Problem #1: I don’t know what will resonate. Should I resort to scotch-induced content?

Okay, it’s not really after a nice full glass of scotch, but before keyword research, marketers relied on their ‘gut feeling’ or costly and time consuming focus groups.

Fix It:

Today’s comprehensive online data about keyword traffic (for the most part) and website behavior shows marketers what is really driving behavior. Search and analytics are no replacement for talking to your prospects and customers, but you can get a lot more efficient and targeted with keyword analytics.

Before you create your next ebook, blog post, or even email campaign, be sure to check out your (and your competitors’) traffic-driving keywords. Doing so will give you the insights to enable you to create more compelling content that focuses on the keywords and topics your target audience wants, thus attracting more of the right prospects to your site.

Problem #2: I don’t know where to start. What will have the biggest impact?

Regardless of your business, the sales and marketing process can usually be modeled as a funnel. If you don’t know whether it’s broken at the top, bottom, or leaky somewhere in the middle, then you’re going to have a hard time improving your results. That means scattershot approaches at problem solving, which is never any good.

Fix It:

Enter closed-loop analytics. Dissecting your funnel to understand what’s coming in at the top and the fallout at each stage along the way will help you identify the ‘leakiest’ parts of the funnel so you can start to fix it there. If you have stellar website traffic but only .05% of it converts into a lead, and leads close at a 50% rate, you’ll pretty quickly know that you need to work on that first conversion and investigate why your offers aren’t resonating or if you’re driving the WRONG types of traffic to your site.

Now that’s a simple example, and most funnels are more complex. But no matter your process, in order to do this, you need your analytics to integrate with your CRM system so you can map that funnel all the way to the end.

Problem #3: I don’t know how to evaluate my social media. I’ll just swag it.

Yes, marketers know they should be participating in social media. But so often, it’s hard to justify why. Coming up with a ‘swag’ or ballpark estimate of value is all you can do if you aren’t using analytics.

Fix It:

Not only can marketers use traffic analytics to show the volumes of traffic coming to their site from social media, but if they are using integrated marketing tools, they can also measure leads and even customers generated from a specific channel like Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook. Mapping dollars and cents to social media campaigns makes it a lot easier to invest in the best social media channels for your business and spend less time on those that aren’t generating marketing results. Even without sophisticated tools, you can use customized, short URLs and specific landing pages dedicated to your social campaigns to track their results.

Problem #4: We missed our number, and I’m in a SMarketing war.

Have you ever seen sales and marketing managers at each others’ throats when the team missed quota?

Fix It:

Creating and maintaining a service level agreement (SLA) between your sales and marketing departments and then measuring which type of leads (based on lead scoring) were generated and how many and quickly they were touched by sales is easier than ever. What used to become a knock-down, drag-out battle has grown up into a collaborative business discussion about tweaking lead criteria and optimizing sales processes to make the entire company successful.

If you read this post and thought, “Wait… that sounds like my company’s marketing department,” don’t despair. With some careful implementation of marketing analytics tools, you can turn your organization into a data-driven marketing machine!

