Last week, we presented our readers with some interesting data about the impact of social CTAs on Facebook engagement. But we got to wondering — what about posing questions in your Facebook posts? How would that impact engagement metrics such as Likes, shares, and comments?

If you’re an active Facebook marketer, you’ve probably seen countless brands using questions as a fan engagement tactic. By asking questions, the social media managers behind those pages are hoping to generate responses, thereby increasing engagement rates. In fact, the power of questions on Facebook has been accepted conventional wisdom for some time now.

Digging into a large data set of more than 1.2 million posts from the 10,000 most Liked Facebook Pages, I was able to not only verify that anecdotal evidence, but also figure out specifically which types of questions work best. Let’s take a look at what I uncovered …

As you can see in the infographic, I found that while posts with questions tend to generate more comments, they also tend to garner fewer Likes and shares than non-question posts. In other words, the data shows that periodically using questions to encourage commenting does work, but they are not an all-encompassing engagement panacea. Posing questions can be a great way to elicit feedback from your Facebook fans and page visitors, but it’s not the most effective way to drive overall Facebook engagement.

In addition, we can also see that question words that yield “yes” or “no” responses such as “should” and “would” — as well as multiple choice questions like “which” — tend to generate more comments than nebulous, open-ended questions like “why” and “how.” The takeaway here is, if you’re using questions to generate more comments on your Facebook Page, post questions that are quick and easy to answer.

How are you using questions on your Facebook Page timeline? Have you experienced similar results?

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We marketing folk talk a whole heck of a lot about “creating valuable content.” In fact, a quick site search of our own blog turned up over 1,400 results for the term “valuable content” alone. And that doesn’t even include the multitude of other variations of the phrase we’ve used, like “helpful content,” “educational content,” “remarkable content,” or “quality content.”

But let’s be honest with ourselves, marketers. Is our content actually helpful? Or is all this talk just lip service to the oft-cited “create remarkable content” inbound marketing credo?

I think some of us might be coming down too hard on our content, while others are probably being too lenient. So I thought it might be good to create a checklist of sorts that we can refer to as a reality check when we’re publishing content. It might quell the fears in some anxiety-prone marketers that their content truly is valuable … and send some back to the drawing board. Don’t worry — it’s all for the love of marketing!

One of the first questions a content creator should ask is, “For whom am I writing this piece of content?” (Brownie points from the grammar nuts?)

You’re going to have a tough time creating a piece of valuable content if you haven’t identified who your target persona is, because it’s hard to know what kinds of questions they have that need answering. Once you’ve created your buyer personas and sussed out what their pain points are, ask yourself whether the piece of content you’re creating addresses an aspect of those pain points.

For example, the reason I’m writing this blog post is due to the fact that several leads and customers have asked if I could check out their blog content to see if it’s the kind of educational content great inbound marketers create. Hmmm … if leads and customers are asking this kind of question — people who we’ve already identified align with our target persona — it’s pretty safe to assume there’s hundreds, thousands, MILLIONS (okay, maybe just thousands) of people out there that need help figuring out what are the concrete qualities of valuable marketing content.

You might find that there are certain pockets of your audience that are more advanced with industry concepts than others. We’ve certainly found that — some of our readers are just learning about inbound marketing, while some have been practicing it for years. Or perhaps there are readers out there that have been inbound marketers forever, but they just decided to get started using LinkedIn. That’s why we started putting skill-level tags on all of our blog posts and ebooks, so readers could gauge whether the content was right for them before they invested too much time in it.

You don’t necessarily have to go this far, labeling your content with skill-level tags. But you should keep in mind your reader’s level of understanding of certain concepts when creating content. After all, a piece of content that’s either too elementary, or goes right over their head, doesn’t offer them a ton of value.

Before you ship a piece of marketing content, consider whether it’s the right type of content — or even the right channel to publish that content — considering your readers’ stage in the sales cycle. There are certain channels, content types, and subject matters that are really only appropriate for readers at a certain stage in your marketing funnel. Here’s a general guideline to keep in mind:

This means you don’t saturate your Twitter account with links to product data sheets — nobody cares. It also means you don’t bombard your marketing qualified leads (MQLs) who are just trying to get your purchase order signed off on by legal with invites to top-of-the-funnel webinars. Swap those two, and you’re doing alright.

It’s always healthy to do a business babble check on your content. Business babble is how people who want to sound wicked smart talk and write.

“Sound” being the operative word.

Read through your content to see if you’re saying things as clearly as possible. If you have trouble nailing an accessible tone in your writing, a good rule of thumb is to simply write how you speak to a friend. I’ll use the example of explaining what SEO is to my grandma — this is a real-life example from the last time I went home for the holidays

“You know when you go to Google and type something in — like how late the grocery store is open? Well, you usually click on the first few results, because they answer your question the best, right? That’s what SEO is — it stands for search engine optimization, and it’s all about finding a way to get your grocery store to show up in the top of Google.”

And for comparison sake, the business-babbley way of explaining that would be:

“SEO describes the practice of optimizing the instances and placement of your site’s web pages in the SERPs based on a user’s search query to help solve for greater traffic and conversions.”

Some of us can probably parse that second one … but why should we have to? Just make it easy to get through, and don’t leave anybody out by speaking in more complicated terms than are absolutely necessary.

Part of writing with a clear tone means writing with specificity — in other words, writing exactly what you mean, and avoiding broad, general statements. Or at least avoiding broad, general statements that you don’t couple with specific details that help clarify your meaning.

Here’s what I mean. (See?! We’re doing it right now, guys!)

If you’re writing a blog post about how to measure the ROI of your Facebook presence, one of your points would probably be about the importance of measuring the month-over-month growth in engagement on your page. But are you going to explain exactly why this is an important metric to measure? Or is it just part of a laundry list of things you should measure … without detailing the purpose of performing that measurement? Furthermore, are you going to tell the reader where in their Facebook account they can get metrics like this?

As a reader, I’d want to see information like:

Growth in engagement is important to measure, because more engagement means that you’re probably showing up in Facebook’s News Feed more often.That’s because of the way Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm works — favoring content from brands that receive a lot of engagement.As such, it’ll be easier for you to grow your reach on Facebook, and this is an important metric.If you want to measure the growth of your engagement, you can go to Page Level Insights in Facebook and export consumption metrics into Excel. I might even want some screenshots.

Prescriptive content like this, which bridges the gap between theory and execution, is way more valuable than general content that touts best practices but doesn’t tell the reader how to do anything.

Dude, we just did this. A few times, actually. It’s why I did a business babble compare and contrast, and why I included a screenshot of an ebook with a skill-level tag in it. Examples demonstrate the concept you’re trying to explain in a real-world scenario. And real-world scenarios mean way more to a reader than hypotheticals.

You should also make sure your examples help demonstrate how the concept you’re writing about would work in your readers’ daily lives. Selling SEO software to lawyers? Use examples about conducting keyword research around legal search terms. Selling children’s clothing to moms? Use examples that talk about getting grass stains out of the knees of your kids’ jeans. Even if you’re selling across multiple industries or targeting more than one persona, you can still try to find some common ground. That’s why examples in our content are often about marketing — people reading a marketing blog all have a basic understanding of the concepts, so the examples will resonate.

A simple way to make your content incredibly valuable is by adding benchmarking data when it’s available. It’s a way to let your readers know whether they’re on the right track with whatever it is you’re teaching.

For instance, when we wrote a blog post about how to properly launch a mobile app, the first thing we told people to do was define success so they knew whether their app launch was, you know … successful. That’s why we gave them this benchmark:

Because without it, it wouldn’t be that valuable. I mean, how would they know if they were successful without knowing what “success” is? If you can provide some sort of data point that indicates whether your reader is doing something right or wrong, or even that helps illustrate a trend your reader should know about, your content will be far more valuable.

Finally, whether your content is valuable or not has a lot to do with the shape it takes — blog post, ebook, tip sheet, video, podcast, infographic, visualization, graph, cartoon — you get the picture. There are some concepts that are best communicated in some of these forms, while the other content types should really be left for other subject matters. If you’ve selected a content format type that aligns really well with your subject matter — like a video and accompanying blog post to explain how to set up your Facebook Timeline — the content will be easier for your audience to consume. And the easier it is to consume, the more they’ll get from it!

This is all a lot of work. Can’t we just have a little fun once in a while?

Yeah, you totally can. I think there’s a lot of value in publishing content that is just there to entertain … once in a while. You might learn a little bit along the way, too, but it’s alright to intersperse your educational content with a little fun. We like to refer to this as the dessert at the end of a healthy meal. You finished your peas and carrots content, now you get a scoop of infographic ice cream. Enjoy. In fact, our readers were lucky enough to have some ice cream for breakfast yesterday morning, with this blog post and slideshow relating social media to coughSEXcough.

It’s good to give your readers’ brains a breather once in a while with content that’s a little bit lighter. Plus, it helps you build your brand, be more likable, and strengthen the emotional ties your reader has with your content.

What other qualities do you think inbound marketers should check for to assess whether they’ve put out a valuable piece of content?

Image credit: SeattleClouds.com

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Didjya hear the news? Yesterday, Pinterest launched business accounts! If you’re feeling a little frazzled — “Ahh! What do I do? How do I get one? I already have a regular profile acting as my business page! Oh, the humanity!” — take a breather. We’ve pulled together a brand spankin’ new ebook with step-by-step instructions about how to set up your Pinterest business account — or convert your current profile into one. You can get your free copy here.

But once you’ve completed the account setup or conversion process, what can you do to promote your business’ Pinterest presence outside of Pinterest? First things first: let your audience know you have one! Luckily, yesterday Pinterest also announced some other awesome tools and resources just for businesses, including a couple of brand new widgets that help you promote your business’ Pinterest presence through one of your most powerful marketing assets: Your website!

Pinterest offers four different types of buttons and widgets to add to your website:

‘Pin It’ Button’Follow’ Button’Profile’ Widget (NEW!)‘Board’ Widget (NEW!)

The ‘Pin It’ and ‘Follow’ buttons have always been available, but now you have even more options with Pinterest’s ‘Profile’ and ‘Board’ widgets. This post will teach you exactly what each of these buttons and widgets are, why and how they’re useful, and how to create the embed code you need to make them appear on your website. The code for all of these buttons and widgets can be generated on Pinterest’s Widget Builder page.

The ‘Pin It’ button lets people pin an image from your website to Pinterest, allowing your site visitors to easily share your site’s visual content on Pinterest. To create the button, first select if you’d like the pin count number (a count of the number of people who have pinned that image) to appear above or beside your ‘Pin It’ button — or not at all.

