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Subscribe in a readerInbound Marketers Report a 60% Lower Cost Per Lead
Galen De Young ( @GalenDY ) | B2B Research | February 16th, 2010Internet marketing technology provider Hubspot recently released a study entitled The 2010 State of Inbound Marketing. The study included 231 marketing professionals, 69% of whom worked for B2B companies in a wide variety of industries. The largest industries were professional services (22% of respondents) and technology (15%).
Inbound Marketing refers to marketing strategies and tactics designed to help companies get found when searching for potential product or service providers or when researching issues or problems. Think search engine optimization, paid search, and social media. Outbound Marketing refers to push-type marketing like trade shows, advertising, telemarketing, email marketing, etc.
Respondents who spent more than 50% of their budgets on inbound marketing channels reported an average cost per lead of $134, while those who spent the majority of their budget on outbound marketing channels had an average cost per lead of $332. That’s a 60% difference. (more…)
Where Should B2B Bloggers set up the Corporate Blog?
Galen De Young ( @GalenDY ) | B2B Search Marketing | February 12th, 2010
The question of where B2B marketers should place the corporate blog is a critical one. It has implications in terms of B2B SEO, positioning, and your ability to later successfully transfer the trust and authority you build up in the eyes of search engines. This post addresses some of the options and their implications. (more…)
9 Tips for Leveraging Synergies of Email & Social Media
Galen De Young ( @GalenDY ) | B2B Email Marketing | February 4th, 2010Are you using social media to promote your email marketing efforts? Are you using your email marketing to promote your social media efforts? The easier you can make it for people to go between the two, the more connections and touchpoints you’ll forge. Here are 9 tips to help you do just that.
Promote your Email Newsletter on your Blog
Feature your email newsletter on your blog and provide a way for your blog readers to subscribe to it. Promote it in the sidebar of your blog near the top of each page. Be sure to include a link to a sample issue.
Link to your Blog
Somewhere in your email—either in the sidebar, header, or footer—promote a link to your blog. Have options for them to subscribe to the blog, either through RSS or via email. That way you can gain people as both email and blog subscribers. Not only does this give you two media through which you can reach your contacts, but it provides a back-up conduit, in case people for some reason unsubscribe from your email or your email is later blocked (e.g., change in recipient’s spam filtering).
Link to your Social Media Profiles
Put links to your social media profiles in your email marketing. Email marketing goes out whenever you send it. But you’re not going to send it every day. Perhaps only once a month. But if you promote links to your social media profiles, email recipients can connect with you on LinkedIn or Facebook, or discover and follow you on Twitter, where you can have additional and more frequent touchpoints.
Post Email Content to Your LinkedIn Groups
LinkedIn is one of the most popular social media sites for people in the B2B realm. Assuming your email marketing content continues on your site, you should promote that content in the LinkedIn groups to which you belong. Members of LinkedIn groups choose to get either a daily or weekly digest of activity within the group. That activity includes members’ postings of news, discussions, and other information. If you have good content that continues on your site, you should submit that content and its URL as a news or discussion item within relevant groups.
In posting to LinkedIn groups, you can link to either the web version of your newsletter or to individual stories within it. Either way, however, you want readers to understand that the content came from an email newsletter and they can subscribe to it. For that reason, it may be best to link to the web version of the email. Just make sure the web version has a clear and obvious button that allows readers to subscribe. Also, if you’re trying to point people to, let’s say, the third story in the web version of your email newsletter, be sure to insert named anchors in the web version and use URLs with named anchors as links to that content. That way, people who click through won’t have to figure out which of the four articles in your newsletter you’re trying to reference. In posting to LinkedIn groups, however, remember to also post and cite others’ content. It’s good social media etiquette. If all you do is promote your own content, you’re really not contributing to the group. You’re simply using it as a sales platform. People can easily see the difference. (more…)
