Your Guide to Inbound Marketing Best Practices

[ Maximize your inbound marketing campaigns ]

Best Practices Guide
for Inbound Marketing Campaigns
A white paper by Pardot

Pardot.com | 950 East Paces Ferry Rd Suite 3300, Atlanta, GA 30326 | P - 404.492.6845 | F - 887.287.8952 | © 2012 Pardot LLC. | All rights reserved worldwide.

Executive Summary
Getting your marketing message to resonate with your target
consumer in today’s increasingly crowded marketplace is one of the
greatest challenges facing marketers today. The internet and related
technologies have revolutionized the face of today’s marketing arena,
creating consumers that are more empowered and markedly more
sophisticated than their predecessors.

Traditional outbound marketing campaigns have
lost their efficacy as more sophisticated inbound
marketing efforts have taken over.
In this white paper, you will learn how to best utilize inbound
marketing campaigns to maximize your company’s marketing
efforts.


Best Practices Guide for Inbound Marketing

Marketers used to engage
consumers with more outbound
messaging and directed one-sided
conversations.
In the past, marketing was straightforward and much less interactive.
Television commercials, print ads, radio spots, direct mailings and billboard
signage are typical examples of outbound marketing. The logic behind
outbound marketing is simple: hit target consumers with your advertisement
with enough frequency and they will eventually take your desired action. In
essence, it was possible to ‘buy’ consumer actions via such media spend to
illicit the targeted action.



Consumers now drive marketing
conversations.
Today consumers’ ability to interact with the internet has spilled over into their
receptiveness to outbound marketing messages and hurt the overall efficacy of those kinds
of campaigns. The face of today’s savvy and cynical consumer is markedly different from
the consumer of yesteryear. Today’s consumers grew up on the internet, are used to being
inundated with endless chatter in their everyday lives and have mastered the art of ‘tuning
out’ marketing messages. As such, traditional outbound marketing campaigns have been
losing ground to a more sophisticated marketing landscape.



Consumers demand personalized and
consistent messages across channels.
Bob Dylan once sang “the times, they are a changin,” and he was right when it comes to
marketing in today’s technology-loaded world. Technology has shifted today’s marketing

Keys to Effective Messaging conversations from ones dominated by companies, to ones that are lead by consumers
and their quest to find information. While today’s internet is largely driven by commerce,
it initially began as an information vehicle and remains a major source of information for
Don’t overcommunicate consumers today.
Keep messages short
Integrate communications Today’s customers initiate many of their conversations with marketers and brands. They

Provide value
search for information on their own, and take action when they are ready to. More
often than ever before, they do so without even leaving their homes. Their hot pursuit
Personalize your messages of information has also raised their expectations surrounding the availability of it. They
demand easily accessible information exactly when they are looking for it. They are no
longer tied to typical business hours, and will access your product information at whatever
time is most convenient for them. Consumers today demand personalized, consistent
information across communication channels.



Consumer now have to deal with information
overload.
While access to information online has certainly sped up consumers purchasing and educational
abilities, it has also lead to a new challenge for marketers: consumer information overload. The
easy access to information has lead to consumers overburdened with so much information that
they resent being approached my marketers and have grown cynical towards typical marketing
campaigns. Consumers now require meaningful, useful communication with companies, on their
own terms.

In response to this shift in consumer expectations, shrewd marketers have started turning away
from outbound marketing efforts and started leveraging the same channels that their prospects
use in order to grow their inbound marketing campaigns. Inbound marketing is buoyed by on the
idea of being “found” by consumers rather than intrusively introducing your company to them.
Consumers now expect these kinds of meaningful interactions that provide value, rather than
traditional sales attempts.

The most competitive companies are proactively building their inbound marketing initiatives using
social media and content marketing. Inbound marketing tools like Facebook, YouTube, blogging,
content, and podcasts have emerged as powerful and efficient customer acquisition streams.