To generate the button for a specific image on a web page, insert the URL of the page that image appears on, and add the URL location for the image you want visitors to pin (right click on the image on your website and click ‘Copy Image Location’ — or select ‘View Image Info,’ and copy and paste the URL under the ‘Location’ field). Then write a short, keyword-optimized description of the image. We recommend against including a URL in the description itself, as Pinterest is known to mark these as spam.

Pinterest will then generate a preview and provide you with your embed code that you can copy and paste into your site HTML wherever you want the button to appear — preferably next to the image you want visitors to pin.

The ‘Pin It’ button is great for promoting the visual content you have on your site, particularly the original visuals your business has created. Place these buttons next to concept visualizations, infographics, product screenshots, etc. on blog articles, landing pages, product pages, other website pages, and even within email messages!

The Pinterest ‘Follow’ button enables you to promote your overall business presence on Pinterest by encouraging and allowing site visitors to easily follow your business on Pinterest, thus helping you grow your social reach.

To generate the embed code for your website, simply enter your Pinterest page’s URL and company/brand name. We recommend turning the button into a call-to-action by adding a verb like “Follow” before your company name, as we’ve done in the example below.

Then simply copy and paste the embed code Pinterest provides into your site HTML wherever you want the button to appear.

Add the ‘Follow’ button to the rest of your suite of social media follow buttons on your website and/or email communication. For example, if you promote your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+ presence using follow buttons on your website’s homepage, ‘About Us’ page, ‘Contact Us’ page, or in your email messages, add your Pinterest ‘Follow’ button to the mix there, too! 

Pinterest’s ‘Profile’ widget allows you to display up to 30 of your latest pins anywhere on your website. This widget is valuable for businesses trying to grow their Pinterest following, because it enables you to demonstrate the value of your Pinterest account to your site visitors before they choose to follow you.

To generate the embed code for your own ‘Profile’ widget, simply insert your user URL, which will then pull in the 30 most recent pins from the URL. By clicking on ‘Advanced Options,’ you can also customize the height and width of your widget, as well as the width of the images it displays within.

Then simply copy and paste the embed code into your site HTML where you want this board to appear.

Consider pairing this widget with the Pinterest ‘Follow’ button on your site. If visitors are interested in the pins they see in the widget, you’ll want to make it super easy for them to follow you right then and there! Add this widget to the ‘About Us’ or ‘Contact Us’ section of your website — or to a web page dedicated to promoting your social media presence across various social networks.

Pinterest’s ‘Board’ widget is similar to its ‘Profile’ widget, but it allows you to display up to 30 of your latest pins on a specific board. This widget is useful if you have one particular board that might appeal to visitors of a particular page or section of your site, thus giving you more targeted content options.

To generate the embed code for your own ‘Board’ widget, simply insert the URL of the Pinterest board you’d like to display on your site. Just as with the ‘Profile’ widget, by clicking on ‘Advanced Options,’ you can also customize the height and width of your widget, as well as the width of the images it displays within.

Pinterest will generate the embed code you need, which you can copy and paste into your site’s HTML wherever you want that board to appear.

Create segmented pinboards that you can use to pin more targeted visual content. Then create targeted web pages appealing to that specific segment, and showcase some of the visual content that caters to them using a widget for that specific pinboard.

How else could you effectively leverage Pinterest’s various buttons and widgets to empower your business Pinterest presence? To learn about the other ways you can take advantage of Pinterest’s new business accounts, download our new, free ebook, A Guide to Pinterest’s New Business Accounts.

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In the last 11 months, there have been tons of updates to our favorite social networks, several of which were extremely relevant for marketers and business owners.

Many of them were just little tweaks, but a lot — 16 in our estimation — had a huge impact on marketers’ jobs. The latter are the ones we want to highlight; not just to show how much can change in a year, but to emphasize how critical it is to remain agile as an inbound marketer so you can keep up with all these updates. Plus, if you’re not already using some of these new features (or perhaps didn’t know they existed), what better time to get started than the new year?

Here are the biggest social media updates of 2012, and why they were so darn important to marketers.

With users coming to companies’ Facebook pages from all over the world, Facebook needed to do something to make marketing easier so community managers wouldn’t have to either 1) keep up multiple brand pages, or 2) maintain one brand page with really untargeted content. That’s why we were so excited in October, when Facebook announced Global Pages that allowed marketers to maintain just one Facebook page URL, but route fans to different versions of the page based on their location. Here, look at Facebook’s own Facebook page, for an example:

This update makes the job of a social media marketer much more efficient and effective. Before, marketers had to manage multiple accounts in different languages, or decide which language they were going to cater to and settle for unhappy followers who couldn’t understand the content. Now, you get the best of both worlds — one page to manage, personalized content, and one centralized dashboard to measure it all.

In June, Facebook launched an important feature for marketers who use sponsored ads. For the first time, they allowed marketers to pay for ads only in the Facebook mobile app, as opposed to the mobile app and desktop app combined.

Many companies may have known that their audience was predominantly using mobile over desktop — or perhaps at certain times one is preferable over the other. However, they had to pay for both advertising placements to have the chance to reach mobile users. Now that these options are separate, marketers can now target their mobile audience differently than those accessing pages on their desktop. They can also see which platform performs better to understand where their advertising dollars should be going.

In August, Facebook announced that they were going to allow advertisers to target their audience based on more criteria than before, including age, gender, gender the user’s interested in, relationship status, education, college grad (college name, major), in college (college name, major, years), in high school, and workplace … all in addition to the options already available including language and location.

Before this update, everything that a Facebook page updated would appear in a user’s newsfeed just because of their language and location, even if it didn’t really relate to them. With more nitty-gritty targeting options, social media marketers can target parts of their audiences with more personalized content.

In January, Facebook announced that it was opening submissions for Open Graph applications. Open graph applications allow third-party developers to automatically share user engagement after someone gives them permission once. For example, if you read an article on the New York Times and have given the Open Graph application permission, it will automatically post your engagement with that app — namely, what you were reading — on your Timeline.

By using Open Graph applications, marketers now have a significantly larger reach than before. Think about it — if one person is playing a game from Zynga and has 2,000 friends, a healthy portion of those 2,000 friends will learn about the game, and have a pseudo word-of-mouth recommendation for it, too!

In June, Twitter announced Tailored Trends, which notifies a Twitter user about popular trends on Twitter based on what Twitter knows about his or her interests, followers, and location. This update allows Twitter to notify users about important topics that matter to each person, instead of the broad topics that only resonate with some.Tailored Trends give marketers a chance to be ahead of the game. When breaking trends affecting the industry happen, Tailored Trends is a way marketers can immediately find out about it, and possibly even do some newsjacking. It can also help you decide what kind of content your followers might be interested in hearing from you.In September, Twitter announced a change to the layout of its profile pages. Similar to Facebook, Twitter now has cover photos on a user or company’s profile page.Marketers now have more real estate to promote their company and give followers a better feel of what the company is all about. Followers’ eyes will immediately go toward the larger image that also promotes the username, location, and bio, which was far less visible with the old layout.In September, Twitter expanded paid advertising to have the ability to target by interest or username. Before, you could target with a search term, but now Twitter allows marketers to get more specific.When targeting by interest, Twitter looks at who the user is talking about, following, and what keywords he or she is using. When targeting by username, Twitter looks at other people who are similar to another username (and not just following them). This update allows marketers to segment during their paid advertising more effectively to reach a greater number of people with interests that are more aligned with the company. 

In September, LinkedIn announced a new design for their company pages. Before, all of the LinkedIn pages basically looked the same, with the exception of the unique logo and company information blurb. However, the new pages display Company Updates and Products & Services more prominently, provide space for a cover photo, a different layout for Jobs, and the option to better target your company updates to certain segments of your audience.

One of the best parts of this new layout is how much more visible your products and services are to page visitors — that page was even redesigned to showcase recommendations in the sidebar!

In April, LinkedIn announced the ability to segment updates based on company size, industry, job function, seniority, geography, and including/excluding company employees. Using this criteria, advertisers can publish updates right to a user’s homepage. Your company’s LinkedIn admins will also be given metrics for number of followers targeted, impressions, clicks, shares, and engagement after 24 hours.

As a result of targeted ads, LinkedIn has seen a 66% increase in engagement. Marketers who are able to segment and personalize messages to their audiences consistently get better results — what’s not to love about the ad personalization bandwagon social media networks are jumping on?

In June, LinkedIn & Twitter announced an end to their partnership. Previously, users could post updates to LinkedIn through their Twitter accounts. The end of their partnership marks the end of users having the ability to do this. Users can still post to Twitter from LinkedIn, but they cannot post to LinkedIn from Twitter, affecting many marketers who had synced up the two for a more streamlined social media management experience.

So while marketers are still able to post to both networks, the change takes away some of the efficiency of having posts update to both accounts.

In July, Foursquare announced Promoted Updates. Before they were announced, companies could only reach users who had already checked into their business. But with the launch of Promoted Updates, companies had the ability to appear in people’s “Explore” tab even if they had not been to the restaurant before. They could promote a special, share photos, or share another message encouraging users to come to their place.

This new feature has helped marketers extend their reach and appear in anyone’s feed, even if they have never been in contact with the business before. For example, if you’re a small coffee shop, your name may not be known by many people, especially in areas dominated by Starbucks or Dunkin’ Donuts. But if you have a promoted post in Foursquare, you have the opportunity to reach a completely new audience.

At the beginning of the month, Foursquare announced ratings, a new system they created to recommend places. They don’t just ask people whether or not they like a location, but they use a combination of factors including tips, likes, dislikes, popularity, loyalty, local expertise, and check-ins from all over the world. When you go to the ‘Explore’ tab, you’re able to see what the popular places nearby are based on these rankings.

Marketers have a unique challenge with this update — unlike your typical ratings where people say how much they like or dislike a place, this ranking also takes into account other factors including check-ins, tips, and loyalty. It is the marketer’s job to encourage people coming to your restaurant or location to leave tips and provide specials that will lead to customer loyalty. 

In May, Google announced Hangouts on Air to the public to allow people to have hangouts with 9 other people while being broadcasted to an even larger audience. Not only can you broadcast to more people, but you can track how many people are watching at a time, and Google will upload your video to YouTube at the end of the Hangout.

Before this update, Hangouts could only really be used in a business setting for smaller conference calls between teams. However, by opening it up to more viewers, Hangouts now have a larger business purpose. Press conferences or company announcements now have a new outlet. Webinars, events, and conferences can now be broadcast to a larger audience. Interviews can now take place on a new channel. And hey, if you can’t stand writing content, here’s another medium for you to create marketing content … without ever picking up the proverbial pen!

