to market to her, and what’s important to her.

Additionally, we need to understand what Enterprise Erin is most interested in; and while Mary and Erin have similarities, such as lead generation as a point of interest, Erin may be in a place where she needs marketing automation, whereas Mary does not. This means that content we create will be different for Erin and Mary. This distinction also allows for an understanding across Marketing and Sales, because now both job functions have an understanding of what separates Erin from Mary, and why we should be talking about different details that are more applicable to either of the prospect groups.

From a goals perspective, it’s also reasonable that the Marketing Mary team has it’s own set of goals that are different than the Enterprise Erin team here at HubSpot. Enterprise sales typically have a longer sales cycle, for instance, so it’s reasonable to think that we won’t see the same number of new customers from the Enterprise segment on a monthly basis compared to the Marketer segment. With that understanding, we’re now able to have separate sets of goals that each team can strive for so that the expectations are more realistic for each segment.

3) Fixing the ‘Misleading’

For every persona you’re marketing and selling to, both Sales and Marketing should have a clear undrstanding of what they need to do in order to hit the monthly goal. The best way to do this is through data, and setting up a service level agreement (SLA) between Sales and Marketing. This way, you can leave it to the numbers rather than “I think” or “it seems like.”

An SLA is simply an agreement between Sales and Marketing about what is expected each month. While there are both quantitative and qualitative factors, the part to really focus on is the quantitative aspect. Using HubSpot as an example, we’ve identified the various types of leads that are generated for our sales team, which include:

• Webinar attendees
• eBook downloads
• Free trials
• Software demo requests

Based on historical lead to close rates, we then apply a monetary value to each lead. While the slide below shows mock numbers, the concept is what’s important. Our marketing team has an SLA number that we know we need to hit each month in order for our sales team to be successful within each segment. For instance, if our monthly goal for the Marketing Mary segment (below) was $100 and we were at $90, then our strategy to get to $100 could be any number of things including leads from ebook, leads from demos, or a combination of the two. Either way, we’ll leave it up to the data and base our strategy around what performs best.

 

 

We then identify with our sales team which are the best leads to work, and when. This part of the SLA agreement ensures that sales will follow up with certain leads within a certain amount of time.

 

 

With this understanding, we know how many leads of each lead type (webinar, ebook, trial, demo) each sales team member needs on a monthly basis in order to reach their sales quota.

Now the marketing team knows exactly what they need to deliver on a monthly basis in terms of the types of leads, and Sales knows how they should be handling the leads based on their quality.

Marketing is responsible to track their progress throughout the month to ensure that lead flow is even-flighted across the entire month, and that they are meeting their goals per the SLA:

 

 

The final piece here is to hold people accountable to their goals! The beautiful thing about numbers and charts, is that they don’t lie. The numbers that are agreed upon before a new month or quarter are the basis of the relationship between Sales and Marketing. If either Sales or Marketing misses its goal, then come together right away and determine through data why you didn’t hit the goal, and what the best way to improve will be as you move into a new month.

While your strategy will be tweaked specific to your exact company needs, identifying and tackling these three core issues will make your company more efficient and a better place to work. Now keep in mind, this task isn’t easy, and it’s something that we here at HubSpot work on constantly, but it is well worth the time investment. Just ask our ROI.

If you found this article to be helpful, then you’re in luck! This article is a teaser for a full scale webinar on 1/10/12 featuring HubSpot’s SVP of Sales, Mark Roberge, and Ken Krogue, President of InsideSales. If you find this content useful, be sure to sign up for the webinar now and get the full details!

Image credit: Lucy Takakura

 

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Today, Twitter said good morning to the world by announcing that users will soon (if not already) be able to download an archive of all their tweets from the beginning of time. Well, from the beginning of whenever they started tweeting, that is. This is certainly an exciting new feature from Twitter, who just yesterday announced in a tweet (how fitting!) that it had amassed more than 200 million monthly active users.

Even as early as this morning, we’ve already seen some great step-by-step coverage from Todd Wasserman at Mashable and Danny Sullivan at Marketing Land, outlining just how to access your personal Twitter Archive. But what marketers should also be thinking about is how the availability of this new information can be useful to them and their business’ future marketing efforts. So let’s put it all together in one place. In this post, we’ll cover exactly how you can get a hold of your own Twitter archive, and what you can do with all those tweets once you have them to improve your marketing in the future.

What You’ll Get From Your Twitter Archive

By requesting your Twitter Archive, you’ll get access to the following:

• All the tweets you’ve published since you created your account
• All the retweets you’ve generated since you created your account (Note: Twitter’s article was pretty vague about this, but it seems to mean you’ll be able to see other users’ retweets of your tweets.)
• The ability to filter through tweets by month
• The ability to search your archive of tweets using certain keywords, phrases, hashtags, or @usernames
• The ability to engage with your old tweets just like you can with your current ones

What you don’t seem to get in this download is any sort of analytics (such as clicks on your tweets, etc.) besides your sheer amount of Twitter activity, but this is certainly a start!

How to Access Your Twitter Archive

Now, let’s quickly review how to request a download of your Twitter Archive …

Step 1: Go Into Your Twitter Settings & Request Your Archive

Head into your ‘Settings’ tab within your Twitter account, and scroll all the way down until you see ‘Your Twitter archive.’ If you don’t see this, it just means Twitter hasn’t rolled out this new feature to you yet. But not to worry! Twitter indicates that over the next coming weeks and months, the Twitter Archive will be made available to all users around the world. For now, it’s only available to a small percentage of users whose language is set to English. If you do have access, simply click ‘Request your archive.’

 

 

Step 2: Confirm Twitter Received Your Request 

One you’ve requested your download, make sure you see the confirmation screen from Twitter that it has received your request and that an email with next steps is on the way.

 

 

Step 3: Open Your Confirmation Email & Unzip the File 

Inside your confirmation email from Twitter, you’ll find a bright blue ‘Go now‘ button. Once you click on this button, you’ll be taken to a page on Twitter where you can access your download. Click the also blue ‘Download‘ button, unzip the file, and open ‘index.html,’ which will take you to another page with all your details. (Alternatively, if you’d like to slice and dice the data in an Excel file, you can open the ‘Data‘ folder to open the file as a CSV.)

 

 

 

 

Step 4: Navigate Your Page Details

Once you’ve accessed this page, you’ll see detail options such as the highlighted arrow below (which advances you to the next month) as well as the blue bar charts on the right (which enable you to choose a specific month within a year). These options enable you to easily navigate from month to month, where you can review your Twitter activity during specific periods of time.

 

 

Step 5 (Bonus!): Conduct a Keyword Search

You can also conduct a keyword search by entering a specific query — to see all of the tweets that match that keyword. This can be very helpful for more focused research.

 

 

That’s it! Now you can research all your tweets, group them by themes, and target specific date ranges.

But wait a minute … While it’s always interesting to go back and review your past tweets for fun or for nostalgia purposes, how does this really help marketers? What can you actually gain from reviewing historical tweets — and is it worth spending your valuable time on this analysis? Why yes … yes, it is.

3 Actionable Ways Marketers Can Use Downloadable Tweets

1) Do Some Seasonality Dashboarding

Have you ever been sitting at your desk early on a Monday morning, only to have your boss rush over demanding to know the most active times of year for your Twitter account? Okay, that example might be a little extreme for most marketers (although it honestly has happened to me). Maybe you’re just reporting to a client, and you need to quickly provide a high-level view of their annual activity and predictive expectations for “planning purposes?” If so, then the activity dashboards Twitter provides in its archive will definitely be beneficial for you to not only gauge your account activity over the years, but also during crucial seasonal periods for your business.