Social media dominates today’s
inbound marketing efforts.
Social media vehicles like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are leading today’s inbound
marketing efforts. While Facebook originally started as a way for students to gossip
about college professors and fellow students, it is now a powerful marketing engine
that connects brands and customers. With over 750 million users, it is virtually
impossible to ignore Facebook and its place in your integrated marketing plan. It
represents the very best of inbound marketing, and it can be a robust tool when
leveraged correctly.

In the past, marketing teams led dialogue with consumers regarding product pricing,
new product lines and product feedback. Today, the norm is having consumers
control these conversations. Consumers are dictating what new product features they
want, how they want them laid out, and how much they want them to cost. Social
media helps companies reach out to consumers on an individual or community-level
and fosters personalized connections.



Content driven marketing has emerged
as a driving force behind inbound
marketing.
Content Marketing Examples The other major component of inbound marketing is content marketing. Creating valuable
content that is meaningful to your customers is a way to generate lots of additional leads
and website traffic. A great piece of content might be a white paper, podcast, or blog post
White papers about something especially relevant to your industry or company. The most downloaded
Podcasts and shared white papers are those that serve to educate and inform customers by
Blog posts providing in depth information about a particular topic, rather than strictly selling a

eBooks product or feature. These ‘thought leadership’ articles are especially compelling and
resonate with your potential buyers.
Infographics
Fresh, relevant content marketing not only serves to inform your customers, it also helps
improve your organic search engine ranking which helps drive more traffic to your site.
Great content pieces can spread virally, quickly shared between people, and even be picked
up by larger websites that have millions of visitors.


Top 10 Winning Inbound Marketing Tips

Learn how you can generate your own inbound marketing campaigns with our

1. Create meaningful content

The key to creating meaningful content for your visitors is to understand their needs and wants.
Are most of your website visitors already customers looking for advanced insight into product
features and new roll outs, or are they newbies that need hand holding and introductory ‘how
to’ guides? Perhaps a lot of your web traffic comes from people that found you by one of your
display ads targeting industry veterans. Each of those unique visitors is looking for content that
is customized to what they are searching for, and should have content tailored to their needs.

Reach out to your company network for new content ideas, as great new content can come
from all parts of your company. For example, your sales team can be a great source of
information regarding common customer questions, competitive positioning, and product
improvements – all of which would make meaningful new content ideas for your website.



2. Optimize it for the search engines

Creating new content for your website is not enough - you also have to optimize your content
for search engines. Search engine optimization (SEO) is easier that you might think. Start
with researching your key industry/product terms (keywords) that you think generate the
most searches in Google, and then create content around those keywords. Be sure to sprinkle
those key terms throughout your content (including your page’s navigation name) in order to
encourage search engines to rank your content higher than your competitors. Do not use your
keywords excessively or you risk getting flagged by Google and penalized.

Including keywords in your page name, title tag, header tags, and image alt tags are great ways
to increase your keyword load on your targeted page without going overboard.

When writing web copy, it’s important to remember that while keeping SEO tactics in mind
is valuable, it is even more important to write quality content that your visitors will find
compelling. If content isn’t interesting and easy to read, no one will share it or take action on
your content.



3. Share your content

Once you have all your sexy new content, it’s important to share it. Promote it through social
media campaigns, emails, webinars, newsletters, even paid search and display ads – without
being intrusive!

Launching your new content can be both soft (i.e. placing a link at the bottom of one of your
email campaigns or a placement on your home page) or hard (a Facebook update or Tweet
alerting your followers to it). For things like white papers, you can even use a fresh display ad
or a paid search campaign to drive downloads more aggressively. It’s important to monitor
paid advertising like display and paid search carefully so that don’t overspend or fail where
your ROI is concerned. While it’s fantastic if 20,000 people download your new white paper
on “Paid Search Best Practices,” you’ve missed the mark if none of those leads turn into paying
customers. Capping frequency in your campaigns is an easy way to make sure you’re not
inundating people with your message over and over, and keeping your spend in check.

Adding a “ShareThis” button to your website is one way to make it easy and simple for people to
share your content.



4. Start a company blog
Starting a company blog is great way to position your business as a thought leader. Your blog
can become a wonderful resource to those looking for more information about your industry,
which in turn leads to new prospects. It’s also a great way to stay in touch with those customers
that are most likely to be your product evangelists. One of the keys to maintaining a positive
online reputation is by keeping your product evangelists happy.