In January, we all learned that Google is now integrating Google+ into search results. So whenever you search for something on Google, it uses information from Google+ accounts in your results, including photos and updates that you or others in your network have shared. Additionally, when you search for people’s names in Google search, it pulls in people you’re connected with or may be interested in connecting with based on your Google+ profile. Finally, after you search for a particular topic, a list of business pages appear on the right side of the business page.

For marketers, the takeaway is clear — if you care about SEO, but don’t really want to use Google+ … tough cookies. If a potential customer searches for a company in your industry and you don’t have a presence on Google+, competitors that do might be the ones that get the click.

In May, Google+ decided to get rid of Google Places and put all of its energy into Google+ Local. By searching for a place or restaurant in Google+ Local, the contact information, reviews, and photos of that place appear in the SERPs. Google+ Local is also now integrated when someone searches for places on Google Maps.

If you’re already using Google+, this should make your life easier — and if you’re not, here’s one more reason to do it.

In mid-November, Pinterest finally answered every marketer’s prayers and announced business accounts for brands. And the process of setting them up is, luckily, really simple.

Even though you may not have heard about Pinterest until recently, it has actually been around for a while, and totally blew up as a marketing mechanism in 2012. This shift to creating dedicated business accounts is an encouraging sign of things to come from Pinterest — we’re thinking features like analytics (pinalytics, even?) might be a hot new addition to the already awesome platform

What other social media updates from this year rocked your marketing world? Which updates are you hoping to see in 2013?

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Marketing automation sometimes sounds like a dirty word, and for good reason. When done incorrectly, it has the potential to undervalue a marketer’s database, irritate those on the receiving end of the campaign, and generate poor results. If that’s not enough to make marketers want to wash out their mouths with soap, I’m not sure what is. I guess you could ask Ralphie.

But the truth is, marketing automation holds a lot of promise for marketers, because it is a powerful tool that can help them overcome some of the core problems they face. For example, we all know that devoting personal attention to our leads tends to generate the best results. Marketing automation can actually help you scale that personal attention. And we could all use some more time in our day to focus on more high-level concerns than just manually nurturing leads. Marketing automation can help with that, too! And these are only a couple of examples.

Let’s take a look at some common mistakes made with marketing automation, and some of their better alternatives.

In most marketing automation systems, setting up a campaign means selecting a starting list, and drawing out a tree of actions. In that tree, there are often conditions in the middle that change the path a lead takes based on things they do or don’t do (e.g. opening emails, clicking on links, visiting landing pages, etc.).

Depending on how you do this and what your conditions are, it’s very possible that you’re setting yourself up for failure. Here are a few reasons why.

When you send a lead down a different path in your campaign based on one or two things they did or didn’t do, you’re making a lot of assumptions that the action they took was intentional and meaningful. But maybe I actually am an interested prospect, but I had a full inbox the morning you sent me an email, and I skipped past your message. Or maybe I clicked through on an email you sent me out of curiosity, but am actually a better fit for an entirely different product you sell. One action a lead does or doesn’t take rarely tells us enough to market to them more effectively.

Take email opens for example. While open rate is a helpful metric to look at in aggregate over time, using an opened status to change the makeup of a campaign for one person is risky, because no email tool can track it with a perfect rate of accuracy. Some email clients falsely report opens, while others don’t report opens when an email was actually read. Do you want an arbitrary metric changing the makeup of your campaign?

Let’s be honest — a branching campaign looks great on paper, but it usually doesn’t take into consideration any of the other ways a lead might be interacting with your brand. If your marketing is working the way it should be, those leads are probably coming back to many different parts of your website through many different channels. If I do an organic search to get back to your website on my own volition, then visit your pricing page and download a whitepaper that isn’t a part of the campaign you are sending me, are the conditions controlling the next step of the campaign I happen to be in still important? Probably not.

Rather than dump a big list of leads into a nurturing campaign that looks like a game of Mouse Trap and hope they get relevant messages along the way, put them into a better targeted campaign from the start.

If your campaign is tailored to a very specific segment that takes everything you know about your leads into context, you’ll be delivering marketing people love right from the very first email, not spamming your database with messages that have a low probability of being relevant.

At HubSpot, we use our tools to build a rich profile for each lead in our system that combines everything we know about them from dozens of different places. What keyword did they initially search for to find us? What content are they consuming through social media? What pages are they visiting on our website? What can we glean from our sales teams’ data in Salesforce about this lead? These are just a few of the many details we look at to segment our prospects.

Looking at those details, our system then automatically puts leads into specific nurturing campaigns we’ve created that we know are well targeted and will speak to those leads in a personal way about things they care about. And because they are better targeted from the start, our nurturing campaigns don’t need to be a complex set of branches — they are simpler, easier to analyze and improve, and they perform well from the very start. We don’t send a six-email campaign hoping that one of those messages will resonate. Instead, we know they all will, and that they are all in context of one another.

Taking things a step further, personalizing your email communications with details from your database (using a lead’s name, sending an email from the sales rep who owns the lead, even mentioning other details about the lead’s business) makes for a well targeted email that reads more like a one-to-one exchange than a marketing email.

There’s no doubt that doing stellar email marketing is important. When done properly, email and marketing automation can generate great results and pull interested prospects back to your website.

That being said, relying too heavily on email (or relying entirely on email, as most marketers tend to do) is fraught with problems, particularly the following two.

Yes, email is easy for us marketers to send, but take a look in your own inbox and think about how you manage the barrage of messages you get. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that your prospects aren’t using the same tactics you might be — filters in Gmail, priority inbox, and bulk deleting marketing emails without batting an eyelash.

As we mentioned before, your leads (hopefully) aren’t sitting by their inbox waiting for your marketing emails in order to find your content and learn more about your business. Instead, they’re searching for you on Google and coming back to your website through social media, among other things. When they make their way to those deep pages on your website, what do they see? If you are focused solely on email, they probably aren’t seeing the same targeted message they got from you in their inbox on your website. Instead, they are seeing many different, fragmented marketing messages and value propositions depending on where they go. At best, this kind of fragmentation is ineffective. At worst, it’s a liability if you are putting special messaging or offers in front of specific audiences.

This really is the Holy Grail of marketing automation, and it’s surprising how few companies do it. You know this kind of marketing from companies like Amazon and Netflix — when you arrive on Amazon.com, you are shown products and calls-to-action that feel like they were suggested by someone who knows you and what you like on a personal level. And yes, you can do the same thing.

If you use HubSpot’s tools, those same segments and lists that automatically allocate leads to specific lead nurturing campaigns can be used to automatically change the content leads see on our website — even on the deepest content pages that don’t get updated all that often. For HubSpot’s own website, this means that a lead who is interested in social media will see content and offers related to social media. A lead who is interested in email marketing will see content and offers related to email marketing. And they don’t just see these messages in one place — leads interested in social media can see a mix of interesting social media offers everywhere they go on our website. It’s a better experience for our leads, and more effective marketing for us.

To learn more about how to leverage dynamic content on your own website, download our free ebook, An Introduction to Using Dynamic Content in Your Marketing.

Think about your own email inbox. How long do you put up with marketing emails from companies who you don’t intend to buy something from? Have you ever switched jobs, or switched email addresses? These are just a few of the many different reasons why the average email database expires at the rate of ~25% per year. And the harder you market to your list, the less effective it will be over time.

Pause to really think about that for a minute. Let it soak in. Or, let’s just put it into perspective: A database of 50,000 email addresses will have shrunk to 21,000 in just three short years. Fighting attrition is tough enough; *growing* your database on top of that requires some serious coordination. It’s something that affects you today — not the next generation of marketers at your company.

Let’s be blunt for a minute. If you aren’t at least replacing leads at the rate you are burning through them, your marketing database is dying.

If leads are coming out of your database at a constant rate, you will need a way to consistently feed your database with brand new leads. There is no better way to do that than inbound marketing — creating content that naturally attracts real people who need what you provide, building a relationship with them over time, and being there at the right time and place when they are ready to buy.

What’s more, inbound leads are more likely to be high quality, interested, and responsive leads right from the start. This means that not only is your database growing over time, but it’s refining itself over time as you learn, tweak your strategy, and attract better and better quality leads. Learn more about how to execute a comprehensive inbound marketing strategy in this ebook.

How does that compare to buying a list, sending slews of mediocrely targeted emails, irritating people, and slowly running through your database?

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Vintage is so in right now. There are apps that send in-real-life postcards, and rotary phone handsets that plug into your iPhone. And for a while now, there have been mobile apps like Instagram that recognize this nostalgic desire and give amateur photographers the ability to kick it old school with sepia-toned filters and scratch-ridden borders.

While everyone is moving toward mobile, Instagram — who started as a mobile-only platform — is taking a step back and joining the rest of the world on the web, launching web-based Instagram profile pages.

Ooooh, visual and social web content?! What a novel idea!

Except that we already have Pinterest. So, what’s the deal with Instagram’s move to the web? Is it any different than Pinterest? Should marketers even bother setting up their Instagram profiles on the web? This blog post will give you the full breakdown of what’s going on, and whether it’s worth your while. Because the last thing you need is another social media presence to maintain.

Instagram is not dramatically altering the way its flagship app functions. The mobile app will remain as is, but users will now have their own web-based profile pages. These profiles, however, are the only Instagram feature to move to the web. There is no uploading from the computer, no feed of those you follow, and no search function.

The layout of profile pages makes it obvious that Instagram and Facebook are related — remember, Facebook acquired Instagram a little less than a year ago. Similar to Facebook’s cover photo, the profile displays a large banner at the top, populated by a sleek grid of the user’s photos, softly transitioning from one to another. Below this, thumbnails of each photo are laid out in an organized grid. There’s very little white space, with lots of pictures and places for your eyes to wander.

Okay, so what’s the difference between Instagram and Pinterest? Here’s the basic breakdown of similarities and differences so you can keep these things straight in your head.

Both Instagram and Pinterest allow users to post original content, “like” photos or pins, comment on posts, and follow specific users. The differences in the two are in organization and audience reach. Instagram photos are free-standing and cannot be shared or re-posted by other users. Pinterest, however, thrives on features like organizing pins into “boards” and sharing or “re-pinning” other users’ content. Make sense?

The biggest difference between the two networks, however, is in how users treat the networks’ similar features quite differently. For example, clothing and home furnishing store Anthropologie has both an Instagram and a Pinterest page. Their Instagram photos tend to have up to 8,000 likes, whereas Pinterest pins barely hit 200 likes. Similarly, their pins produce a few comments at most, while their Instagram photos consistently have upwards of 20.

On the other hand, Anthropologie’s pins have hundreds of re-pins, which means its ability to spread and share content far outweighs Instagram’s. And that content differs, too. Anthropologie’s Pinterest page has 1,710 pins, often of models dawning new collections; and their Instagram page has only 214 pins, including photos of jewelry-making workshops, office events, vintage-filtered bottles of champagne and, of course, puppies.