2) Analyze Your Content Topic Balance

With all the tweets you publish live each day, how do you keep track of not only which topics you’re talking about, but also how often you’re covering them? Not always easy, right? For instance, if you’re a full-service digital marketing agency, you’d probably want to make sure the information you’re sharing on Twitter covers all aspects of digital marketing, including topics such as PPC, SEO, social media, display, analytics, landing page optimization … the list goes on. If maintaining a certain balance of the topics you tweet about is one of your goals, a great way to measure your success toward this goal would be to download your Twitter Archive, and drop your tweets from a given time frame into a tool like TagCrowd. 

For example, I ran a quick analysis of HubSpot’s Twitter activity so far today, and here are the trends for our account:

 

 

You can see that today, we’ve been talking about blogging, email, newsjacking, etc. Now imagine if you were to conduct this analysis for your business for the last 6 months — or a year? This can be a very helpful way to make sure you stay creative and comprehensive in the content your sharing on Twitter. Not one likes monotony.

3) Identify Which Types of Content Led to Highs and Lows in Engagement Rates

Whether you’re looking at engagement rates for your paid or organic results on Twitter, as a marketer, it’s always useful to understand what drives the highest engagement from your Twitter presence. But it’s not always easy to jump back two or four months ago to identify exactly what was the cause of a high spike (or low dive) in engagement, such as referral traffic from Twitter, and leads. While a variety of factors such as seasonality or time of day are important variables to consider, examining the qualitative side of your engagement rates by analyzing historical data can provide valuable insights into the specific types of content that resonate with your audience.

Coupled with your closed-loop marketing analytics, use your Twitter Archive to zone in on times when you’ve noticed a spike or deficiency in your referral traffic and leads from Twitter. How was your topic balance then? Were you tweeting more heavily about a certain topic that your audience wasn’t as engaged with? Was there a specific offer you pushed out then that did particularly well? Do you notice that certain tweets generated more or fewer retweets from other users? Look for patterns and insights that can help you modify and improve your future Twitter marketing strategy.

Well there you have it! This new feature from Twitter is certainly a welcomed one. The more information you can learn about your Twitter activity, the better informed you’ll be for future Twitter management and planning.

How else could you use your Twitter Archive to improve your future Twitter marketing efforts?

Image Credits: niner bakes, Marketing Land, Twitter

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Who knew Disney (Walt, not the corporation) was such a prognosticator of things to come?

Visionary, yes. Impresario, of course. But who knew that “It’s a Small World,” that cloying little ditty you can’t get out of your head for hours after taking a 12-minute motorized gondola ride, would foretell the future of marketing?

For digital marketers, even as the opportunities expand, the playing field is shrinking — to a space about 2 inches by 3 inches: the smartphone screen. Also shrinking is the time to reach consumers: 75 percent of online searchers take an action within a few hours, and 36 percent of them take an action immediately.

Yes, the market for tablet devices is growing rapidly, but the latest figures show more than 6 billion smartphones in use worldwide, about 90 percent of the world’s population. And, regardless of which analysts’ predictions you believe, 2014 or 2015 — the time when mobile access to the Web will outpace wired access — is almost here.

So as a lead generating inbound marketer, you must master optimizing your landing pages for mobile marketing, too. I mean, do you really want to lose out on lead generation opportunities with your mobile audience — an audience that’s getting bigger day by day? I think not. So this post is going to tell you the best practices for optimizing your landing pages for mobile devices — it’ll be a handy checklist to ensure you don’t miss out on that on-the-go audience of yours!

12 Things to Remember When Creating a Mobile-Optimized Landing Page

1) Be Visible

Flash, PNG-24 images, and a host of plug-ins make much of your content inaccessible on many mobile devices. Use alternate means to get your content onscreen, such as HTML5, jQuery, or JPGs so mobile devices have an easier time rendering your content. After all, you can’t exactly expect a ton of conversions if no one can see your landing page content in the first place.

2) Scale to Size

Use responsive web design to determine what type of device consumers are using to access your landing page, and scale the content appropriately for them. Don’t forget to program the page to load and scale properly based on both portrait and landscape mode — you never know when someone’s going to flip on ya!

3) Be Concise

Six-word headlines are so last year. Three- to four-word headlines are all the rage. Write your landing page copy, then cut it in half. Every word must contribute, must matter, on a mobile landing page. Not only are the screens too small for extraneous words, a mobile reader’s attention span is far less than that of a desktop viewer.

4) Be Available

Adding click-to-call capability — the ability for users to literally click on your phone number on your mobile landing pages — will help you with mobile conversions. They are, after all, on their phone. Include a phone icon, call-to-action text such as “Call Now,” highlight the link in a complementary color, and offer something useful in exchange for the call, such as a guarantee or a promotional rate.

5) Think “Two Thumbs Down”

Make sure the items on your landing page a user needs to click on are thumb-friendly. For most devices, this means the clickable area should be somewhere between 38X38 pixels to 44X44 pixels. Add padding to your links, make sure there’s some margin (negative space) between clickable links to avoid misclicks, and use plug-ins with touch swipe gestures (such as Flexslider or Photoswipe), where possible.

6) Be Slim

Present your content in a single column and, whenever possible, keep your call-to-action above the fold, which is within the top 100 pixels for smartphones. If your CTA doesn’t fit above the fold, include a prescriptive teaser, such as “Scroll Down for Special Offer.”

7) Think Local

Smartphones and other untethered devices may mean its user is on the move, but that doesn’t mean you don’t know where they are; in fact, quite the opposite. Even the broadest of geotracking systems locate users within 5 to 20 miles of where they are, so use the local nature of mobile to make your landing pages more relevant to consumers. Include a link to your nearest outlets, such as “Stores near Seattle,” customize headings with the city or area name, and prepopulate location fields — or better yet, zip codes — on web forms to make it easier for users to get to the “Buy Now” button.

8) Use Simple Forms

Keep your forms to the bare minimum needed to get the job done. The simpler the form, the fewer the fields, the better. Longer forms tend to lead to lower conversion rates in general, but it’s even more true with mobile devices — some estimates put the conversion rate as much as 50 percent lower. If you cannot fit everything you need on a single page, split the form into two pages to make it look less daunting.

9) Be Fast

The data on your mobile pages should be lean, lightweight, and under 20 kilobytes so your pages load in 5 seconds or less.

10) Get to the Point

The fewer actions a user has to take to get to their reward, the better. If you can limit those actions to three or four at the most, you will no doubt improve your conversion rates. Each action a user takes should be not only easy to complete, but compelling and bring them one step closer to completion.

11) Be Legible

Don’t sacrifice size for content. Content that’s too small for users to read is essentially no content at all. Having to zoom in to read content is just one more needless thing for a user to have to do, and may prove to be one reason too many to continue on to conversion.

12) Don’t Trust. Test.

A/B test your mobile landing page. Don’t trust that what works for your desktop landing page will work for your mobile landing page. Mobile marketing is not desktop-lite marketing, it’s a whole different game with a different set of rules.

The bottom line to making the most of your mobile landing pages is to keep your end goal in mind. What are you truly looking to get out of your mobile efforts? You won’t be able to include everything on mobile that you’re able to on desktop/laptop/tablets, so ask yourself (and your team) what the core focus is going to be around. In terms of the effectiveness of your mobile efforts, keep a keen eye on simplicity, usability, and performance. Keep your pages fast and your content clean and lean so people on the go can get what they want as quickly and easily as possible.

What else helps landing pages convert better for a mobile audience?