1. Be Relevant – Determine a Journalist’s Beat
   Journalists get pounded with thousands of press releases and story requests from PR professionals on a daily basis. The trick is figuring out the best way to break through the clutter and grab their attention. The first step to doing this is to determine which topic(s), or beat(s), the journalist writes about.
2. Conduct Research – Read a Journalist’s Past Articles
   Identify which stories a journalist has covered in the past. If you think your company is interchangeable with another company the reporter has written about, pitch the story to them. Show them that you have a creative angle that could be a follow-up story to one of their past articles. Also, research which reporters and publications are writing about your competitors. If they are writing about a similar industry and topic, they may be open to writing about your company, too.
3. Listen – Use Twitter
   An important part of building relationships on Twitter is listening to what others are asking for instead of always asking for help. Many journalists tweet about articles they are writing and seek people to interview. Use tools like Muck Rack to identify appropriate journalists by beat and industry on Twitter, and take the necessary steps to build relationships and schmooze with the journalists you’d love coverage from.
4. Establish Yourself – Get Journalists’ Attention
   Tweet about and create content that covers topics similar to what journalists have written about in the past. Communicate with journalists and provide feedback on what you liked about their past articles. Share content either you’ve created or think the journalist would find useful to get their attention. Notice they’re looking for a source for their story? Your business might not be a great fit, but maybe you could suggest another helpful source. Be helpful, and they’ll be more inclined to return the favor.
5. Network – Leverage LinkedIn Introductions
   Research journalists on LinkedIn. Because you can see which connections you share, introductions can be more intimate. Research the connections you have in common, and request introductions from your mutual connections. This practice should go both ways, too. If you introduce your colleagues to the people you know, you’ll find the goodwill will be reciprocated.
6. Be Top of Mind – Stay in Touch
   A major part of public relations is building relationships. And part of relationship-building is making sure that after someone helps you out or does you a favor, you show your appreciation and possible even reciprocate. The same applies when working with journalists. After a journalist gives your business some news coverage, make sure you reach out to them and let them know you appreciated the article. Keep the door open for opportunities to work together in the future. This may mean periodically letting them know what your company is up to or following their research and publications to see where you can help them out with a story. Even if you’re not a good fit for a future story they’re writing, they will be more inclined to suggest you to another journalist whose story you are a good fit for.
7. Create Remarkable Content – Give Journalists a Reason to Cover You
   Content creation is arguably your best tool for public relations outreach. Don’t simply repeat the normal online discussion topics within your industry. Create content that stands out, and media professionals will take notice organically. Can you do the research to publish an industry report that reveals some compelling industry insights? Original research and data analysis can take your content and ideas a step further and truly stand out to the masses. Furthermore, particularly creative content has a lot of potential to generate media coverage as well. Think viral videos, awesome infographics, and funny cartoons.
8. Optimize – Optimize Press Releases for Search and Lead Generation
   Press releases are a tried and true tool for distributing company news, but they have another great benefit as well: SEO. Because press releases are often published on many news syndication sites, they offer a ripe opportunity to build inbound links for your business and help you boost search engine rankings. In your press releases, be sure to include appropriate keywords for your business to help increase the release’s SEO value. Also include relevant links with anchor text pointing back to your website. To amp up the lead gen value of your press releases, consider linking back to landing pages on your website, too.
9. Publish Content Regularly – Maintain a Company News Blog
   Every time your company does something interesting, you likely can’t afford to distribute a press release. It can get expensive, and won’t be efficient. But just because you don’t send out a press release over the proverbial ‘wire,’ that doesn’t mean you can’t write about it on a company news blog. Create a separate blog that is reserved for interesting company news and updates (separate it from your educational, industry thought leadership blog), and publish content to it regularly. Link to your news blog from your website’s newsroom, and the media will recognize this as the “go-to” place to read about the latest happenings of your company.
10. Create Brand Evangelists – Let Others Do PR for You
    Continue to produce relevant and interesting content for your audience. You will soon find that you have generated a great following of fans and evangelists who will likely spread your messages and thus, do some PR handywork for you and your company.

• Leverage Domain Knowledge
  If you’ve been researching industry language in order to nail a product or service page description, put the knowledge you’ve gathered to work by pitching the idea of a blog to your client. Written in the customers’ language, blogs help create the need for your clients’ products and services. Communicate to your clients that websites with active blogs generate more traffic and leads than those that don’t, and that you can easily be the point-person for this effort.
• Give Your Best Content Growth Hormones
  Blog for a month or so, and then measure which posts performed the best. Bubble those posts up into an uber-topic, and get your client to commit resources for writing a more extensive and premium piece of content around that subject, like an ebook or a whitepaper. Give this the loving touch of a copywriter by dressing it up with a genius title, illustrative pictures, compelling charts, and witty headlines.
• Unleash Your Premium Content
  Build a landing page for your ebook or whitepaper to live behind, so that a website visitor has to exchange their contact information in order to download. Then place links to that landing page within and at the end of your blog posts. Make it your goal to have that link “complete your reader’s thought,” meaning if they read something high-level on your blog, the ebook or whitepaper is an opportunity for them to really dig in.
• Make a Goal-Line Handoff From Sales to Marketing
  By linking to those landing pages, you have built real lead generation potential into every blog article you post. Continue by building the potential for real customers by listing out the specialties of your client’s salespeople, and matching each rep to a landing page. Doing so will ensure that the name and email address of every lead generated gets funneled to that rep with the best chance of closing the business.
• Rinse & Repeat
  Get in the habit of measuring everything. It will allow you to build on successes you’re having, report on content that might be falling flat, advocate for increase project scope, or earn a retainer deal from your client.