It’s not so much that you should choose one network over the other, but rather that you should understand the different functions of each, and utilize them accordingly. As we told you a few weeks back, 21% of people with a Pinterest account have purchased an item after seeing it on the social network. It makes sense given that a brand’s Pinterest boards are set up like digital catalogs, displaying items that link directly to product pages. Pinterest targets users that are ready to jump to the actual point of sale — or at least who have some intention of making that decision. It remains to be seen, however, whether or not Instagram can produce this same kind of purchasing power. Companies like Chirpify, for example, are trying to make it happen by allowing users to complete a transaction by commenting “buy” on a qualifying Instagram photo.

Simply Measured recently reported that while 63% of Interbrand 100 companies have Pinterest accounts, a close 54% (and growing) of those companies have also added Instagram pages to their social media strategy. Not only this, Instagram’s adoption rate has grown in the last quarter more than Pinterest, Google+, Facebook, and Twitter combined. According to Mark Zuckerberg, two year old Instagram now boasts 100 million users to Pinterest’s 11 million, a number that took both Facebook and Twitter over 4 years to achieve.

The point here is simple: more and more brands and businesses are using Instagram every day, and if you have the visual content to back it up, it may be worth experimenting with the web platform to see if it yields and results. I mean … if you thought Pinterest was a joke and were then pleasantly surprised with the results, well, you might feel the same way after a few months using Instagram, right?

If you want it boiled down to a simple either-or, though, I’d say that Pinterest may present a call-to-action that more directly impacts transactions — “click on this product to buy it” — while Instagram drives more audience engagement and helps you expand your social reach.

So you want to give this new Instagram a try. How do you do it right? We’ve got a few tips for you.

First, when posting to Instagram, make sure your brand’s Facebook and Twitter accounts are linked to your Instagram account so that your photos post seamlessly to all of your networks for extended reach. Unfortunately, you can only link your brand’s Facebook account if you are uploading from an iPhone. If you are using an Android, you won’t miss out on the web exposure completely — your web Instagram page will still automatically update with your latest photos, it’s just that your brand’s Facebook page won’t.

Then, when a follower likes your photo on Facebook, this activity is posted on his/her page. Now you’re gaining exposure with not only your followers, but his/hers too. See what I mean by extended reach?

It’s also important that you consider these web profiles as important organic search mechanisms, even though people can’t search for users or hashtags on the Instagram website. You want your profile to turn up in the SERPs, so optimize your profile with keywords, and use relevant hashtags with every picture. Besides, just because there’s no search functionality on the site now, doesn’t mean it wont show up in a later iteration. Might as well be prepared, right?

Finally, you must remember that Instagram is still primarily mobile. That means:

1) Don’t overload your audience with a new photo every 5 minutes.

2) Don’t post pictures solely of the products you’re trying to sell.

That kind of posting works on Pinterest, a place for users to do some virtual window shopping. Instagram, on the other hand, provides the consumer with a new lens to see a more complete digital picture of the brand’s personality. Post interesting content with the aim to drive engagement, not to annoy, overwhelm, or bombard with hundreds of photos of your latest product.

Will you be using the web version of Instagram? Do you think it’s sufficiently different from Pinterest, from either a user’s or marketer’s standpoint?

Image credit: jenni from the block

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“Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes.” Could David Bowie’s 70s hit be a marketer’s theme song, or what?

On a related — but arguably more serious — note, according to the 2012 CMO Survey by the American Marketing Association and Duke University, Marketing appears to be one of the early rebounders in the initial economic recovery. In terms of both department size and budget, Marketing is on the rise.

Just take a look at how the size of business’ marketing departments has more than doubled — in fact, almost tripled — since August 2011 …

And as the role of marketing grows, it also continues to evolve. Today’s marketing department, for example, looks very different than it did even just a few short years ago. In fact, a collection of new roles has emerged, and they’re growing in importance within many marketing teams. 

Let’s examine what each of these roles consist of, and why you might want to consider adding them to your growing marketing team.

Marketing operations professionals are charged with monitoring, measuring, and analyzing the effectiveness of marketing initiatives as they relate to the overall company’s goals. Marketing operations staff work closely with Sales, and sometimes also have a sales operations counterpart. Together, they manage the relationship between Marketing and Sales to ensure that both sides are optimized to deliver (Marketing’s role) and work (Sales’ role) the highest quality leads, something HubSpot has grown fond of calling “SMarketing.” Marketing operations staff make projections about the quality of the sales and marketing pipeline and find efficiencies that will make the company work better as a whole.  

Marketing operations would be a fit for anyone who has an analytical mind and is interested in marketing and sales strategy. Karen Rubin, a HubSpotter in a marketing operations role adds: “We focus on helping our marketers get the analytics they need, running monthly reports, and understanding why data and results are looking the way they do at any given point.” 

In 2011, Forrester released a report called “The Rise of the Chief Customer Officer.” The report detailed a trend existing among B2B and B2C companies alike — hiring an individual to oversee customer communications and customer happiness. While the report focuses on a formal, executive-level role (“CCO”), we’ve seen this trend at all levels in companies.  

Roles under this subset include community managers, customer experience designers, and customer communications officers. Skills and focus areas range, but the customer evangelist is essentially the internal voice of the customer within a company. Sometimes measured by Net Promoter Score surveys or user testing, their role aims to keep customer happiness and loyalty high by making customers’ experiences with the company easy and rewarding. Beyond being “the right thing to do,” creating a positive customer experience actually drives results. In fact, according to Nielsen’s April 2012 Global Trust in Advertising report, 92% of consumers worldwide trust recommendations from friends and family more than any form of advertising. In a socially driven market, the role of a customer evangelist becomes all the more critical.

It’s no news to us, but recent research from SiriusDecisions underscores the shift that B2B companies are making toward inbound marketing as a core strategy, and the need for more inbound marketing talent. “More than any other new approach, inbound marketing is rapidly becoming a standard part of the marketing mix,” writes Jay Gaines, who leads SiriusDecisions’ Demand Creation Strategies advisory service. Inbound marketing strategists must have a comprehensive mix of skills including search engine optimization, content strategy, and content mapping against a lead’s decision-making process. Gaines writes: “SiriusDecisions expects the inbound marketer to become a fixture in the majority of b-to-b marketing organizations in the next one to two years.”

As most savvy marketers will tell you, attracting traffic and converting those visitors into leads is only half the battle. All too many potential customers get stuck in the middle of the marketing funnel, never continuing on to make an actual purchase. Professionals skilled in lead nurturing help marketing teams deliver highly tailored content to guide leads to a point of decision. And research shows that personalized marketing leads to more customer conversions than generalized communications.

The lead nurturing role in an organization is steeped in customer and lead data. According to that same AMA/Duke University CMO Survey, “The ability to leverage information about customers in order to deliver and demonstrate value opens the door for marketers to fill the role as analysts and ‘data whisperers.’” 

Technology has lowered the barriers to creating high-quality videos, making creation and distribution more affordable for companies of all sizes. As a result, video as a form of content is on the rise. It’s no surprise then, that 87% of online marketers use video content, according to Outbrain’s State of Content Marketing. Not to mention that Social Media Examiner reported earlier this year that 76% of marketers planned to increase their use of YouTube and video marketing, making it the top area marketers would invest in for 2012.

As part of this investment in video as a content format, many companies are adding videographers to their marketing teams. We asked Chris Savage, co-founder and CEO of Wistia, a video hosting and analytics provider, what companies should look for when hiring video talent. “Adding the right videographer to your team can unlock an entire new channel of content for you,” said Savage. “The key is finding someone who has a mix of skills that complement your existing team. Besides just the basics of lighting, shooting, and editing, you really want someone who has a strong sense for what topics will be most successful on video.”

Co-marketing is the practice of two, complementary companies collaborating on content or marketing initiatives. As a result, co-marketing brings fresh perspectives to your marketing initiatives and helps each company reach an audience that might not otherwise have found them. 

Dan Slagen, head of global marketing relations at HubSpot leads our co-marketing initiatives. Dan explains, “We partner with like-minded companies on projects that will help promote the marketing industry. For HubSpot, the value of working with partners such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Salesforce, and Google has been an array of thought leadership, brand alignment, and new business opportunities for all parties involved.”

In addition to the growing prominence of some newer roles, a number of existing marketing roles have begun to change and adapt as well. Here are some top trends we’ve noticed.

Five years ago, a marketing department might have hired a young graduate to head up its social media strategy. But according to the 2011 Webmarketing123 State of Digital Marketing report, with an average of 68% of marketers generated leads from social media sites, social media is no longer a specialization but rather a core marketing skill. As such, new marketing hires at every level should be expected to understand and contribute to social media strategies. 

As you may have noticed above, analytics and data are playing a big role in emerging marketing positions. In fact, the AMA/Duke CMO survey cites that spending on marketing analytics is expected to increase 60% by 2015. As marketing departments grow in size and marketing budgets increase, the ability to measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and channels will become more and more essential. Read more about how to cultivate a data-driven marketing team in this blog post.

In a Gartner study, Vice President of Marketing Strategies Laura McLellan asserts, “By 2017, the CMO will spend more on IT than the CIO.” Her assertion is backed by survey data in which 90% of respondents said that the marketing department is either solely responsible or leads a cross-functional team that sets the strategy for technology purchasing decisions. Marketers have more and more say in the technology they use to do their jobs. Enough said.

According to the AMA/Duke University CMO survey, only 53% of companies are using marketing staff for traditional public relations activities, which is a significant step down from 65% in 2011. Talking with Laura Fitton, HubSpot’s inbound marketing evangelist, you’ll quickly learn that she prioritizes being helpful to journalists and bloggers over pitching to them. Even when it doesn’t result in a news story about HubSpot, Laura’s priority is to help journalists make connections and find data for their reports. 

In all of these developments and newly emerging roles, there are a few overarching trends: The importance of data, useful content, and relationships are on the rise. With these trends in mind, here are a few tips for interviewing today’s inbound marketer. And for those of you on the other side of the interview table, here’s how to get hired as an inbound marketer.

What new roles have you added to your marketing team? What roles would you add if you had the capacity? Share with us in the comments.

Image Credit: healthrx.com

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Email is a critical tool for lead generation and lead nurturing; not only does it allow you to continue a dialogue with those who have shown an interest in your company and keep them coming back for more, it also helps marketers reach new and untapped markets. With email, there are no geographical boundaries, and growing your business to leverage new locations is increasingly viable.