Image credit: JD Hancock

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When it comes to pay-per-click (PPC) ads, Google is the undisputed heavyweight champion. In Q2 2012, Google racked up a 42% year-over-year increase in paid clicks.

But if you’re not Google — so, pretty much all of us — the odds of your PPC ad being seen and clicked on via a search just got 42% harder. Maybe more. That number doesn’t include the skyrocketing cost of PPC ads on Google, or the increased spending by big companies for whom bidding higher is easier than the typical small or mid-size business.

Still, all eyes are on the web. So to attract new business, especially if you’re a B2B player, you need alternative ways to reach customers. For B2B companies, increasingly, that means shifting some ad dollars to LinkedIn, the networking site for professionals that has garnered 175 million users (40 million in the U.S.) since 2002. Let’s break down some of the benefits of using LinkedIn PPC ads, and dive into how you can use them effectively.

Why You Might Benefit From Using LinkedIn PPC Ads

There are several benefits to moving some of your PPC marketing dollars to LinkedIn:

• The PPC ad program at LinkedIn is relatively new. That means fewer advertisers competing for users’ eyeballs, so your ads have a better chance of being seen.
• Better yet, LinkedIn’s PPC ads let you target specific job titles, job functions, industries, or company size, to name a few options — you know, the people who are more likely to need what you sell. Whether you sell uniforms or janitorial services, LinkedIn lets you more narrowly target the people who buy those things. That’s powerful stuff compared to Google’s increasingly crowded, more expensive PPC landscape.
• As your inbound marketing initiatives gain traction and the percentage of new business you get from organic search results increases, doubling down by placing costly PPC ads alongside your free organic links makes less and less sense. When it’s the same set of eyes seeing your ad and your organic search result, there’s at least a 50-50 chance that users will click on the ad first, costing you money you may not have needed to spend. If your PPC ad is on LinkedIn, your reach is expanded.

How LinkedIn Ads Work

The general principle behind LinkedIn PPC ads works much the same as PPC ads on Google, Bing, Yahoo!, etc. You target a demographic and location, then set a budget for individual clicks and total expenditure. Your ad then competes on LinkedIn pages with like-minded advertisers. LinkedIn also offers a program where you pay for ad impressions — how many people are exposed to your ad.

LinkedIn requires a minimum budget of $10 per day and $2 per click (Google has no such minimums). There is also a one-time $5 activation fee to get your PPC account set up.

As with any marketing initiative, you’re going to want to closely monitor which ad campaigns and keywords are most effective. As a benchmark, LinkedIn says clickthrough rates above 0.025% are good.

Still, return on investment matters more than CTR, so even if your CTR is double that rate, unless you’re seeing more sales as a result of your investment, figure out what might be lacking — the ads themselves, the cost-per-click, or some other factor adversely affecting your efforts.

Your LinkedIn Ad Choices (Lots), and What to Do With Them

Unlike search engines, LinkedIn offers several unique PPC advertising opportunities — poll ads, social ads, ‘Join Group’ ads, and video ads. Since much of inbound marketing revolves around deepening the relationship between you and your leads and customers, these alternatives are worth considering. Here’s a breakdown of what you could do in terms of paid LinkedIn ads:

• Poll Ads – As the name suggests, these let you conduct market research while creating awareness for your brand. You can uncover customer preferences, change perceptions about your company’s thought leadership, and, because the poll results page is exclusively yours, your brand is all users see there.
• Join Group Ads – These help you deepen the connection between customers and your brand, position your brand as a thought leader, and provide an ongoing channel — the LinkedIn Group — through which you can keep the conversation going.
• Social Ads – With social ads, you can target buyers by using what LinkedIn knows about your social network and integrating them into their ads, a la Facebook. The ads integrate member activities and information into advertising. Highly controversial when first introduced in June 2011 because they co-opted users’ names and photos into the ads (implying their endorsement), LinkedIn quickly opted out of that practice for these ads.
• Video Ads – These are the latest offering from the LinkedIn advertising platform. The interface lets you use your YouTube videos or ads you create (in 300×250 format) in 30 second spots that bill and place the same as any of the other ads you place on LinkedIn.

Regardless of which type of PPC ads you place on LinkedIn, remember that all these usual best practices still apply:

Target the Right Audience

When building your ad campaigns, make your ads specific. Target by job function, seniority, geography, or group interests. After all, is your offer really applicable to everyone? Most likely not. Identify which offers are more identifiable with a CMO versus a CTO, for instance, to see higher returns on your ad spend.

Keep Your Messaging Consistent

With LinkedIn, you typically only pay on a cost-per-click basis, which means that you won’t be charged for impressions. This is a great feature, because it means that users who clicked your ad saw something in your ad that sparked their interest. This also means, however, that they have a high expectation for your user experience So make it a good one! If your ad promises a free 30-day trial, don’t have a free 7-day trial on your landing page. Whatever you say in your ad, be sure to have identical promises and offers on your landing page. Just do what you say you will. Good advice in general, really.

Identify and Provide Solutions to Customers’ Problems

LinkedIn ads are a form of display advertising. Even though they are highly targeted, they are still display. Users didn’t “search” for anything about you on LinkedIn or ask to see your ad. This doesn’t mean that they are opposed to seeing ads … if they help them solve problems that are sticking in their craw. Doing that will help you increase your CTR significantly. For instance, if your product helps make sales teams more efficient, then make sure you target a sales director, call out the job title in the ad, and illuminate a problem that they most likely have, such as “how can you work your most qualified leads faster?”

Test & Track Results With Unique Landing Pages

Test, re-test, and test some more. Try different hero images, headlines, and copy on your landing pages. Also, be sure to use tracking software to ensure you can measure the success of your efforts. After all, if LinkedIn is working well for you, you’ll want to know that, report on it, and then scale to the best of your ability.

Have you experimented with LinkedIn ads yet? How do they compare to Google PPC?

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We’ve always been pretty hesitant to jump in head first with event sponsorship and attendance. Sure, there are some industry events we think rock: Dreamforce, SMX, Dublin Web Summit, LeWeb, and of course Inbound. But what usually happens with events? They end up over-hyped and under-delivering, chalk full of poor networking opportunities, generic content, and few opportunities to make meaningful connections with new leads and customers. That means a whole lot of time and money gets wasted. What a bummer.

Wouldn’t it be nice, then, to be able to determine whether an event yields enough new business to justify the cost to participate in it? Absolutely. That’s why we wanted to outline exactly how to track event ROI accurately so you can determine whether you should keep sending in that sponsorship and/or attendance check year after year. Let’s get started.

How to Calculate the ROI of an Event or Trade Show

If you’re going to sponsor an event, the two core components your boss will ask about will be (or at least should be) ROI and tracking. Of course there are additional benefits of events such as thought leadership, networking, learning, branding … but when there’s a hefty sponsorship check involved, there needs to be a measurable, positive ROI that can be tracked.

How to Track Event ROI

The best way to track ROI is using this formula:

(Gross Profit – Marketing Expenses) / Marketing Expenses

For instance, let’s say we went to an event and our expenses were as follows:

So, did we have a positive ROI? At the moment, we wouldn’t know, because our sales cycle isn’t instantaneous — it’s a few weeks long. As such, it would take a few weeks before we could look back to determine whether the investment was worth it. But when that time comes, this is how we’ll calculate it:

ROI = (Gross Profit – $100,000) / $100,000

Note that the gross profit number would consist only of deals that happened due to our attendance at the event, so they would not have happened if HubSpot had chosen not to show up. As long as your gross profit — which for HubSpot specifically will be measured based on our LTV:CAC performance model — is higher than your total investment, then you’ll post a positive ROI. It will then be up to you to determine if the ROI is enough to justify continued involvement in the future.