1. 200 million Americans have registered their phone numbers on the FTC’s “Do Not Call” list.
2. 91% of email users have unsubscribed from a company email they previously opted into.
3. 84% of 25-34-year-olds have left a favorite website because of intrusive or irrelevant advertising.
4. 86% of people skip television ads.
5. 44% of direct mail is never opened.
6. 61% of marketers will invest more in earned media (inbound marketing) in 2011.
7. The average budget spent on company blogs and social media has nearly doubled in the last 2 years.
8. The number of marketers who say Facebook is “critical” or “important” to their business has increased 83% in the last 2 years.
9. 2/3 of marketers say their company blog is “critical” or “important” to their business.
10. 67% of B2C companies and 41% of B2B companies have acquired a customer through Facebook.
11. 57% of businesses have acquired a customer through their company blog.
12. 42% of businesses have acquired a customer through Twitter.
13. 57% of companies have acquired a customer through LinkedIn.
14. 48% of companies have acquired a customer through Facebook.
15. Inbound marketing costs 62% less per lead than traditional outbound marketing.
16. 3 out of 4 inbound marketing channels cost less than any outbound channel.
17. 55% of companies who blog reported leads from their blog were “below average” in cost.
18. 47% of companies who use social media reported leads from social media were “below average” in cost.
19. 39% of companies who leverage SEO reported leads from SEO were “below average” in cost.
20. 27% of companies who use PPC reported leads from PPC were “below average” in cost.
21. Trade shows were reported as being “above average” in cost by 47% of respondents.
22. Direct mail was reported as being “above average” in cost by 27% of respondents.
23. Telemarketing was reported as being “above average” in cost by 21% of respondents

1. Make Sure Your Messaging Aligns: One reason for poorly converting landing pages is unaligned messaging and positioning. Take a look at your page’s referral sources to identify where your traffic is coming from. Then take a look at the messaging from those sources. Perhaps you’re generating traffic to the landing page via your blog and from social media, yet the language you’re using to promote the offer in these channels isn’t really in sync with the language you’re using on the landing page itself. Conflicting messaging is an easy way to confuse visitors to your landing page and mess with their expectations, resulting in a lot of potential leads left on the table.
2. Make Sure You’re Clearly Communicating the Necessary Action: Once visitors land on your page, does it clearly communicate what action they need to take? If your visitors are left with a question of what they need to do next to retrieve your offer, you definitely have some healing to do. Use clear, actionable language to let visitors know what action they need to take. Do they need to ‘download’ the ebook, ‘register’ for the webinar, or ‘sign up’ for the free trial? Use specific, action-based text that’s clear and obvious, and avoid vague terms like ‘submit.’
3. Remove Site Navigation and Competing Calls-to-Action: Your landing page is no place for competing calls-to-action for other offers. Including other calls-to-action on a landing page is a sure-fire way to increase your page’s bounce rate, confuse visitors, and inhibit lead generation. Focus each landing page on one specific offer, and limit the chances of visitors navigating to another page on your site by hiding the top navigation from that page.
4. Test Form Lengths: Another factor that may be contributing to your landing page’s conversion problem is form length. We always recommend marketers decide on their forms’ length based on their particular leads goals (i.e. longer forms may result in fewer, yet more high-quality leads, and shorter forms may result in a higher volume of leads, but ones that are lower in quality). However, a page suffering from a low conversion rate may be a good indicator that its form length needs shortening. Remember: you should only be asking visitors for the information you need from them. Test a shortened version of your form, and see if it results in more leads, especially if that’s your goal.
5. Offer Security: In a world where online privacy and security is becoming more and more of a concern for many internet users, sense of security is a must-have. Keep in mind that, by completing your lead-capture form, you’re asking your site visitors to share some sensitive, personal information about themselves, and this is often a point of concern for many. To combat these issues, include an obvious link to your company’s privacy policy on or near your form. This will help ease people’s fears and fight many visitors’ hesitation to fill out your form.