By posting frequently, and keeping those posts relevant and succinct, you’ll be on your way to
effectively blogging. As you explore other industry blogs, you’ll see that the most popular blogs
are the ones that keep their posts fresh, updated, and short.

Blogger and Wordpress are two great (free!) blog publishing tools that are easy to set up and
simple to use.



Tip Sheet: How to Attract New Blog Followers
Promote it - send out an email to your colleagues, friends, and customers letting them know about your blog. Additionally, commenting
on other people’s blogs and linking back to a relevant post on your own blog are great ways to get new eyes on your blog.

Write frequently (it may seem obvious, but writing a blog post 2 or 3 times a week, versus once a week, dramatically increases followers).

Submit your blog to sites like Google, “YaBing”, Technorati, Blogged.com, and FuelMyBlog so that they can start crawling your blog and
including your posts in their search results.

Optimize your blog posts for the search engines (keyword rich copy, proper titles, etc).

Follow other blogs! Don’t be afraid to comment on other blogs that you find interesting (never leave a negative post though! That can
lead to all kinds of negative ramifications).

Add a ‘ShareThis’ button and an RSS feed to your blog posts so that it’s easy for your followers to share your content.

Enable following in your blog so that others can easily subscribe to it.

Add a link to your blog in your email signature.



5. Engage your customers with social media
There are more than 750 million people now using Facebook and another 360 million on Twitter.
You can be sure that somewhere in one of those billion+ accounts, your current and potential
customers can be found. As an inbound marketing tool, social media can help your company or
products be found when someone is looking for them. It can also help your company engage with
key influencers in your space, interact with customers, generate leads and of course, promote your
new content.

A great way to boost your social media productivity is by scheduling your posts in advance.
Marketing automation tools and social media dashboards allow you to create Twitter, Facebook,
and LinkedIn posts in advance and schedule them to go out when you want them to.



6. Build your community

All too often, new social media users start off strongly and then quickly flatline. With
all the other things you’re juggling, it’s easy to see how that can happen. However, it
is important to keep your momentum and use social media regularly to stay engaged
with and build your online community. Facebook and Twitter can be paramount for
discovering who your product evangelists are, and those relationships can be key to
controlling your online reputation.

When you use your social media accounts frequently, you organically create a community
surrounding your company and products, helping you stay top of mind, and creating a
positive user experience. Use your Facebook or Twitter accounts get feedback about your
products or services, ask for feedback about new features or answer common questions
that your core customers have.

Remember that social media is a great vehicle for listening and responding to your key
product evangelists, so don’t simply push information on to your followers.



Tip Sheet: Social Media
Here are a few thoughts to keep in mind when you’re using your social media accounts as business tools.

Remember to be helpful – answer common questions, showcase your website’s FAQ page, or ask for feedback regarding a new feature.

Use social media to post information about upcoming events like product launches, speaking engagements, or company webinars.

Fill our your profiles thoroughly (including a photo as it inspires trust and legitimacy).

Find other industry leaders, related groups, and other fan pages, and add them to your network (don’t forget to comment on their posts!).

Use social media to research the people you’ll be speaking with on your next sales call. Try to glean some kind of personal information and
use it during your call (are they a Red Sox fan? Do they have a photo of their dog online? (But remember, don’t be creepy - no one likes a
stalker!)

Keep your personal information exactly that - personal! Make sure your settings for your personal photos, status updates and tweets are set
to private.

Reward your followers. Recognize those that comment on your posts with personalized responses, a casual thank you, or even some kind of
freebie endear you to followers.

Keep it short and sweet. Both Facebook and Twitter have character limits, so get to the point when posting.

Engage your community with questions related to your business, but also other more personal questions like “Who are you rooting for
during the Superbowl”.



7. Don’t forget about video
Sharing video content about your company is another great way to generate website traffic
and leads while interacting with your target customers. Videos can be uploaded to sites like
YouTube and Vimeo quickly and are great ways to deliver personalized interactions with your
customers. With over 3 billion views of YouTube videos each day, it’s clear that people are
watching. A couple of easy and quick video ideas that you can use are customer testimonials
and product demos.