How to Track Trade Show Lead Generation and Sales

Now that we know how much we spent on the event, we then need to determine what leads and sales were generated as a result of our participation. The best way for us to track this is to set up a naming convention for all leads generated due to that event. Using a CRM — we use Salesforce because it integrates with HubSpot for a nice, closed-loop view of our sales and marketing activities — we would enter every single lead generated at the event (via badge scanning, business cards, or email addresses collected) with an event tag. Because we’ve tagged them properly — the tag can just be the name of the event you attended — we can then set up weekly reports to monitor performance. As the leads begin to turn into new HubSpot customers, we’ll then be able to perform our ROI calculations.

Now, if the event just ended but you have a long sales cycle, it would take a little bit of time to calculate the exact ROI. But you could still run some predictive ROI calculations each month, and wait to perform the final analysis a few months down the road. After that, though, the team that attended the event should meet, review the numbers, and ultimately make a call on whether or not the participation was worth it based on the ROI calculations. Having this post-attendance meeting is essential for your company — just be sure that the meeting happens after all leads and sales can be accounted for, and have adequately matured.

How do you determine whether your presence at a trade show or event was worth the cost?

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Here at HubSpot, we know a thing or two about webinars. We’ve set the Guinness World Record for largest online marketing seminar, we’ve hosted webinars with partners such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Salesforce and we’re able to host and promote in-house because of the modern marketing team we’ve built!

But no matter how great the content of your webinar is, it doesn’t mean much if there’s nobody there to hear it. So what do you do to ensure people actually show up? Turns out, there’s at least 18 things you can do to get people aware of, excited about, and attending your next webinar. Here’s your guide to making your next webinar a rousing success!

18 Ways to Get People To Show Up To Your Webinars

1) Pick a killer topic.

It’s really, really hard to get people to attend your webinar if your topic stinks. Try to select a topic that’s broad enough to attract a large audience, yet targeted enough to provide actionable advice that attendees can implement the second they hop off your webinar. For our recent webinar with Salesforce, for example, we decided that we wanted to select social media as the overarching theme (who doesn’t love to talk about social media?) but focus on how to use social media and inbound marketing in unison.

2) Establish a good track record.

Having an established history of providing quality, educational content — whether via your blog content, written lead generation content, or previous webinars — can help boost your webinar attendance. If you’ve hosted plenty of webinars in the past, it also helps if you don’t run into things like sound quality or hosting issues on a regular basis. I mean, things happen, but attending a webinar is a time commitment … that occurs during their workday, no less. If there’s a lot of negative sentiment around your past webinars, admit your mistakes as you market your next webinar, and explain how you’ll do a better job this time around. It may not be easy, but over time you can regain a solid audience.

3) Set a registration goal.

Having a goal will inspire you to hit it, and help you measure success. In order for us to break the Guinness World Record for webinar attendees, for example, we knew we had to hit almost 30,000 registrants. You should track performance on at least a weekly basis to see whether your marketing efforts are moving the needle. That way, if you need to dial up your promotion due to low initial registration numbers, you’ll know what to do to fix it. 

Note: Just because people register for your webinar does not mean they will attend your webinar. Which brings us to our next tip …

4) Set an attendee goal.

Webinars typically get a 30% attendance rate, so to determine how many registrants you need, you should think ahead to how many actual attendees you want. Continuing with our Guinness World Record example, we knew we needed 10,000 attendees to break the record. So doing a little backwards math, we took the 30% attendance rate into account and figured out that we needed 30,000 registrants in order to hit 10,000 attendees.

You will see the word “remind” quite a bit in the rest of this post. That’s because getting people to attend your webinar requires lots and lots (and lots) of registrant reminders. People often sign up for webinars weeks in advance — they may have every intention of attending when they sign up, but with the myriad distractions that pop up every day, it’s critical you play an active role in keeping your webinar top of mind.

5) Give attendees something special.

At HubSpot, we’ve given away tickets to events, free marketing consultations, ad spend coupons to Facebook and LinkedIn … tons of cool stuff! We’ve also inspired the audience by asking them to be a part of something huge, like breaking a world record. Try to think of things that will get people excited, feeling special, talking with colleagues, and remembering their experience on your webinar in the future. Excited registrants turn into excited attendees.

6) Choose the right day of week.

Do not host your webinar during the weekend. Okay, you probably knew that one. But did you also know that it’s best to host your webinars on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday? Monday and Friday always seem to get filled up with “catch up” and “last minute emergency” happenings around the office. In a recent poll done by WhatCounts, the data suggested that their audience preferred Wednesday or Thursday for webinars, and we tend to agree.

7) Choose the right time of day.

HubSpot typically runs webinars at 1 p.m. EST or 2 p.m. EST, because it’s the most convenient time for the largest chunk of our audience. But if you have a huge audience in … I don’t know … Jakarta, you might want to reevaluate your timing. Right? Right.

If you have no clue what time would work best for your audience, you can always ask. Include a field on your registration form that asks attendees to confirm the time slots that work best for them, and schedule your webinar based on that feedback.

8) Create an informative landing page.

Be clear. Be honest. Set expectations. Take a look at the landing page we created for our upcoming webinar with Dan Zarrella and Chris Luo of Facebook.

 

 

On this landing page, we’ve clearly outlined a few things:

• Who? Introduce presenters on the landing page, with brief bios that explain who they are and why they matter — well, why they matter for this webinar, at least.
• What? Include an explanation of what the webinar is about, and some of the topics it will cover.
• When? Seemingly obvious, but ensure you provide a date and time so people can mark their calendars.
• Where? Clearly explain when and how the webinar will be accessible. Typically, webinars are accessible via links, and can be joined 30 minutes prior to start.
• Why? Explain the value of your webinar. What will people be able to do after they leave your webinar that they weren’t able to prior to attending?

9) Send a thank you email and registration confirmation.

Sending a thank you email is just good manners … but it also gives you a chance to confirm their registration (so they know that their form submission worked) and, you know, remind them about your webinar. Some people will delete it. Some people will save the email in their inbox, serving as a periodic reminder of your webinar. Some people will take the details in the email and input it on their calendar. If any of your registrants fall into those last two groups of people, you’re sittin’ pretty.

 

10) Send value-building reminder emails.

Send these two weeks in advance, and one week in advance on your webinar. They not only serve to remind registrants about the webinar’s date and time, but rebuild the value that you established with them on your registration landing page. Many of your registrants may have not only forgotten that they registered for your webinar … they may have forgotten why they registered in the first place.

11) Send two final reminder emails.

People forget. Things come up. Last minute reminder emails — specifically, one the day before, and one the day of — give people enough time to finagle attendance around meetings and other items on their to-do list, but also not too much time that they’ll forget about the webinar. It’s only a day (or less!) away, after all.

12) Market your webinar using social media.

You know what’s awesome about social media? It’s much more difficult to oversaturate your social audience than your email audience. And there’s a really, really good chance much of your email audience is connected with you socially, too. That affords you the opportunity to use social media to remind your audience about your webinar. If you’re using a social media publishing schedule (if you’re not, download a template for one here and start!) you can pepper in updates for every social channel that remind your audience you have an upcoming webinar. Increase the number of reminder updates as the date approaches, particularly the day before and day of.

 

 

13) Market your webinar through your speakers.

Of course you’ll be promoting your webinar. But what about the presenters? You know, the ones with a different audience than yours right at their fingertips? Are they leveraging their personal connections, social accounts, and email lists to make sure they have a giant audience? If they’re not, they sure as shootin’ should.