If you are looking at using email marketing to help you explore the UK market specifically, however, you may find you have a bit of a pickle on your hands. That’s because when marketers are collecting data from the UK, specific laws apply that may not apply in other markets. Failure to comply with these data collection laws could not only end in disaster for your email marketing, but could also put you to the wrong side of the UK law. With these roadblocks, it’s no wonder the Direct Marketing Association values a single email address in the UK at £9.11.

If you’re looking to grow and nurture your email database in the UK, this post will help acquaint you with the laws you need to be aware of, and explain how they’ll affect how you do your job as a marketer.

Email marketers targeting a UK audience should acquaint themselves with the 2003 Electronic Communication Act. It governs email marketing, and states that you cannot email anyone unless they have previously opted in to receive your email. This means they must have stated they’d like to receive your communications through actively signing up.

There is, however, a 3-point caveat to this. You can send to anyone:

If a previous relationship exists;You are selling products/services of a similar nature to what they have shown an interest in;The addressee was given the opportunity to opt out (free of charge except for the cost of transmission) at the time of sign up. The opportunity to opt out must be given with every subsequent message, meaning there must be a valid unsubscribe link on every email you send.

Further — and this is obvious to any legitimate email marketer — you must not conceal your identity. Be sure to use a recognizable and non-spammy ‘From’ name and address. 

Anything that indicates that person has shown an interest in your products or services; an inquiry on your website or via the phone where they’ve left their email address; or making a purchase on your website. A request for a quote is enough, they don’t have to complete a transaction.

Having connected with someone on LinkedIn or having their business card, on the other hand, isn’t enough to be considered a previous relationship — unless they’ve already indicated that they would be happy to receive your promotional material in any of the previous ways we just discussed.

The law is pretty basic and makes being legally compliant easy, but if you’re looking to be an effective marketer, you should obviously go above the law and into best practice territory. Data collection is about the quality of the data you’re collecting, as well as respecting the personal nature of the information you hold. And of course, good and legally compliant data means getting expressed opt-in from all subscribers. Email sign up forms should follow these guidelines to help you not just stay legally compliant, but boost opt-ins while doing it:

Calls-to-action should outline the benefits, i.e. “Receive the latest news straight to your inbox.”Landing pages, thank you pages, and the email that confirms their opt-in should set the expectations, inform new signups of email-sending frequency, and explain the type of content they can expect.Include at least one welcome email from your email signup that confirms their opt in.

Inquiry forms should also have a tick box (not pre-ticked) and a minimum of a link to the privacy policy. And if you’re an ecommerce business, you should have a dedicated opt-in instead of simply automatically adding shoppers to a list.

Another common way marketers acquire opt-ins is through incentives. When running an incentive, ensure the incentive is small and relevant to your business, as people who sign up for the incentive — whether it’s a prize draw, giveaway, gift, or whitepaper — may otherwise be interested in only the incentive, and not your business offering. That means all you’re doing is growing your database full of recipients who aren’t actually interested in your products or services.

You may also decide to pursue co-marketing opportunities, collaborating with other businesses to grow both your databases. To remain legally compliant and not suffer quick list depreciation, it must be clearly states that the data will be shared between the two of you. Requiring opt-in for both is advisable.

Finally, you should not email anyone you have not recently contacted, or has stopped engaging with your email content. It’s likely that they either don’t remember your company, they’ve stopped using that email address, or they’ve lost interest in your content. Continuing to email them will only serve to harm your online reputation.

The law covers any consumer, sole trader, and partnership data — all except those from limited companies. You can still buy data about limited companies; but just because it is an option, doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. We strongly recommend against such actions as it ruins engagement with subscribers, harms online reputation, and undermines any inbound marketing activities you may be engaged in. We spend so much time as marketers building up our online reputation and working on improving engagement rates, it would be damaging to contradict this.

Remember, as someone who wants to be an effective marketer, it’s much better to have a smaller mailing list of people who are generally interested in your products/services and a higher likelihood of purchasing in the future, than a large list of people, most of whom are unengaged with your brand. You’ll see your brand engagement improve, and your ROI skyrocket.

Anna Penrose is an email marketing specialist at Jarrang, a UK-based online marketing agency with ten years experience working with clients in multiple sectors from luxury travel to financial services.

Image credit: @Doug88888

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You may have heard us say the phrase, “data is a marketer’s best friend” many times before. Well, that phrase still rings true today, especially as the marketing world continues to change.

How else would you know how well your marketing campaigns were performing without data to prove their effectiveness? Similarly, how would you know what “effective” means without benchmarks to show you the way?

Lucky for you, this week’s marketing round-up is focused heavily on data that will move you forward and help you get a leg up on the competition. So kick back, enjoy the last of your weekend, and learn a bit more about the direction the marketing industry is headed with these top marketing stories and resources of the week.

You might remember our weekly round-up post from a couple weeks ago where we reported that only 6% of fans engage with a brand’s Facebook Page. Now we’re finding that Facebook posts obtain 50% of their reach in the first 30 minutes of being posted, then drastically move downhill from there. More data from MarketingCharts reveals that an average of one-third of a post’s reach was obtained in the first 10 minutes of being posted, and the rest is obtained in the following 7 hours. It appears that this drop-off is even more drastic than email open rates.

According to MarketingCharts, “23.6% of email opens occur within the first hour after delivery.” Of course, if this were one hour after the delivery of a Facebook post, the message would have already reached 60% of its total audience. Do these statistics surprise you? Or have you noticed a drastic decrease in your company’s Facebook reach over time? For more intriguing Facebook reach statistics, check out the full story here.

What do you think smartphone users are looking to do after they search for a business on their mobile devices? According to Search Engine Land, 76% of users get a business’ location or operating hours, 61% “click to call” the business, and 48% access the company’s social networking page. These consumers are actively seeking out information from companies of interest — at an incredibly high percentage, too! So as a marketer, you must ask yourself, are you taking advantage of these common mobile search actions?

According to the same study reported by Search Engine Land, a whopping 96% of users have visited a site that was not mobile-friendly, 74% say they’re more likely to revisit mobile-friendly sites, and 55% say a frustrating mobile experience hurts their opinion of the brand. Ouch! Those are some painful statistics if you’re a marketer. It just goes to show the increased importance of mobile optimization, and it’s certainly something to keep on your marketing radar. Interested in seeing more stats from this study? Check out the full story here.

How do you feel about your company’s marketing emails? Are you worried that your audience might get turned off and mark you as spam? Well according to a recent study reported by ClickZ, 40% of consumers enjoy receiving a substantial amount of marketing emails every week, as long as they’re from brands of interest. The same study reported that 35% of consumers said they were “very interested” in receiving emails from their favorite brands, and 54% said they feel they are getting the right amount of marketing emails every week. Ah, how reassuring!

Of course you shouldn’t count your chickens before they hatch, because the data goes deeper and reports that 48% of consumers find day-to-day management of marketing emails to be very “time consuming,” and another 43% occasionally overlook marketing emails due to excessiveness. This isn’t terribly surprising. Although consumers genuinely enjoy receiving your company’s emails, chances are you’re facing a great deal of competition. And remember, this competition not only includes emails from other brands, but also emails from friends, family members, and business contacts, too. To see more interesting email marketing stats from this study, check out the full story here.

Adobe recently partnered with Edelmen Berland to survey 1,250 adults over age 18 about The State of Online Advertising. One thousand survey takers were part of the general population, and 250 were marketing decision makers. When asked, “In general, how do consumers ‘feel’ about online advertising,” 68% of consumers responded that online advertising feels “annoying,” while only 47% of marketers responded with the same answer. The majority of marketers responded saying that marketing is “all over the place,” and there was a large gap between consumers and marketers with answers such as “eye-catching” and “clever.”

Who do you think had a more positive sentiment about online advertising? You guessed it! Marketers. It seems like marketers are in a slight state of denial, wouldn’t you say? Additionally, 66% of consumers say that television ads are more effective than online advertising, while only 49% of marketers agreed. Of course, these statistics are based on consumers’ opinions, not on tangible marketing data. When you look further into Adobe’s research, you’ll discover that the difference between consumers’ and marketers’ opinions is a bit surprising. In fact, it’s always good to take off your marketer hat every once in a while and remember how your target audience actually perceives the work you do. Want to see more data from Adobe’s latest research? Check out the full story here.

Surveys are becoming strong feedback mechanisms to help marketers draw insights, feedback, and new ideas from their target audience. With helpful feedback from devoted fans, you can become more effective at improving your marketing messages, and thus achieve better results. However, before jumping in and adopting this marketing tool on a whim, you should be aware of the different problems that surveys can help you solve and match them with your goals. Surveys are helpful for market research, optimization of marketing, thought leadership, and internal communication — all of which are important for achieving success with your marketing. Now go identify a problem you want to solve and use a survey to tackle it in a smart, data-driven way! Read the full guide from HubSpot and SurveyMonkey here to get started.

How do you determine which content should specifically be used for your middle-of-the-funnel (MOFU) marketing efforts, as opposed to top-of-the-funnel (TOFU)? When a lead has reached the MOFU stage, it’s important to pull him or her down the funnel with very specific and advanced types of content. Kuno Creative has addressed 5 different content ideas you can leverage for B2B marketing automation including case studies, videos, buyer’s guides and success kits, reviews and testimonials, and FAQs.

Have you ever used these types of content in your lead nurturing campaigns? If your lead has reached those MOFU stages, it’s clear that they’d like to receive more information about your products and services. Can you provide noteworthy examples of customers who are successfully using your products or services? How about providing detailed guides on how to achieve similar success? If you’re eager to experiment with some new MOFU-centric content, check out the full article here.

What other interesting marketing stories did you stumble upon this week? Share them in the comments below!

Image credit: theogeo

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“Everything in moderation.” When applied to marketing automation, it’s the perfect mantra. Even though marketers must be careful not to over-automate, marketing automation can be a great way to manage and nurture your leads so they’re more sales-ready. But did you know it can even help you tackle administrative marketing tasks, too?

With the concept of workflows — series of automated actions that you can trigger to occur based on a person’s behaviors or contact information — all of this is possible. Workflows go beyond email and take simple marketing automation to the next level, allowing you to send emails, update contact information, add or remove contacts from lists, and trigger email notifications. But how exactly do you set up an automated workflow? How do workflows … well … work? In this post, we’ll walk you through the typical setup process of workflows, which you can then use to set up various lead nurturing workflows … and beyond!

Keep in mind that the way you set up your workflows may vary depending on the tools you’re using. But for the sake of all being on the same page, this article will explain how a typical setup process works using HubSpot’s Workflows tool as our recurring example.