1. Maintain an e-learning portal. Set up an online community of video content and boldly give away lots and lots of free information. You heard me: give it away. Set it up so that people need to register in order to view the content and then fill it with useful, full-length webinars and videos that teach your constituents things of value that will help them. Give them a 30-second preview first so they get a sense of what their getting. A lot of people get freaked out by the concept of giving away so much information but in order to attract subscribers, you need to provide a lot of value. Yes, it takes work. Jump in.
2. Consistently publish a great blog. Create articles that teach, educate, and inform and then publish them on your blog for free. Yes, you guessed it: boldly give away free information. Then make sure your readers have an easy way to subscribe to your blog via email. If the content is good enough, your readers will join your mailing list and now you have permission to talk to them. Yes, this also takes work. Jump in.
3. Give away services with live webinars. Running a webinar series is a great way to find new prospects. Create high-value presentations that teach and inform and give away all your secrets. Yes, you are still hearing me correctly: give your knowledge away for free. Then, at the end of each webinar, make an offer to give away even more stuff. Set up a form and invite people to fill it out to get a free consultation, audit, or report. Offer it to the first five people who fill it out. Make sure the consultation is a true consultation, not a sales pitch. These people will end up in your CRM and will develop the most loyalty to your organization. Yes, this takes even more work. Jump in.

1. Identify the benefit.
Yeah, I know, this is another thing you already knew, but it’s the necessary first step in this process: identify the benefit (the positive influence or outcome) the consumer/customer/client gets by obtaining your feature. To wit:

* Fungus-resistant grass seed: grows in adverse, fungus-prone conditions
* Packet-shaping technology: gives IT the power to control/allocate bandwidth to selected network activities
* Keyword audit: identifies most effective words for efficient SEO

2. Put the benefit in context.
In other words, why is this benefit important to the reader (or to customers)? In what conditions, situations and/or environments does the benefit have meaning? When or how does this benefit matter? For example:

* Fungus-resistant grass seed: works well in shaded and/or waterlogged lawn areas
* Packet-shaping technology: accelerates traffic and improves networking performance without having to buy more raw bandwidth
* Keyword audit: helps companies drive more (and more precisely targeted) traffic to their sites

3. Place the benefit/context within a reader-centric theme.
As the creator of content, your motives are clear: you’re building credibility as a trustworthy authority, a resource to whom money may be reasonably transferred (i.e., ultimately, you’re moving toward a sale). But to motivate potential customers to read your content, you have to speak to their interests.

The theme of your ebook/white paper must address an audience concern—the more urgent, the better. Any feature, transformed into a benefit and placed into context, should be flipped into a supporting point or idea that reinforces the theme. It looks like this:

* Fungus-resistant grass seed:
Theme: 10 Turf-Building Ideas for Tough Lawns
Specific supporting point: “For wet lawns, apply fungus-resistant seed blends.”

* Packet-shaping technology:
Theme: Winning with WAN: How to Boost Performance Without Busting Budgets
Specific supporting point: “Allocate resources by activity and priority.”

* Keyword audit:
Theme: S.O.S. for SEO—Getting the Traffic You Deserve
Specific supporting point: “Review keywords for relevance and popularity.”

Let your customers flip over you
Notice what the examples didn’t do: name the product or service behind the topic idea. Successful trappers don’t go into the woods shouting, “Yoo-hoo! The net’s over here!” Your white paper’s job is to build a connection in readers’ minds between the things they want and your company or brand. Anything that stinks of “commercial” will break that connection.

Instead, let your ideas speak for themselves. If you work your flips correctly, they will automatically point to the unique virtues of your enterprise. To complete the connection, be sure that your ebook or white paper includes a call to action—a demo, a sample, a webinar invitation, etc.—that draws readers another step closer to your company. Make the right flips and your readers are more likely to become customers who’ll flip over you.

Health is rapidly becoming a hot topic in the blogosphere, and marketing–whether self-promotion or the promotion of others’ products–is becoming more prevalent among health-related blogs, according to new research.

A survey from health care marketing communications consultant Envision Solutions finds that nearly half of all American adult bloggers have written about a health-related subject, and 60% of those bloggers write primarily on health-related topics. The company estimated that more than 13 million Americans posted at least one health-related item to a blog between February and August 2008.