 

 

14) Don’t be afraid of paid media.

If you’re looking to drive more attendees to your webinar and have the budget, a little paid media to supplement your organic efforts can always help. For instance, you might run a PPC ad on Google for the term “aligning sales and marketing” if you were in charge of marketing our recent webinar with Salesforce to get the word out there and drive attendance.

By bidding on such a long tail term like “aligning sales and marketing” you can also keep your CPC costs low, promoting your webinar in a cost effective way. Just make sure your paid media team and organic team are aligned, so your company is organically publishing terms like “aligning sales and marketing” while you bid on the same term, resulting in total dominance in the SERPs for that keyword phrase.

15) Blog about your webinar.

Use your blog (and other blogs if you have the relationships) to promote the concept of your webinar — and even the webinar itself — so people are talking about and interested in the topic. Obviously, you’ll want to provide links to the registration landing page within the blog post, too. You could even create a webinar-specific CTA to include at the end of your post!

 

 

Bonus: If you start writing posts about the webinar topic far enough in advance, you can use the questions readers ask in the comments section to beef up your presentation, too.

16) Set calendar reminders.

Some uber-organized people will put your webinar right on their calendar. But Google+ is now taking it a step further, incorporating calendars into its offering to be sure your Google+ attendees remember to show up to your next webinar!

17) Partner up.

If you want more people to attend your webinar, you can always consider working with another brand. But while additional attendees is one benefit, it shouldn’t be the main focus of partnering up — relevancy, however, should be. HubSpot has partnered with numerous partners specifically for co-marketing purposes because we believe that two well-aligned brands have the power to be truly amazing together. Much more amazing than they can be apart. It’s also helpful for your audience if they can hear another perspective once in a while, particularly when that perspective comes from a specialist point of view.

 

 

18) Leverage your homepage.

Hubspot.com along gets 1 million visits per month. Why wouldn’t we leverage our homepage real estate to promote upcoming webinars? It’s a great way to show people that your entire company is behind the webinar, and sees the value in it for site visitors. Don’t hide behind your webinars; get them out in public and show people that your company believes in the initiative!

What do you do to ensure registrants don’t forget about your upcoming webinars?

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Facebook ads. Facebook ads are what bring us here today.

While there has been quite a bit of controversy surrounding the effectiveness of Facebook ads lately (you remember the whole GM thing, right?), Ford and Coke recently gave their seal of approval in a Wall Street Journal article about Facebook ads, with both saying they were finding value in Facebook ads, and with Ford planning to expand its use of Facebook’s advertising platform.

Since HubSpot has personally experienced success with Facebook ads and we’re now seeing two Fortune 500 companies publicly back the channel, we thought it was a great opportunity to take a look at some examples of Facebook ads and why they’re effective. Obviously, we don’t have access to the targeting, back end parameters, or metrics of these particular ads, but if our gauge of ‘effectiveness’ is based on online advertising best practices, we can get a good sense for which Facebook ads are destined to be winners.

What Makes an Ad ‘Effective’?

If we’re talking about ‘online advertising best practices,’ exactly what makes an effective Facebook ad? First, let’s consider how the success of online ads are generally measured. Typically, ads are measured based on click-through rates, although advanced ad tracking can also allow you to measure ads by leads or sales. So before we look at some Facebook ads we think are effective, let’s quickly examine best practices on AdWords, as it’s been the standard for so many years, and then we’ll compare and contrast against Facebook. When advertising on Google AdWords, for example, the following three elements are crucial for high click-through rates.

1) High Relevance

When a user types in a specific query, ideally, an effective ad would be 100% relevant for the query. So, for instance, if I search for red running shoes, I should see search results for red running shoes:

 

 

Take a look at the example above. The first two results don’t even address my needs indicated by my search query. Thankfully, Target came close by showing me an ad for red athletic shoes. Close enough, right? Well, let’s take a look at the landing page I get directed to, just to be sure …

 

 

Eek! Not quite, Target. You delivered on the ad, but the landing page isn’t specifically showing me red running shoes. An effective ad needs to deliver relevancy throughout the entire process, from the ad to the landing page.

2) Compelling Call-to-Action

The call-to-action of your ad should motivate a user and generate a sense of urgency to click on your ad now. AirCanada does a nice job below, calling out the price of its flights today and making a compelling sense of urgency to book online now.

 

 

3) Value Proposition

Why should users shop at your store — or online, for that matter? There needs to be a value proposition to encourage them. Zappos does a nice job of offering free shipping and a 365-day return policy, which saves consumers money and puts their mind at ease about a potential return policy. Old Navy has also done a nice job by putting its low prices right in the search results and also creating a sense of urgency with its call-to-action, calling out the end date of the sale, June 27th.

 

 

The Challenge With Facebook Ads

Pretty simple right? High relevance, a compelling call-to-action, and a solid value proposition — the recipe for an effective ad on Google. When advertising on Facebook, however, the crucial elements of ‘effective’ ads change a bit. While relevance, a great call-to-action, and highlighting the value proposition are all important, the main different between Facebook and Google is that the messaging strategy is push versus pull. On Google, users are actively searching for something and then browsing the search results to find the content that best suits them.

On Facebook, users are there to check in on their social lives, which means that the element of disruption comes into play. Your ads now need to be louder and grab the attention of a user so they stop doing what they had initially set out to do on Facebook, and change their course of action to pay attention to your ad. And for Facebook advertisers, that’s a big challenge.

That’s why it’s even more important to keep those best practices of relevance, calls-to-action, and value proposition in mind, in addition to the distraction factor, when creating Facebook ads. And if we do that, here are 10 Facebook ads we think are representative of effective Facebook advertising, and we’ll break down exactly why.

1) Bing

 

Relevance: This ad was served on the Facebook homepage of a recent college grad. What better time for a vacation?!

Value Proposition: In a world of social reviews, what better way to determine the perfect vacation destination than by viewing recommendations from friends.

Call-to-Action: We think the ad could have been a bit more aggressive, but the call-out is to use Bing’s sidebar for those ready for some vacation exploration, so perhaps the ad identifies with users further down the vacation purchase funnel.

Disruption Factor: Advertising vacations on Facebook is the perfect disruption for this medium. As users are seeing what their friends are doing, places they are visiting and vacations they are taking, it is only relevant that an ad pops up to entice users to take a vacation of their own.

2) Clairol

 

Relevance: This ad by Clairol came to us by a female Facebook user in her mid-20s, so the targeting appears to be sound.

Value Proposition: The value is very clear, offering up $1,000 for 50 lucky winners.

Call-to-Action: The call-to-action here is a mix of the offering and “enter here,” as the user has been told what they can win and where they should go to enter.

Disruption Factor: The disruptive part of this ad is that “ENTER HERE” is in all capitals letters. A seemingly frowned upon approach in AdWords; however, on a site like Facebook with so many other things going on, the capital letters works well to draw the eye. As soon as the eye meets the ads, of course there is then a cash prize offering generating excitement through a contest, which is also a recommended strategy.

3) West Elm

 

 

Relevance: This West Elm ad was submitted to us by one of our female college interns, which makes the targeting spot on.

Value Proposition: It’s very clear: 10% off if you are a college student.

Call-to-Action: This is one area that could use some improvement. However, the message is that if you’re in the market to shop and you’re also in college, you can save 10% off now through this ad.

Disruption Factor: The ad uses words that a college student would recognize and responds to well, including “.edu,” “college,” and a percent discount.

4) Bud Light

 

Relevance: This ad showed up for a man in his 30s, and it’s about Bud Light and the NFL. Makes pretty good sense!