In order to create a workflow, you need to provide a starting condition, or criteria which, if met by a given lead, will trigger the workflow to begin for that lead. HubSpot’s Workflows tool, for instance, provides three options for a starting condition:

A form is submittedA smart list is triggeredNo starting condition

The first option is to trigger a workflow when a given form is submitted. This is useful when you want to send emails to follow up to a specific download on your site. For example, let’s say you have a landing page with a form to download a specific ebook. Maybe you want to set up a nurturing campaign to engage the people who download this ebook with more content about that specific topic. You can create a workflow with emails tailored to these topics and automatically enter any lead that downloads this ebook into that workflow. Here is an example of what that setup might look like:

You can also trigger a workflow when a lead is added to a certain list. You can design these lists to include only leads that meet certain criteria for contact properties or behaviors. In HubSpot, you can create Smart Lists, or lists based on specific criteria that dynamically update to include any leads that come to meet that criteria:

For example, you could create a Smart List of leads who have visited your website a certain number of times, or a list of leads who have requested a free trial of your product, or a list of leads who live in Texas and have fewer than 50 employees, etc. You can use any information from your contacts database to create these Smart Lists, and then trigger workflows based on those. This gives you a wide range of possibilities for the rules you can set up for each of your workflows.

Lastly, you should also be able to set up a workflow that doesn’t have a starting condition. This simply means that you only want to add contacts to the workflow manually. For instance, if you host a conference or another type of marketing event and want to create a workflow for the leads you drive from it, you might upload that list and add it to the workflow on its own. Or, if you engage in a co-marketing initiative, you can import a list of opt-ins and nurture them with a specific set of emails.

Now we get to the meat of the workflow — the sequence of actions that it triggers. Much like starting conditions, there are several different types of actions you can initiate with your workflows:

Setting a contact property valueSending an emailAdding a contact to a list (or removing them)Sending an email notification

As we discussed earlier, workflows can be used to change or update information about your leads in their contact records. This gives you an extremely easy way to conduct mass updates to your database, rather than manually making changes to each lead record, one at a time. Let’s say you have a handful of new contacts that you want to mark as subscribers in your database. You can simply create a list of these new contacts and enter them into a workflow that updates their lifecycle stage property value to “Subscriber.”

For example, maybe you have a contact field that indicates whether or not a lead has requested a demo of your product. You can immediately set these contacts apart in a way that demonstrates they are high-quality leads. For instance, you can create a workflow that essentially says, “If a lead’s ‘Demo Requested’ property value is equal to ‘True,’ change that lead’s lifecycle stage to ‘Marketing Qualified Lead.’” In this case, you have a starting condition of a Smart List (as a member of a Smart List of people who request a demo) and an action (set their lifecycle stage value to ‘Marketing Qualified Lead’).

Or maybe you want to create a workflow that changes specific pieces of contact information of your contacts. For instance, you can take a list of leads whose company name value is blank, and change them all to the value ‘unknown.’

The second type of action that you can trigger in a workflow is sending an email. This is probably the most intuitive use case for workflows because it allows you to nurture your leads with a targeted series of emails. For example, with HubSpot, you can take emails you’ve already created and save them specifically for automation, which then allows you to select those emails when you’re setting up a workflow. So now, you can create each of your emails ahead of time, and build workflows to schedule these emails to be sent in the order you want and with the timing of your choice. You can include as many steps in a workflow as you’d like — you can build a nurturing campaign with two follow-up emails and another one with six follow-up emails, etc. The campaigns can span five days, two weeks, or three months, etc. No matter how you choose to set them up, your workflows will take the pain out of lead nurturing by simplifying and automating the entire process.

The third type of action that a workflow can perform is adding a contact to — or removing a contact from — a list. This is another great organizational tool to simplify the way you handle your lists of leads by automating the otherwise manual process. For example, you might be hosting a webinar and have a landing page with a form that lets people register for that webinar. You could set up a workflow that takes any leads who submit that form and adds them to a list of webinar registrants. Again, here you have a starting condition (submits webinar form) and an action (add to webinar registrants list). Couldn’t get much simpler than that!

The last type of action you can add to a workflow is sending an email notification. This feature allows you to send a notification to a specific address the minute that something important happens to one of your contacts. This has a vast number of possible uses. You could set up a notification email to alert a sales representative when someone submits a key form, like a pricing information download or a bottom-of-the-funnel offer. You can also use this feature to notify a sales rep when a lead becomes sales qualified, hits a specific lead score threshold, or when any other property on their contact record changes.

You could even set up a notification for your social media manager to trigger when a lead who is a “social media influencer” comes into the system, based, for instance, on their Twitter follower count. Workflows make it easy to keep track of these important changes, so you know which of your leads are warmest, and can act on that information immediately.

The great thing about workflows is that you can add multiple actions to a given workflow in whatever order you choose — and they don’t all have to be the same type of action! You could create a workflow whose starting condition is “submits webinar form,” in which the first step is “add to webinar registrants list,” the second step is “update lifecycle stage to ‘Lead,’” and the third step is “send demo offer for webinar registrants email.” Now you’re all set to perform three distinct actions for every single lead that fills out that form, without having to do a thing once you’ve set up that simple workflow.

Workflows should allow you to select the timing of each action they trigger. For every step you add to a workflow, you can say something like, “I want these leads to receive this email two days after they fill out this form, and the next email five days after that.” You can update contact properties or add them to a list as soon as the leads are entered into the workflow by setting the time delay to zero. You can spread out the actions over as much time as you’d like, and specify timing down to the number of days, hours, or even minutes.

Time delays are unique to each individual lead. So when John Doe enters your workflow on a Monday, he’ll get the email two days later on Wednesday, but Mary Jane, who entered the workflow on Tuesday, will get the email two days after her workflow began, on Thursday. You weren’t really going to send John an email on Wednesday and send Mary a separate email on Thursday on your own, were you? That would be a total pain. You probably would’ve just picked one of those days to send the email to the entire list of your leads, and sacrificed the effectiveness of aligning the timing of your marketing with your leads’ needs.

With workflows, you can just schedule everything to send automatically, and you don’t have to worry about keeping track of who needs to get what on which days. And more importantly, you can time your marketing based on what’s best for your leads, not what’s easiest for your busy schedule.

The last main component of a workflow is its settings. There are various settings you can arrange to refine the way your workflows operate, and you can use these to your advantage to make your workflows more effective. In HubSpot’s Workflows tool, for example, one option is to set your workflow to execute steps on business days only. If you don’t want to be emailing your leads on the weekends, you can turn this setting on, and it will override the time delays you’ve selected when necessary. In other words, any steps that are scheduled to occur on a Saturday or Sunday (say, an action is set to trigger one day after the previous one, which occurred on a Friday), will be rescheduled to occur on Monday.

You should also be able to modify your settings to execute steps only within a certain time range. In HubSpot, for instance, this setting also overrides the time delays you’ve selected when necessary. Let’s say you’ve done some research into the effectiveness of your email marketing, and you’ve found that your highest clickthrough rates occur in the morning. With this in mind, you could set your workflows to only send emails between 7 a.m. and 12 p.m. If your time delays are set to send an email in the afternoon, the workflow will reschedule it for the following morning.

Are you leveraging workflows to make your marketing more effective? What unique workflow ideas have you put into play?

This article is an excerpt from our ebook, Going Beyond Email: How to Use Workflows for Better Lead Nurturing. To learn more about how to do smarter lead nurturing with workflows, you can download the ebook for free here.

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This is an excerpt from our new ebook, The Ultimate Guide to Using Surveys in Your Marketing, created in collaboration with SurveyMonkey. To learn all about launching successful marketing surveys, download your free copy today.

As they say on Family Feud, “Survey says …” Well, when it comes to leveraging surveys in marketing, they can say quite a lot of helpful things.

Surveys are strong feedback mechanisms that can help marketers draw valuable insights from their communities — which can then be used to achieve better marketing results. But when building online surveys, it’s important for marketers to understand that the way you structure and pose your survey questions is critical to the overall survey’s success.

The formatting, design, clarity, and wording of your questions can have a huge impact on both the response rate and the accuracy of your survey results, so getting them right is key to a successful marketing survey. Here are some general best practices and recommendations every marketer should follow when it comes to building effective marketing surveys.

Make sure your survey questions flow in a logical order. Begin with a brief introduction that motivates survey respondents to complete the survey. Start with questions that are broad, and then continue with those narrower in scope. For instance, if we were to evaluate how useful this blog post is to our audience in comparison to other blog posts, we might start with a question like, “How often do you read HubSpot’s blog?” Then we’d get into more nitty-gritty, specific questions.

Collect demographic data and ask any sensitive questions at the end of your survey, unless you are using that information to filter survey participants. Also, if you are asking for contact information, request that information last.

Keep your questions simple, straightforward, and concise. This will make it easier for your survey respondents to understand exactly what you’re asking. It will also make it much easier for you to accurately analyze your data.

Keep it simple in terms of survey length is important, too. The folks over at SurveyMonkey have found that the more questions a survey has, the lower its completion rate. For each extra 35 questions, the completion rate goes down by a whole percentage point. So, don’t ask too many questions!

Did you enjoy our ebook about surveys that you found on our website? This is an example of a double-barreled question. It has two parts to it: 1) Did you enjoy our ebook? and 2) Did you find the ebook on our website? This means that a respondent could answer positively to one part and negatively to the other. It’s also wicked confusing.

Such double-barreled questions don’t belong in surveys. Instead, go with closed-ended or open-ended survey questions. Closed-ended questions prompt specific choices (e.g., yes or no). These types of questions are great for collating and analytical purposes, which is why multiple choice questions are often a great choice for marketing surveys. Open-ended questions are effective at providing qualitative information and insights. These should be use when you want survey respondents to describe something in their own, unbiased words.

But you just told me earlier to “make it flow!” Stay with us here. While a general, logical, overall flow is important, the order that specific questions appear in your survey can directly impact the responses you gather. Priming is the reason behind this dynamic: respondents are primed to think about one issue while answering the subsequent question.

Another reason the order in which you pose survey questions matters is that survey takers have a tendency to want to appear consistent in their responses. For instance, if you ask a person to put together a controversial event announcement, then ask how much they enjoy event marketing, they may be inclined to rate their interest lower if they struggled to write it.

Response options from previous questions can also impact people’s reaction to later questions. For instance, if you ask respondents which of the following marketing channels (email, blog, or social media) they find most effective, and then ask them to rank the success rate of all their marketing channels, you may inadvertently focus their attention on just those suggested options from the previous question.

How can you avoid these types of question order-related effects in your own surveys? One option is to randomize your questions so respondents don’t all answer your survey questions in the same order.

A question like, “How happy are you with the quality of information on our blog?” might seems pretty standard at first glance. But what exactly does happy mean? What about quality? In this context, it would be more helpful to break up the question so you can be as specific as possible, as in:

“How helpful are our blog posts?”“How compelling is the information we share on our blog?”