“[Health blogging] has exponentially grown over the past two years,” says Fard Johnmar, founder of Envision Solutions. “Once dominated by medical professionals, the health blogosphere has grown to incorporate a diverse range of people in the United States.”

Health-related blogs also span many different demographics, Johnmar says. More than half–057%–of health bloggers are women and 38% are African-American or Hispanic. Half of health-related bloggers were between the ages of 18 and 34, according to the survey.

While one-third of the respondents said they were blogging to educate others about a condition or malady, 21% of them said they blogged primarily for marketing purposes, such as a doctor who looked to increase business for his or her practice, or a health care consultant wishing to demonstrate expertise in a subject or health policy.

Only 7% of the respondents said they were blogging to help cope with a medical condition, and 10% said they were doing it to advance a cause.

Outside of personal marketing, 46% of the health care marketing professionals said they had been contacted by PR professionals to promote a product or service–up 29% in the 2006 survey, Johnmar says. Thirty-five percent of the bloggers said they were running advertisements on their blogs, compared with 27% in 2006.

Despite those findings, nearly three-quarters of the bloggers — 73%–expressed confidence that their peers were disclosing conflicts of interest. (In a finding that may be related, nearly 20% fewer bloggers reported posting anonymously than in the 2006 survey.) Seventy-nine percent of health bloggers said a person’s background and biases have a greater influence than advertising
on credibility.

The complexity of the B2B buying process, compared to that for B2C, often demands more of marketers. Because of the longer B2B sales cycle, marketers must diligently fill the sales pipeline and continuously support sales by keeping prospects engaged with the brand during the sales cycle through the use of multiple touchpoints, like email or campaign nurturing programs.

Marketers have an endless array of digital channels and choices for uncovering prospects, and MarketingProfs and Junta42 found 63% of B2B marketers in North America turn to content marketing as a key lead generation source.

More specifically, North American B2B marketers used articles (78%) and e-newsletters (61%) for their content marketing efforts. More educational and instructional forms of content, like case studies (55%), white papers (43%) and webinars (42%), were also used. These types of educational and instructional content were rated the most valuable for directly supporting B2B marketers’ objectives, according to Focus Research.

Use these five simple but powerful rules to elevate your next presentation from mundane to magnificent.

• RULE #1: Treat your audience as king.
  Like any good content, great presentations focus less on the author and more on the audience. Don’t just throw together slides that force your point of view on the audience; design slides that meet THEIR needs. What does your audience want? What unites them? What incites them? What can you do for them? Why should they adopt your view? And finally, what steps do they need to take? Don’t forget that the last slide is the one they’ll most remember, so take extra care to be very clear on that final page.
• RULE #2: Spread ideas & move people.
  Don’t just share your ideas or your data; make meaning. Don’t focus solely on changing minds; put some effort into changing hearts. Powerful imagery and though-provoking video are excellent tools for connecting your audience to your message emotionally—which after all is how humans ultimately make decisions, and what separates man from machine.
• RULE #3: Help them see what you’re saying.
  On average, half your audience will be verbal thinkers, and half will be visual. Cater to both by brainstorming graphics that will effectively communicate your words. Then apply a consistent look that helps attract, not distract your audience from your message.
• RULE #4. Practice design, not decoration.
  Nancy rightly points out that 90% of the creative process is actually destructive. You create a slide—and then slowly but surely see what you can peel away.

  Do you have one main point? Consider using just a single word on a slide to convey your core message. Want your audience to remember several ideas? Don’t plop them all bullet-style on a single slide; reveal them one at a time, creating story, and share an example or anecdote to illustrate each one. Have an image or quote that accurately expresses your idea? Let it! Don’t be afraid to remove everything else from the slide, and let that one powerful image say it all.

• RULE #5. Cultivate healthy relationships with your slides—and your audience.
  Too many of us “hide” behind our slides. We overload them with text and complicated diagrams, hoping they’ll reduce the communication burden—when actually they increase it. Reduce the amount of text on your slides as much as possible. Put all of the details in your notes, and practice like crazy! Get in the habit of using slides only as ‘digital scenery’ and connecting eye to eye with your audience. Remember: the Audience is King