Value Proposition: There is a solid value proposition here, as this ad is answering questions that fans specifically asked, presenting them with exactly what they wanted from Bud.

Call-to-Action: The ad is updating fans by telling them that their questions have been answered and that they can now review the results.

Disruption Factor: “EXCLUSIVELY” for Bud’s Facebook fans means that this ads was created for Facebook fans and Facebook fans only! The image is also well done, as it attracts users with the promise of a video.

5) SERPS.com

 

Relevance: This ad was shown to someone who has an interest in online marketing, so the SEO offering is definitely relevant.

Value Proposition: The value here is very clearly stated with the free, 14-day trial.

Call-to-Action: The offering here is that, in just 5 minutes, you can have the SEO dashboard of your dreams, and there is a 14-day free trial.

Disruption Factor: The image showing graphs (always relevant to a marketer) coinciding with the “SEO dashboard of your dreams” initially helps to draw the eye, and is then nicely followed up by “5 minute setup” and “14-day free trial” bonuses.

6.) Fiverr

 

Relevance: This Fiverr ad was shown to an online marketing professional, so the targeting seems reasonable.

Value Proposition: The value proposition is well stated here, as Fiverr is offering an all-in-one marketing services destination for just $5.

Call-to-Action: It’s a bold statement, but that’s what it takes on Facebook to get attention, with the ad closing with “Check it Out Now!” using both capitalization and an exclamation point!

Disruption Factor: Fiverr does a great job leveraging imagery here in regard to its logo. The bright red, almost zombie-like logo does its job here, which is to draw the eye by being loud. It also helps that SEM and SEO are in all caps.

7) Survivalstraps.com

 

Relevance: This ad was shown to an active and athletic female in her late 20s, so the targeting looks to be right.

Value Proposition: The value proposition here is a bit hazy, but the keyword in this ad is “support.” The ad is meant to appeal to those people who want to get behind their country and show a bit of national pride during the Olympic Games!

Call-to-Action: “Get yours today!” This call-out is designed to make people click NOW while they’re “in the moment.”

Disruption Factor: The disruption here is that the ad is calling out the Olympics, which is right around the corner and something that is in the news every day.

8) Samsung Mobile

 

Relevance: This ad was shown to an online marketer in their mid-20s, so the targeting could be a bit tighter perhaps by additionally targeting phone interests, but Samsung seems to be casting a wider net with this ad.

Value Proposition: There is a great value proposition here, as not only will Samsung take your old phone off your hands for you, but they will also give you $300 toward the purchase of a new phone.

Call-to-Action: The call-to-action here appears to be the flow of the entire ad. Trade in your old phone for $300 toward the new Samsung S III, targeting users who are further down the funnel and looking for either a new cell phone or specifically a new Samsung phone.

Disruption Factor: The disruption here is a combination of the visual and $300. There are 4 phones featured in the image with bright colors to draw the eye, and then an immediate call-out of $300, which attracts users to the value.

9) eWebinars

 

Relevance: This ad was shown to a marketer engaged with SMBs in their early 30s, so the targeting was well executed.

Value Proposition: The value prop is well stated here, as the offer is the ability to grow your business through pinning (on Pinterest).

Call-to-Action: If you’d like to grow your business, the ad does a nice job of using the word “advantage” and using all caps on the word “HERE,” which is meant to make the user want to learn more.

Disruption Factor: Ah yes, the old ‘sex sells’ approach. You may think to yourself, “Huh? I’ve never associated an attractive blonde female with webinars,” but we’ve seen this approach since the dawn of advertising (and every year during the Super Bowl thanks to Go-Daddy). You just have to ask yourself, “Is this a method you want to take for your business, and can you make it relatable to your offering?” If so, go for it!

10.) HubSpot

 

Relevance: How could we not share a HubSpot example? This ad is quite relevant, as it’s targeting SMB marketers who have expressed an interest in lead generation.

Value Proposition: The value proposition here is driving leads with Facebook. SMB marketers (our target) are on Facebook, and they’ve been hearing all about how Facebook doesn’t work from GM. But now, thanks to the folks at the Wall Street Journal, they’re getting assurance that Facebook ads do work from big names like Ford and Coke. So as thought leaders in the industry, we at HubSpot wanted to be sure that SMB marketers know that HubSpot is here to answer all of their questions and help make Facebook an efficient medium for their business.

Call-to-Action: Since we know our software will help you drive leads and improve your business, we want you to start today!

Disruption Factor: Since the ad was targeted specifically at SMB marketers, we opted to go with our logo for the visual, which stands out thanks to the orange sprocket. We then looked to draw the eye further by starting the ad out with a data point that is 100% relevant to SMB marketers.

Well, there you have it. Relevance, value proposition, call-to-action, and disruption: the four key elements to running effective Facebook ads. Don’t afraid to try something new, be loud, be bold, or be controversial. Your main objective is to draw the eye away from all of the other distractions on Facebook, and there are a lot! Whether you’re new to Facebook ads or a seasoned pro, things that are considered relevant are constantly changing (e.g. current events like the Olympics), so there is always good reason to update your ads regularly and test something new.

What are some examples of Facebook ads you’ve stumbled upon that you think are great?

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Between the IPO, debate around GM’s ad performance, and Zuckerberg’s recent marriage, there’s been a lot of controversy — or at least chatter — around Facebook of late.

As we look across the digital landscape, however, we still get a lot of questions regarding Facebook ads and how to set them up, especially with the recent changes within the user interface. 

This post is not to debate the efficiency of Facebook ads (I did that last week), but rather to show new users how to set up Facebook ads, and current users how to improve their existing ad campaigns by highlighting some of the nuances in the setup process. Let’s get started.

How to Set Up Ads on Facebook

Step 1 – Create an Ad. When logged in to Facebook, look at the top right hand corner of your browser. You’ll see a green button that says ‘Create an Ad.’ Click it and you’ll be on your way.

 

 

Step 2 – Select What to Advertise. There are a bunch of options here. You can promote URLs (on or off Facebook), pages, applications, events, places or domains. For example, you might want to drive users off of Facebook to an external URL. Or perhaps you’d like to promote your Facebook page and get more ‘likes’ — know as ‘connections’ in Facebook speak — so that you can grow your fan base more quickly. As you can see below, I’ve chosen to promote our Inbound 2012 Marketing Conference!

 

 

Step 3 – Set Up the Ads. For Facebook ads, you’ll usually need to write some short copy and confirm your URL. An ad preview will display on the right hand side so you can see how the ad will look once it’s live. For certain ad campaigns, such as driving likes to your page, you won’t need to write additional copy.

 

 

Step 4 – Target by Geography. Select the geographical region in which you want your ad to run. Pay particular attention to the checkbox that includes cities within 10, 25 or 50 miles of the region you’ve selected, as you may or may not want this additional targeting. Get as targeted as you can here, as the capabilities include country, state/province, city, and zip code; or you can even try to type in your target city as I’ve done below with Boston.

 

 

Step 5 – Target by Age and Gender. Select which genders and age groups you’d like to see your ad. Be sure to uncheck the box to the right, or else Facebook will be at liberty to show your ads “slightly” outside of your target market.

 

 

Step 6 – Target Your Ad to Precise Interests. At this stage, you can target users based on their hobbies, status, interests, ethical background, and more. Pretty crazy, right? Options include both broad categories and very precise interests, some of which you can see below.