In this revision, helpful and compelling are two distinct ideas that will help you to better focus on actionable next steps.

Another great way to improve the accuracy of survey respondents’ answers is to incorporate scale points. For example, let’s say we asked our readers to rate how helpful this blog post is. It may be the most helpful (or the least helpful blog post) you’ve ever read, but chances are there are readers who fall somewhere in between — extremely helpful, very helpful, somewhat helpful, slightly helpful, not at all helpful.

If you decide to use rating scales (e.g. from one to five), keep the numbering consistent throughout the survey. Use the same number of points on your scale, and make sure meanings of high and low stay consistent throughout.

Fully labeled scales are an added measure of stability that will help your respondents focus and thus help you make better decisions based on the feedback provided. Also, if you decide to use numbers as your scale points (e.g. “rank this blog post on a scale from one to five”), you need to be clear and descriptive about what one and five each represent.

A large number of survey researchers try to boost response rates by offering some sort of reward for completing a survey.

Academic research suggests that offering prizes can initially increase completion rates. There’s a downside to this, however. Once you reward people for a task, they expect to be rewarded every time and often won’t complete the same task in the future without a reward.

In this context, rewards can be effective for one-time surveys but less beneficial if you plan to interview the same people in the future.

Lastly, some psychology literature shows that incentives, especially cash, can reduce people’s intrinsic motivation to do things, resulting in more careless responses, which can lead to poorer quality data.

Once you’ve created your questions and planned your survey, take that final step to ensure that everything is working as designed. Be sure to test your survey with a few members of your target audience and/or co–workers to find glitches and unexpected question interpretations.

Ready to learn more about building and launching successful marketing surveys? Download your copy of The Ultimate Guide to Using Surveys in Your Marketing.

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So I’m scrolling through the news this morning, and you know what I saw? News of another Facebook feature test! And this one’s definitely an interesting one — an ad ROI tracking tool.

They will begin rolling the tool out on Friday, and it will allow advertisers to track the actions of Facebook users post-click. Pretty groovy, eh? This tool will help advertisers track conversions to their external pages, and allow all businesses to track their success on Facebook.

Let’s dive into some more detail on what the tool is, how it’ll work, and why marketers might want to get excited about it.

Like we said, the tracking tool will allow marketers to see how their Facebook ads perform post-click, tracking the actions of users after they convert on the ad and go to the landing page to which your ad directs them. In order for this ROI tracking tool to work, all advertisers will need to do is place code on pages on their website that users access after making a conversion. These pages might include the check out page for an ecommerce business, or a thank-you page after filling out a form on a landing page. Once a Facebook user views this page, the Facebook ads platform is alerted that someone who viewed and clicked on a Facebook ad has converted off-site on the advertiser’s page. Even better, advertisers will then have the option to target ads at the segments who have responded positively to certain ads in the past.

Along with this tool, the optimized CPM (cost per thousand impressions) bidding tool — which was released earlier this year — helps advertisers optimize their campaigns for better results. The current CPM tool allows advertisers to tell Facebook their goal, and Facebook will adjust the CPM of ads based on the current demand. Similar to Google AdWords, the CPM on Facebook varies throughout the day; advertisers who use the optimized CPM tool don’t need to worry about constantly changing the pricing, because Facebook does it for them. 

This tool is currently in beta, being tested by various advertisers. One online retailer, Fab.com, has already reduced ad costs by 39% using this tool to optimize their advertising campaigns. Once we test out this tool, we will let you know our results, too!

Tracking the success of marketing campaigns is critical — you know that. By bringing a tracking tool in-house, Facebook will allow advertisers to use the Facebook platform for all aspects of the campaign, instead of relying on a third party company to track success and ROI. By tracking the number of conversions — including sales, leads, or downloads — advertisers will be able to measure if their Facebook campaigns are working, and if not, what they can be doing to optimize their campaigns for better results.

The conversion tool when used along with the CPM tool will be beneficial to advertisers who are not able to see or identify the return on investment of their Facebook ads. Advertisers are often disappointed with Facebook ads because they can’t track if they’ve been successful past the metrics Facebook currently gives, like mere clicks and impressions. This new tool in Facebook will give people an easy way to track conversions in the same platform as the ads.

This tool will be most beneficial to “direct marketers” who are looking for an increase in immediate sales, something Facebook has struggled to monetize since thier IPO. While the tool won’t provide identifying information about a user, it will provide information long after someone views an ad — whether it’s hours or weeks. That kind of information helps advertisers understand how much of a role their Facebook ad played in a customer conversion.

The best part is that this all seems like perfect timing for the holiday shopping season! Coincidence? Maybe not

Do you think this tool will help you better prove (or disprove) the ROI of your Facebook ads?

Image credit: Emma Brabrook

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With more than 175 million users, LinkedIn is the most popular social network for professionals as well as one of the top social networks overall. Are you using it to its fullest potential? While Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Pinterest have been monopolizing the buzz in the social media marketing world lately, LinkedIn is a powerful platform that often gets underutilized or put on the back burner.

But the truth is, LinkedIn can be extremely useful — especially when you’re aware of all the little hidden tricks that don’t get nearly enough exposure as they deserve. To help you master LinkedIn, below is our ultimate list of 35 awesome tricks you may have been overlooking.

We’ve divided these tips into three main categories — optimizing your LinkedIn presence, using LinkedIn for professional networking, and using LinkedIn for business and marketing.

Make your profile look more professional and easier to share by claiming your LinkedIn vanity URL. Instead of a URL with a million confusing numbers at the end, it will look nice and clean like this: http://www.linkedin.com/in/pamelavaughan. Do so by going here and clicking “customize your public profile URL” down on the right-hand side.

If you have your own personal website or blog, you can promote your personal LinkedIn presence and help grow your professional network by adding a Profile Badge that links to your public LinkedIn profile. LinkedIn has a few different badge designs to select from, and you can configure your own here.

Instead of using the default “My Website”-type anchor text links in your LinkedIn profile, you can change the anchor text to make those links more appealing to people who view your profile. So if you want to increase clicks on the website links you can display on your profile, change the link’s anchor text to something more attention-grabbing than the standard options LinkedIn provides. For example, if you want to include a link to your blog, rather than choosing LinkedIn’s standard “Blog” anchor text, customize it to include keywords that indicate what your blog is about, like “Internet Marketing Blog.” Each profile can display up to 3 website links like this, and they can be customized by editing your profile, clicking edit on your website links, and selecting “Other” in the drop-down menu to customize the anchor text.

You can also optimize your profile to get found by people searching LinkedIn for key terms with which you want to be associated. Add these keywords to various sections of your profile such as your headline or summary.

Did you know that LinkedIn provides a variety of different applications you can use to improve your LinkedIn profile? Browse the Application Directory, and consider adding the SlideShare application or linking your blog to showcase your presentations and blog articles on your profile. The Events application is also a great way to see what events your connections are attending and find other popular industry events to attend.

LinkedIn enables users to reorder the sections of their profile in any way they prefer. When in edit mode on your profile, simply hover your mouse over the title of each section. Your mouse will turn into a four-arrowed icon, at which point you can click then drag and drop to another position on your profile.

LinkedIn allows users to create up to 3 saved searches. After conducting a search, clicking the “Save This Search” option allows you to save a search and easily run it again later. You can also choose to receive weekly or monthly reminders via email once new members in the network match your saved search criteria. Just click on the “Saved Searches” tab on the Advanced Search options page and select one of your saved searches to run again.

Perhaps you’re using the LinkedIn Answers feature to grow your knowledge of industry-related topics. If so, you may have noticed that, after a period of time, the opportunity closes for users to answer questions that are posed in the Answers feature of LinkedIn. To extend the life of the questions you ask and enable more time for users to provide answers, click on the “My Q&A” tab within Answers, click on the question you’d like to revive, and click “re-open this question to answers,” which will open it up again for 7 more days.

Job seeking is one of the most common — and beneficial — uses of LinkedIn. Were you aware that LinkedIn enables you to turn your profile into a resume-friendly format in seconds with its Resume Builder tool? Just choose a resume template, edit it, and export it as a PDF that you can print, email, and share.

Now that you’ve generated that awesome new resume from LinkedIn’s Resume Builder tool, you can use it — and LinkedIn’s Job board — to help you land an awesome job. LinkedIn allows you to search for jobs by industry and location. It even suggests jobs you might be interested in based on the information in your LinkedIn profile.

Back in September, LinkedIn launched a new feature called Endorsements, which enables users to endorse their connections for skills they’ve listed in the Skill & Expertise section of their profile — or recommend one they haven’t yet listed. These endorsements then show up on your profile within that same Skills & Expertise section, as you can see in the screenshot to the right. Okay, so you can’t guarantee your connections will endorse you for those skills, but because it’s so easy for LinkedIn users to do (all they have to do is click on the + sign next to a particular skill on a user’s profile), you’ll find that many of them will do it anyway. Just make sure your profile is complete and you’ve listed the skills you want people to endorse you for. It will definitely give your profile a bit of a credibility boost.

12) Use OpenLink to send messages to people you’re not connected to.

Aside from the exception of group members (more on that in number 17), LinkedIn only allows you to send messages to people with which you share a first-degree connection. But did you know some people let you send them messages anyway, even if you’re not connected? The ability to be part of the OpenLink network is only available to premium account holders, but it allows them to be available for messaging by any other LinkedIn member if they choose to be. OpenLink members will appear with an icon that looks like a small ring of dots next to their name in search results and on their profile.

Found on your LinkedIn homepage, Network Updates are kind of like your Facebook news feed. Check these periodically for a quick snapshot of what your connections are up to and sharing.

Find out who’s checking out your profile by allowing others to see who you are if you view theirs. When you click the information under “Who’s Viewed My Profile” on your profile page, you’ll be able to view users who have looked at your profile, stats on your profile’s number of views, and its appearances in search recently. To change this, go into your settings and click “See what others see when you’ve viewed their profile.”

Want to transfer your LinkedIn connections to another contact management system? LinkedIn enables you to easily export your connections. Just click on “Contacts,” “My Connections,” and then scroll down and click “Export Connections.” You have the option of either exporting as a .CSV or .VCF file.

Speaking of connections, the LinkedIn Companion for Firefox is a great plugin that helps you identify the LinkedIn profiles of people who are emailing you. It also enables you to easily access other LinkedIn features via your browser.

Did you know that if you’re a member of the same group as another user, you can bypass the need to be a first-degree connection in order to message them? In addition, group members are also able to view the profiles of other members of the same group without being connected. Join more groups to enable more messaging and profile viewership capabilities.