You can set up accounts and upload your videos to YouTube and Vimeo in just a few minutes



8. Use your office

Utilizing Google places, sites like Yelp, and iPhone apps like FourSquare are great trust-builders
for your business. An actual office location adds credibility to your business while the resulting
link helps your SEO ranking and website traffic.



9. Remember your ultimate goal

Be sure your content focuses on your ultimate goal - generating your Key Performance Indicator
(KPI), which is typically a sale or lead. Optimizing your content for SEO is important, but optimizing
it for your KPI is even more important. Be sure to include a call-to-action (C2A) to remind your
prospects what you want them to do once they’ve absorbed all your new content. Your goal and the
type of campaign you’re running will determine what C2A you want to use. You might use buttons
that say things like “Click Here to Learn More” or “Download this white paper now” if you want your
prospects to read one of your white papers. Conversely, if you’re driving a free trial of a product or a
direct purchase, you might want to use C2As like “Start Free Trial Now” and “Buy Now”.



10. Measure, track, measure again, grow

Measure your results – develop benchmarks, test and learn, and grow. And then test again!

Creating all of your fresh new content without tracking in place is equivalent to playing
Russian roulette. Tracking results helps your organization develop benchmarks that can
fuel additional growth and efficiencies. You should have tracking on all of your web pages,
marketing campaigns, and social media efforts. That key success metric can be as simple as
tracking ‘shares’ or ‘retweets’ or diving deeper and analyzing how much time a visitor spent on a
particular web page (stickiness) on your site before leaving the page (bounce rate).

When you discover what content is the most successful, it becomes easier to create even more
relevant content and build on those insights. Was a revamped product page visited more often
than the old one? Was a certain white paper downloaded more frequently than your other
white papers? Did a Facebook survey generate more responses than your last email blast? With
analytics in place, you’ll be able to track and report on those kinds of results. Most website
analytics are simply snippets of javascript that you add to your web pages.

Google Analytics is a free tool that provides robust reporting metrics perfectly suited for
most small and mid-sized companies. Be sure that your marketing automation suite can fully
integrate with your marketing analytics tool.


Conclusion

Marketers have to work harder and
smarter today to keep pace with more
sophisticated consumers.
By 2005, blogs had become main stream and emerged as sources “people
could not ignore”* and less than 2 years later, it was video that was
driving millions of views a day. Now of course, Facebook and Twitter are
positioned as the leaders of social media and inbound marketing. These
shifts have meant marketers have to work harder, and smarter, to get and
keep a prospect’s attention today.

With effective inbound marketing tactics in place, your marketing team
will be able to maximize your lead generation and sales opportunities
while minimizing costs.

*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_blogging


[No hassle marketing automation]

About Pardot Contact Us
Pardot is an on-demand marketing software company that increases sales and Tel: 877.3.B2B.ROI
maximizes efficiency for companies with complex sales cycles. Tel: 404.492.6845
Fax: 877.287.8952
Pardot offers an industry-leading marketing automation product that
Online: www.pardot.com
manages prospect interactions such as site visits, email, forms, and more.
The on-demand suite solves the integration challenges faced by B2B
marketers today by allowing you to control formerly disparate online and Pardot LLC
offline marketing tools one central interface. Pardot syncs with select CRM 950 East Paces Ferry Rd
vendors and is available on the salesforce.com App Exchange. Pardot was Suite 3300
founded in 2007 and is headquartered in Atlanta, GA.
Atlanta, GA 30326

Your Guide to Inbound Marketing Best Practices

Empfohlen

Empfohlen

Weitere ähnliche Inhalte

Was ist angesagt?

Was ist angesagt? (20)

Andere mochten auch

Andere mochten auch (6)

Ähnlich wie Your Guide to Inbound Marketing Best Practices

Ähnlich wie Your Guide to Inbound Marketing Best Practices (20)

Your Guide to Inbound Marketing Best Practices