 

 

Step 7 – Define Precise Interests. If the particular interests that you’d like to target your ad towards are not included within broad targeting, then this is the option for you. Simply type in the keywords that are most relevant, and Facebook will automatically show you options. For instance, I typed in “marketing” below and results instantly display for my exact keyword, as well as related keywords that I may also want to focus on.

 

 

Step 8 – Or, Use Broad Categories. Facebook also provides plenty of options within their broad categories. If you see categories here that fit your target market, simply check the box and your ad will automatically be included within the chosen segment.

 

 

Step 9 – Target Your Ad Based on Connections. While you can target by interests, age, and geographical location, Facebook also offers ad targeting based on connections. For example, you can target people who are connected to your business page or specific apps, and you can even target their friends. As you can see in the sample Facebook ad below, I’ve targeted people whose friends are connected to HubSpot. The strategy here is that you can target like-minded users who have an interest in your company.

Additional targeting features within this section include sexual orientation, relationship status, language, education and workplaces.

 

 

Step 10 – Set Your Objective and Pricing. This one is tricky. See the pop up below? If you aren’t careful, Facebook will charge you on CPM pricing (cost per 1000 times your ad is displayed) rather than CPC (cost per click your ad receives). If you prefer CPM, then don’t worry about this. But if you prefer CPC, like I do, then be sure to select “click on my ad or sponsored story” in the drop down like I did below.

 

 

Step 11 – Review Your Ad. Be sure to review your Facebook ad before taking it live, and check everything to ensure you know exactly how you’re paying, when the ads are live, who the ads are targeting, and that every other detail below is as you intended!

 

 

Step 12 – Launch Your Facebook Ad! Click that blue “Place Order” button you see above to take your ad live. As always, be sure to watch your Facebook ads very closely during launch to ensure that everything is working properly, and that your budget is being spent wisely. Treat your Facebook campaign like any other well strategized campaign, and manage it with precision and diligence.

Have you set up a Facebook ad campaign yet? Were you happy with the results you saw?

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“Facebook ads suck.” For many companies, advertising on Facebook and expecting a return is a “fantasy.” If you clicked those hyperlinks, you found just two examples in the flurry of negative press surrounding Facebook advertising of late — all stemming from the recent GM announcement to cut $10 million in paid ad spend on the social network.

It makes you wonder what prompted this announcement from GM. Is this a media tactic to help searches for GM? Or were the results of Facebook advertising really so miserable that it warranted this media attention? Who knows — the onslaught of coverage wasn’t accompanied by a leak of GM’s analytics. One thing that is evident is that GM hasn’t had much visible success from digital advertising in general; just take a look at what Google’s Insights for Search tool had to show.

 

 

But is GM truly the digital marketing icon that we should be referencing to determine whether or not Facebook ads work? What about a brand like Southwest? They run Facebook ads quite frequently … how are they faring? Actually, they’ve been able to generate a ton of positive mentions in the same time period as compared to GM:

 

 

From this perspective, maybe it’s the Southwests of the world we should look to for guidance when it comes to digital ad success, not GM. What is clear is that we must have data points and ask the right questions — not just have opinions when it comes to determining the value in something like Facebook ad spend. Because the only answer to the question of whether Facebook ads work or not is “it depends.” While this response is typically an advertiser’s way of sidestepping a direct question, I mean it sincerely, and here’s why.

Just as with any marketing initiative, to run a successful Facebook marketing campaign, companies (especially those with a $10 million budget) need to consider many factors before even logging into their Facebook account.

11 Planning Considerations Before Starting a Facebook Campaign

1) Set your goals. Do you want fans? Conversions on Facebook? Conversions off of Facebook onto a landing page? What about leads, qualified leads, sales, revenue and ROI?

2) Determine your market size. How large is your audience, and what can you realistically expect from advertising on Facebook? Are there 2 million people that you can target, or only 1,000? Don’t be surprised to find out that the market for niche groups is often larger than you think. For instance, there are 127,000 people in the United States alone that list Agatha Christie as an interest — not bad for a British crime novelist that passed away in 1976.

 

 

3) Set a budget. Have you budgeted enough for your campaign, or too much? If you’ve set aside too much, you’ll likely be disappointed with your results as you’re pushing budget to the point of inefficiency. If you haven’t set aside enough, you’ll spread yourself too thin and your reach/frequency won’t be strong enough to target your core audience.

4) Take seasonality into account. Mindsets change during summer months. Ecommerce budgets, for example, are typically much heavier in Q4. Market costs can increase during certain months of the year, or during years with major elections. Are you thinking about all of the external factors that could be impacting your campaign?

5) Consider the day of the week. Ad performance varies by day, especially from weekday to weekend. Understanding which days perform best for your company is vital so your budget doesn’t go to waste. For example, if you’re looking to drive users to your website to convert on a “Talk to Sales” call-to-action, you need to make sure that you have the proper staff working during the days these campaigns are live.

6) Use day parting. What hours of the day are the most effective to run your ad? When does your specific audience show the highest engagement rates? If you understand this, you’ll be able to get the most of out your ads and push them harder during your most efficient times.

7) Consider the decision process. What are you asking users to do? What are they thinking about when they see your ad? An example of a decision process might be:

Recognizes Need >> Performs Informational Search >> Evaluates Options >> Makes Purchase

If you know this, you can get in front of users with those needs, have a conversation trigger, educate them, and nurture them through the sales process.

8) Determine your target demographic. You could consider age, social class, gender, family size, income, occupation, lifestyle, education, religion, and race and nationality.

9) Determine your audience’s psychographics. Ask yourself these questions about your target market (TM):

• What does the TM like/dislike about your product or service?
• What does the TM like/dislike about your competitor’s product or service?
• What is the trigger that sparks conversion?
• Is there brand awareness?
• Were there influencing factors from other marketing campaigns prior to converting?
• Is disposable income a factor in the sales cycle?
• Are there emotional factors at play during the conversion cycle?
• What social class does the TM fall into?
• Who is the decision maker, as opposed to just helping evaluate options?
• Are there specific values that your TM identifies with?
• Are there hobbies or interests that would help define your TM?

10) Do your geo-targeting. When targeting ads, you should consider country, region, state, designated marketing area, city, town, and zip code.

11) Don’t forget about the customer service experience. Like we mentioned before, if you’re directing people to speak to someone at your company, experience matters. Will they talk to a live person who is knowledgeable about their questions? How long did the phone ring before the call was answered? Was the experience the same at 7AM as it was at 4PM? What about on Monday, versus Saturday? If the follow-up was via email, was it timely, friendly, and helpful? You should provide a consistent experience from initial ad impression to customer service interaction.

Once all of those details have been accounted for, then you’re ready to start spending money on Facebook ads. Why? Because it’s easy to generate clicks from a Facebook campaign, but the post-click experience is where the true expertise — and ROI — comes into play. From the ad, to the landing page, to the customer service experience, it takes a team effort from Marketing and Sales to convert leads and customers.

7 Ways to be Efficient With Your Facebook Ads

Now that you know your goals, target market, and understand the bigger picture of running a Facebook ad campaign, you want to ensure your campaigns run efficiently. Here’s how.

1) Build your audience. Using Facebook to generate fans (known as “connections” in Facebook ad lingo) is an opportunity to build the exact audience that you want to expose your ad messaging to. You should always be working to do this by pushing out thought leadership content, running contests, and promoting offers and lead generation campaigns. The more targeted you are with building this audience, the more impactful your broadcasts will be when you message your followers. For instance, start by targeting a select group like we’ve done in the screenshot below:

 

 

2) Attract more of those same types of users. The easiest way to do this is using Sponsored Stories. At HubSpot, we’ve been able to use Sponsored Stories to help attract additional connections that behave similarly to others in our target market.