LinkedIn’s Advanced Search feature provides a much richer search experience. For example, say you want to find out if you’re connected to anyone that works at a specific company. Type the company name in the company field in Advanced Search, then sort the results by “Relationship” to see if you have any first or second degree connections to any employees.

Ever since the LinkedIn/Twitter breakup at end of June, you can no longer automatically sync your tweets to publish on LinkedIn (or even selectively by using the hashtags #in or #li in specific tweets). But don’t fret — the opposite is still possible! So if you’re ever posting an update to LinkedIn that you’d like your Twitter followers to see as well, you can easily syndicate that update to Twitter by checking off the Twitter checkbox before clicking “Share” in the LinkedIn update composer.

While social media makes it extremely easy to network, there’s still nothing like face-to-face interaction. LinkedIn Events is an application that automatically delivers personalized recommendations for events you should attend based on your industry, location, and what events your connections are attending. And through its ‘Attendees You May Want to Meet’ feature, LinkedIn surfaces important people attending the event who you may want to connect with (or at least prepare for your run-in at the actual event) — or you can always take control and filter by company and industry to find other opportunities.

LinkedIn Events can also be used for marketing purposes — by promoting the events you’re hosting (click “Create an Event” in the app), identifying events where you can recruit potential job candidates, or helping to research possible events it might make sense for your business to participate in — which leads us to …

Now that the new LinkedIn Company Page design has officially rolled out to everyone, it’s important to optimize your Company Page so it’s set up for the new layout. We’ve published an entire ebook about the layout changes and how to set up your page so it accommodates the new design, but at the very least, make sure you take advantage of a couple of the bigger aesthetic changes by adding a cover image, and making sure the images you’ve uploaded for your Product and Services Spotlights are still displaying well in the new design.

Make the most of your LinkedIn Company Page by publishing company status updates for all your page followers to see. This will give LinkedIn users even more reasons to follow your Company page and grow its LinkedIn reach. To learn how to enable LinkedIn Company Status Updates, read this post.

Been using Company Status Updates for a while? Why not step it up a notch and leverage the power of segmentation with LinkedIn’s targeting options, which enable you to target your status updates to the Activity Feeds of specific users. Page admins can target their updates by criteria like company size, industry, job function, seniority, geography, or by including/excluding company employees. In fact, according to an internal LinkedIn study, examples have shown a 66%+ increase in audience engagement as the result of targeted updates.

Company Buzz is a helpful application that allows you to track what people are saying about your company and related topics on Twitter. Just install the application and customize your topics to view tweets, trends, and top keywords.

Make your business’ Company Page more interactive by adding video. To do so, visit your Company Page as a page admin, click your Products tab and, on the “Edit” drop-down menu, click “Add a product or service.” This enables you to create a new entry that features your video (or you can add a video to any existing product/service pages you’ve already set up). Currently, LinkedIn only supports videos that have been uploaded to YouTube.

Besides the ability to ask questions, LinkedIn Answers also offers a great opportunity for users to share their expertise and thought leadership as well as link to content they’ve created that helps to answer others’ questions. Have you provided a helpful answer (maybe one that was selected as the “Best Answer” by the user who asked the question?) to another’s question lately? When you’re on the question’s page, click “Share This” beneath the question. You then have the option to share the question via LinkedIn message with up to 200 of your connections, bookmark it on Delicious, or grab the permalink to share in other ways.

But that’s not all. LinkedIn Answers has a ton of other great marketing applications, including generating blog content ideas, getting a better understanding of marketing personas, gathering marketing campaign feedback, identifying industry influencers, seeking out guest bloggers, etc. Learn more about each of these marketing uses of LinkedIn Answers in this blog post.

LinkedIn Today is an awesome feature that provides you with the most popular stories that are shared on LinkedIn. Use it to stay on top of news occurring about marketing, the internet, computer software, etc. You can also sign up for email summary notifications of LinkedIn Today news.

In an internal study of HubSpot’s customer base, we found that traffic from LinkedIn generated the highest visitor-to-lead conversion rate at 2.74%, almost 3 times higher (277%) than both Twitter (.69%) and Facebook (.77%). So yes — LinkedIn can help you generate leads. To get the most out of LinkedIn for lead generation, promote and share links to the landing pages for your marketing offers in your Company Status Updates, where appropriate in LinkedIn Answers and Groups, and on the Products & Services section of your Company Page. (Hint: Think of your offers as “products” themselves; see below.)

Company Status Updates aren’t the only thing on your Company Page that you can target. Speaking of the Products & Services section of your page, were you aware that you can create different variations of this section to cater to different segments of your audience? This enables you to better target the content of this section to your various marketing personas, providing a more personalized experience for your Company Page visitors. Targeting options are similar to what’s available in Company Status Update targeting, and you can learn how to set up your page variations in this step-by-step blog post.

If you’re looking to complement your organic marketing efforts with some paid advertising, LinkedIn ads aren’t a bad choice to consider. We wrote about why B2B marketers might want to cozy up to LinkedIn ads, and one of the biggest benefits is … you guessed it … the targeting options! 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. And because they’re relatively new, the competition is much lower than say, Google. If you want to get started with LinkedIn’s advertising platform, here are answers to some of the top questions we’ve been asked about using LinkedIn ads.

Another little LinkedIn gem that not a lot of users or marketers are aware of is the fact that you can access statistics for any LinkedIn Group — even those you’re not a member of! To access the Group Statistics for a specific LinkedIn group, find the group and click ‘More’ in the group’s top navigation. Then click ‘Group Statistics’ from the drop-down menu.

Not only do LinkedIn Group Statistics tell you how many members are in a group or how active those members are; they also provide other key insights about the group’s members such as locations, seniority, function, and industry. Use this data to analyze the makeup of a group before you decide to join, identify which LinkedIn Groups you should target in your LinkedIn ads, help guide you in the best ways to segment the variations of your Products & Services tab on your Company Page, or gather insights about your buyer personas to help you do better marketing outside of LinkedIn.

Or you could just create a LinkedIn Group (as well as subgroups if you’re so inclined) of your very own, like HubSpot did with our popular Inbound Marketers Group. Create a group based on an industry-related topic, and become a LinkedIn Group administrator. You can then use this Group to establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry, grow a community of advocates, generate new marketing content ideas, and even new leads! If you’re interested in getting one started, check out our five tips for managing a LinkedIn Group first.

Generate leads from that group, you say? That’s right! One of the perks of managing a LinkedIn Group is the fact that you can literally email the members of your group — up to once per week. This email takes the form of LinkedIn Announcements, which are messages sent directly to the email inbox of the members of your LinkedIn Group. Whichever email a LinkedIn user includes on their profile will receive the LinkedIn Announcement. This is a prime opportunity for generating leads from LinkedIn, particularly if you’ve build up a robust Group of users. In fact, our best LinkedIn leads days are usually the days on which we’ve sent a LinkedIn Announcement. Here’s how to get the most out of your LinkedIn emails.

In addition to emailing, you can also poll your group members. Just go to the group in which you want to publish a poll (it’s up to group managers to decide whether everyone can publish polls regardless of group membership), hit ‘Poll’, enter your question, and schedule for how long you’d like your poll to run. (Hint: If you’re trying to increase membership for your own LinkedIn Group, make use of the Twitter checkbox that allows you to share your poll on Twitter and get your group more traffic, activity, and membership.) Use polls to generate blog and content fodder, get feedback, conduct research, attract new group members, or get ideas for new marketing offers.

Recommendations are a powerful word-of-mouth marketing tool. And you might already be aware of the LinkedIn recommendation feature that lets users leave recommendations for other users (a plus for professional networking, of course). But did you know you could also collect recommendations for your Company Page’s products and services, too? That’s right! Users can leave a recommendation for anything you feature within the Products & Services tab of your Company Page. And when you click on an individual item on that page, you’ll see all the user-generated reviews of that product or service! What’s really cool is, not only can you have your product or service reviewed, but you can also generate reviews of your marketing offers if you choose to list them there, as we mentioned in number 28.

Encourage your prospects and customers to use LinkedIn as a recommendation platform, and once you’ve collected some awesome recommendations, use them as testimonials on your website.

Looking to fill a position or two on your marketing team — or anywhere else within your company, for that matter? Then be sure to build out the Careers tab on your Company Page, which you can use to promote your available job openings. For more robust Careers tab customization options, you can also purchase a Silver or Gold Careers package which allows you to add a large, clickable cover image that can be transformed into a call-to-action. This image can direct users to a specific job, a list of jobs and opportunities located on your website, or examples of your company’s culture. Below this image you might see a list of jobs, people at your company, a summary section for your careers, what employees are saying about working at your company, and recent updates. The look and feel of this page depends on what information and images you choose to include.

Furthermore, if you’re actively recruiting candidates with specific skills and expertise, don’t forget about LinkedIn’s Advanced Search feature!

Promote your company’s LinkedIn presence and help grow the reach of your Company Page
by adding the Company Follow button to your website. Furthermore, consider adding the LinkedIn share button to your various content assets like blog posts, emails, and landing pages to extend the reach of your content to LinkedIn users. To build these buttons and more, visit LinkedIn’s plugins page here.

Want to take advantage of some even more LinkedIn features and capabilities? Think about upgrading to a pro account for even more LinkedIn awesomeness.

What other LinkedIn tricks do you use to take the most advantage of your LinkedIn presence? Share them in the comments below! (And don’t forget to follow HubSpot’s Company Page on LinkedIn to get more updates!)

Photo Credit: Steven Depolo

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Best of HubSpot | 17 Inspirational Sales & Marketing Quotes to Honor Zig Ziglar

Today [November 28,2012], we’re very sad to have lost the legendary Zig Ziglar after a short battle with pneumonia at age 86. Widely known for his motivational speeches and corporate training to help better people’s lives and careers, Ziglar inspired many businesses, salespeople, and marketers — in addition to countless others — by showing us the “The Ziglar Way.” …Because he has motivated so many marketers and salespeople throughout his more than 50-year long career, we thought a great way to honor his life would be to compile a list of some of our favorite Zig Ziglar quotations — quotations that any marketer, salesperson, or business can learn from….

“Every choice you make has an end result.” … “A goal properly set is halfway reached.” … “If you want to reach a goal, you must ‘see the reaching’ in your own mind before you actually arrive at your goal.” … “Every sale has five basic obstacles: no need, no money, no hurry, no desire, no trust.” … “When obstacles arise, you change your direction to reach your goal; you do not change your decision to get there.” … “You will get all you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want.” … “Stop selling. Start helping.”

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Zig Ziglar | Inspirational Words of Wisdom

Zig Ziglar | Attitude Is Everything

Before Zig Ziglar | Earl Nightingale’s Secrets of Success in 30 Days