by jbreazeale on August 12, 2009
Todd Defren (@tdefren) kicked off the second round of Inbound Marketing University yesterday with a topic that didn’t get much coverage the first time around – public relations.
With free and available technologies that allow anyone to publish their information, significant reductions in the ranks of professional journalists, and the public’s seemingly insatiable desire for news that is weirder and wilder than ever before, PR folks are fighting an uphill battle to get their information out there.
But as most companies know, you can’t live on advertising alone – it’s too expensive (and often doesn’t work that well) – and having a well-executed PR strategy can produce real results (Newsweek estimates that media prominence accounts for 25% of brand value.)
This isn’t your parent’s PR, though. The days of boring, corporate-speak-gobbledy-gook press release with little or no news or entertainment value are over.
Instead, here’s how Todd defines PR:
Public Relations is not just about “hits” – it’s about frequently distributing relevant content via the right channels to boost credibility and findability.
This means that you need to be part of the dialogue every day – creating a blog post, commenting, pitching a new idea to a journalist or blogger, twittering, etc. You consistently have to stay in front of your audience – enough so they stay interested, not so much that they become annoyed.
You also need to create content that is concise, relevant, and easy to find. Instead of creating a 10 minute video about your product, create 10 one-minute videos for each of its features.
Make it easy for people to consume and share your content – then look at your stats to see how it resonated with your audience. Are your raw traffic stats improving? Are visitors sharing your information? Are they converting? If the answers are no, then it may be time to reconsider your content (was it relevant?) and how it was presented (was it relevant, but too hard to consume?)
And, don’t forget your SEO basics. (For a refresher, take a look at Blogging Basics and SEO Fundamentals and Advanced SEO Tactics (IMU).)
But even with relevant and timely content, have you to sent it to the right places. Do you know what publications have the most traffic and authority (Technorati, Cision, etc.)? Do you know where the top bloggers are active (hint: it’s not just on their own blog)? A positive mention or retweet by the right blogger can have a great impact; just pasting a press release on your own website – not so much.
Distribution is also where you can leverage your PR agency’s network of contacts (and their credibility). Ultimatley you want a self-reinforcing cycle — a hit in the New York Times article about your company gets the reader to your company’s own content-full site which continues to provide useful news/information to the New York Times, etc… It’s not an either or situation, you need traditional media relations plus content creation and distribution to maximize your results.
I was very impressed by Todd’s presentation and learned some great new stuff about PR. I’ll post a link to his slides later this week, until then you can find Todd at Shift Communications or PR Squared.
And, for more about Inbound Marketing University, you can read my reviews of the first round of presentations and watch the IMU classes yourself.
by jbreazeale on July 9, 2009
The exam results came in and… yay! I’m now an Inbound Marketing Certified Professional and am ready to help you put a complete set of inbound marketing tools and practices into use at your company.
Businesses of all sizes are being challenged by their customers to connect, engage, and interact in ways that are meaningful to the customers, and yet when those businesses look for advice on how to make these connections, they’re often at the mercy of their own knowledge, their staff, or the nearest search engine. Wouldn’t it be helpful to have a single resource who can give you the big picture and then break it down into meaningful and actionable steps?
Don’t get me wrong, I think there will always be a need for the niche consultants when you have a very specific problem to solve, but as they say, if you only have a hammer…
Thanks to Hubspot for putting on the excellent Inbound Marketing University (IMU). If you missed it the first time around, you can check out my reviews of the first sessions in June and don’ t miss the sign up for the next session in August!
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by jbreazeale on June 26, 2009
Professor: Brian Carroll, MECLABS, InTouch
Your lead generation efforts have really paid off and you have a full database of people just waiting to hear from you, but maybe not buy from you, not yet. What do you do next? Continue blasting them with email and phone calls? Or, maybe you’re ignoring them altogether? Brian Carrol from InTouch gave us another idea during his IMU presentation – you should nurture those leads through your pipeline.
Brian’s definition:
Lead nurturing is a relevant and consistent dialog with viable, potential customers, regardless of their timing to buy.
Much of the information included in Brian’s presentation would be helpful to anyone looking to better understand sales processes in general and he provides some very colorful mind-maps that would be useful when brainstorming some of these lead generation and nurturing activities.