 

 

Driving the right kinds of fans to your business page will help ensure higher response rates as you push your message out through Facebook ads.

3) Take advantage of the fans you’ve generated. Talk to your fan base regularly via your business page by posting content that drives engagement. And by engagement, I mean lead generation. Here at HubSpot, we take the thought leadership approach, meaning that we think people will want to use HubSpot software if we are able to prove that we truly understand the digital landscape and have the best online marketing software. Take a look at some of the ways we do that.

First, we like to share relevant blog posts that help educate our readers. You might think blog content doesn’t generate leads, but that’s only true if you’ve forgotten to include calls-to-action within your blog content. And we’d never do such a thing … would you? 😉

 

 

But we also post lead generation content directly to our Facebook page. This post directs fans to a landing page on which they can redeem an ebook about creating effective calls-to-action.

 

 

4) Converse with your fans. What does talking with fans have to do with paid ads on Facebook? Well, it’s an important factor in the success of your overall Facebook strategy. You can’t just think about paid ads in a silo — you have to think about the entire strategy. Conversing with fans will give you a better idea of who your target audience is, what they think about, and what they need. And that makes for better ad targeting.

5) Run paid ads to target segments. Don’t be afraid to engage in direct response lead generation on Facebook. HubSpot uses ads like the one you see below to send users to landing pages that offer free inbound marketing assessments, free software trials, and inbound marketing software demos. Do they work? We wouldn’t be running them if they didn’t.

 

 

6) Segment as much as possible with your campaigns. Messaging and landing pages should be tailored to specific demographics. For instance, if GM were running a campaign for the Chevy Volt, you can imagine how messaging would change among those aged 25-34, as opposed to those aged 55-64.

The younger audience may be more concerned with the fact that the Volt is helping our planet become more green, while an older audience near retirement age may be more interested in buying a car with better fuel economy. Think of every possible way you can segment, and use your Facebook ads, messaging, and landing pages to connect with that segment accordingly. 

7) Put senior members of your marketing team in charge of your Facebook ad campaign. If the team member heading up Facebook advertising doesn’t know who Ogilvy is, then get someone else. The marketing game hasn’t changed, just the venues. Using the core concepts of traditional marketing, targeting, and messaging is the way to win with Facebook ads. Having that leadership backbone to coincide with the nuances of social and digital media will ensure a fully optimized campaign.

Who’s to Blame for GM’s Facebook Ad Failure?

So … was GM doing all of those things? Well, you can see that campaign setup and targeting isn’t really that hard — it’s the post-click experience that matters most. If GM was focused on all of these elements and still failed, then perhaps Facebook wasn’t the best fit for their particular brand. This doesn’t mean that Facebook isn’t the right avenue for the auto industry in general — or any other industry — since GM has a very specific target audience that differs from, say, KIA or VW. For digital advertisers, the answer to whether or not Facebook advertising is the right choice certainly depends on the market and brand, but most of all, it hinges on proper execution.

Facebook doesn’t want to fail. They have no interest in going broke. They’ll likely continue to hire top notch developers and engineers, and keep bringing on the best product management and marketing professionals to work on continuously improving their advertising options. Rand Fishkin wrote an article back in 2010 about all the things he wished he’d known before starting his company. A piece of the article illuminated exactly what we’re seeing in the general public right now regarding Facebook’s IPO and their advertising solution — haters gonna hate.

I don’t dispute that Facebook has not worked for a considerable amount of advertisers, but it’s also worked quite well in many instances. So before you jump on the lambasting train of Facebook ads, approach the situation using data and an evaluation of your own strategy on Facebook, not just opinions. Ask yourself, did I truly understand how to advertise on Facebook, and did I do all of the things that I should have in order to fully execute on my strategy? Or was I just looking for a quick and easy way to generate conversions? The barriers to entry are practically non-existent when it comes to Facebook ads, but that doesn’t mean they’re easy in terms of generating ROI. That’s what all advertisers must keep in mind when deciding whether or not Facebook ads are appropriate for their business.

What do you think of Facebook advertising? To what do you attribute GM’s Facebook ad failure?

Image credit: Zeevveez

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It’s a topic that is running rampant around the web. How do you measure ROI from Facebook? Is anyone (besides Fortune 500 brands with multi-million dollar budgets) generating ROI from Facebook? And if so, how?

The difficulty with establishing ROI on Facebook has typically been tracking, but luckily, Facebook recently made a bunch of updates to help marketers tackle this problem. And while Facebook is heading in the right direction, SMB marketers (and all marketers) need more, and they need it now.

So what’s the best way to track Facebook ROI? You’re about to find out. This post will show you how to determine whether your Facebook ad spend is generating you the kind of ROI you need to justify the expense.

How to Measure the ROI of Your Facebook Ads

In order to determine the ROI of your Facebook ad spend, you first need to be able to properly track your Facebook connections. You can attract connections on Facebook two ways: by running paid ads, or by posting updates to your business page. If you’re posting updates to your fan base, running ads to grow your audience via cost per connection campaigns is often difficult to measure. Necessary data that Facebook provides to properly track includes:

• Spend
• Clicks
• Connections
• Cost per click

But even with this data that Facebook provides, you still need a tracking solution that tells you your cost per connection. You could calculate that manually using data from Facebook by taking your spend and dividing it by your number of connections. But since we like to do things more efficiently here at HubSpot, we use a Facebook ads tracking app that easily allows you to see all of the metrics that are available within the Facebook user interface, and also provides you with that crucial cost per connection data. This is a time saving feature that allows marketers to quickly see which campaigns are cost effective, and which ones need work.

 

Now that you have that cost per connection data, it’s time to start promoting your offers! You know, so you can turn those connections into leads. As you promote your offers to your audience, it’s imperative to be able to track who converts into a lead, so be sure to use landing pages that are integrated with your closed-loop analytics software. When we do this with HubSpot, for example, we can see all of the leads that were driven by Facebook with the following lead information:

• Date
• Event trigger
• Lead source
• Contact information
• Lead quality
• Sales details

 

 

Now, we can understand which campaigns and segments are more interested in our offerings, and as leads turn to sales, ROI is easily realized with every new customer. And all of that information lives within your marketing software for your sales and marketing team to reference!

To make all of this a little clearer, let’s use an example of how one might establish the ROI of a Facebook ad. We’ll use an example from one of our own campaigns.

Step 1: Create a Facebook ad that includes a lead generating offer. If you need helping creating a Facebook ad, reference this ebook for some assistance!

 

 

Step 2: Send users to a unique landing page so they can redeem the offer in your ad. Remember, this is how you’ll turn those Facebook connections into leads! And of course, we’ve written a handy guide to creating an effective landing page.

 

 

Step 3: For the sake of this example, we’ll assume the visitor converted on the landing page. The next step is to analyze the data.

 

 

Again, we use the HubSpot Facebook ads app to do our analyzing, though you can get the data from a combination of Facebook ad analytics and your own closed-loop marketing software. But regardless of which tool you use, you should look at the following data points to track your lead generation campaigns over time:

• Spend
• Clicks
• Leads
• Cost per lead
• Customers
• Cost per customer

With this additional data readily available, measuring ROI is easy, because it puts direct spend up against revenue generated to truly measure ROI on Facebook.

Trying to track ROI from social media can be a nightmare, especially if you aren’t using the proper tools. Tracking, cost association, and revenue measurement are paramount when it comes to driving new business with Facebook. Without having the ability to do those things, the time you do spend on Facebook will become a cyclical headache that just won’t go away.

How do you determine the ROI of your Facebook ad spend?

 

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