Some of my key takeaways were:
- Lead nurturing can take a significant amount of resources (time, money, people). And, if you’re in a larger company, don’t discount the internal battles between sales and marketing that you’ll have to negotiate if you want to put one of these plans into action. (Who owns lead generation? Who owns lead nuturing? When do the leads pass from the nurturing team to the sales rep? How do we know that the sales rep is following up? Etc…)
- Don’t underestimate the power of the human touch. Although email and other online tools can be helpful, when it comes right down to it, you’re trying to build deep relationships with selected leads, not lots of shallow relationships with every lead. Building those deeper relationships requires more consistent and meaningful contact.
- Spend enough time at the beginning to clarify who your ideal customer is, how you’ll be able to identify and qualify them, how they’ll be scored and prioritized as they move through the pipeline, and how you’ll nurture them in a way that’ s meaningful to them (e.g. CIOs typically like to have printable reports, so don’t just send them webinar invites).
- Keep building your lead nurturing library of articles, reference guides, white papers, podcasts, etc. that may be of use to your leads. Not only does this help position your team as a trusted advisor, but it also gives you the opportunity to provide value in the form of meaningful and relevant data to your lead instead of just another sales pitch.
- Consider building custom lead nurturing “tracks”. For example, a CEO lead may get “targeted email #1″ in Q1, followed up with a phone call in Q2, and a personalized invitation to an executive briefing in Q3. If you can match these to your lead’s business cycle, even better.
- At a minimum, you should probably contact your leads on a monthly basis (with meaningful and relevant content, of course!)
Here’s Brian’s presentation:
by jbreazeale on June 26, 2009
My takeaway from this presentation: The folks at Marketing Experiments really know their stuff and if I ever have a business that needs (and can afford) their services, I would definitely sign up. Other than that, we seemed to spend most of our time breezing through examples without as much time digging into the details (those questions always seemed to be answered with “It depends…”)
Some useful tidbits:
- Don’t just send people to your home page. Instead, create targeted, clear, and concise landing pages with a meaningful call to action. “Click here” or a “submit” button do not count as meaningful calls to action!
- Conversion heuristic: C = 4m+3v+2(i-f)-2a
- C = probability of conversion
- m = motivation of user (when they arrive at your landing page; Do they want to learn more? Buy something?)
- v = clarity of value proposition (why should they take the next step? adding testimonials to your site is one way to boost this metric)
- i = incentive to take action (must outweigh the friction elements, gift cards are sometimes used as incentives, free trials are another method)
- f = friction elements in process (how much effort does the user need to exert? are you making them click through lots of pages or fill out very detailed forms?)
- a = anxiety about entering information (are you asking them too much information? or the wrong information?)
- Conversion Rate: CR% = (# successes/# actions) * 100
Here’s Jeanne’s presentation:
by jbreazeale on June 25, 2009
Professor: Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz
The community guy praised others, the marketing guy told stories, and the SEO guy pounded us with data. I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised! Rand’s slideshow (below) is packed with helpful information and I know that I’ll be spending some more time digging into it in depth. In the meantime, here are a few of the highlights:
- Expert opinion and correlation data both agree that links are still king – around 75% of Google’s ranking is based around (or affected by) quantity/quality of links.
- Use keywords in your title tags and as close to the beginning as possible; data shows a linear decline between the position of the keywords in the tag and the impact in search results. For example, “John’s Used Cars” would be better than “John’s dealership and repair shop for used cars.”
- Although experts recommend including keywords in your H1 tags, the data suggests that this will have little to no impact on your search results.
- Substantive and unique page content, along with page recency/freshness are some of the most of the important non-link factors.
- Getting lots of people to link to your substantive and unique content really cranks up your SEO.
- Static pages (with substantive and unique content, of course) aren’t bad, but they probably won’t be crawled as often (which may or may not affect your rank).
- Using W3C compliant HTML, another non-link factor, has little to no impact on your search results.
- The number of unique domains linking to you may be more important than the actual number of links. For example, 500 unique domains that link to you is better than 100 unique domains with 500 links.
- The fewer number of domains (and subdomains) you use, the better. Example:
- http://blog.company.com – ok
- http://company.com/blog – better
- It’s a good idea to use keywords in your URL and common keywords are probably readable even if you scrunch them all together. For less common keywords, it’s better to use a hyphen than an underscore. Example:
- http://company.com/healthinsurance.htm – ok
- http://company.com/health-insurance.htm – better
- http://company.com/health_insurance.htm – worse
Here’s Rand’s presentation:
