B2B Lead Generation Articles on inbound marketing

• Thoughts on and Definition of Inbound Marketing (Listening)
  B2B Marketing Confidential | Nov 21, 2010 | Permalink
  Marketing is a word that has lost its meaning, and marketing is a discipline that has lost its way. When I say “marketing” to most people on the street, the first words that are mentioned are overwhelmingly negative. Marketing is thought of as “advertising”, “spam”, “pushy offers”, or “tricks”.Here's an ironic and unlikely hypothesis--marketing accountability has driven this trend. This is meant to be a controversial statement. Marketing accountability, otherwise known as “ROMI (return on marketing investment) measurement”, has forced the marketing function into a single role driven by a single metric—driving incremental, short-term revenue. Of course, this is an oversimplification. Many companies think “long-term” and do care about their long-term customer relationships. But, there has...
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• 4 Ways to Sell Inbound Marketing to Your Manufacturing CEO
  Hubspot | Nov 19, 2010 | Permalink
  At HubSpot, I spend a lot of time speaking with CEOs and owners of manufacturing about integrating inbound marketing into their businesses. During these conversations, I often get the same response: “Our customers are just not online.” I get it. Really I do. Having spent many years in the manufacturing industry I understand. Often manufacturing and Industrial companies make or design something that they can only sell to a set group of businesses. Perhaps they have to be an “approved” supplier and think they are on all necessary approval lists. They know exactly who their target market is, and they know and watch every move their competition makes. As a marketer, you know there are quality leads on the internet, how can you enlighten your CEO to make the important change to Inbound Marke...
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• 4 Immediate eCommerce Solutions to Increase Holiday Sales
  Hubspot | Nov 19, 2010 | Permalink
  I recently wrote an article on 4 Tips to Increase Holiday Sales that was meant to help prepare eCommerce Stores for the upcoming online holiday shopping season.  The time for preparation of the holiday season is quickly coming to a close.  Implement these 4 tips now to increase your visibility and conversion rates this holiday season. 1.  Take Advantage of Cyber Monday - Cyber Monday is followed by Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving) and is the biggest online shopping day of the year.  Take advantage of the increase in online shopping by having visibility in organic search on major search engines.  The best way for an eCommerce store to have increased visibility in organic search on Google or Bing is to write a blog.  Most major search engines have Shopping sections where...
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• The Small Online Merchants Guide To Cyber Monday Success
  Hubspot | Nov 17, 2010 | Permalink
  If you run an ecommerce site and your store is not one of the top 500 online retailers, you likely are up at night obsessing about how to get on that list. After all, those 500 claimed nearly 70% of all online purchases last year. eCommerce has become a winner-take-most model and it’s remarkably difficult for small and medium-sized online stores to catch up without truly changing their customer acquisition model. Cyber Monday is an important kickoff to the shopping year – how will your store compete?

  Redefine Success for Cyber Monday 2010

  Instead of trying to compete on price with the Amazon.coms and Home Depots of the world on Cyber Monday, create a marketing strategy to retain the one-day-only traffic increase on November 29th, 2010. After all, most purchases take place betwe...
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• A Small Business Owner's Guide To Building Credibility
  Hubspot | Nov 16, 2010 | Permalink
  As a small business owner, you recognize the importance of making people aware of your organization's credibility. For nearly 100 years the Better Business Bureau (BBB) helped you work towards that goal by rating reputable small businesses. However, a recent controversy related to the BBB's current rating system exposed the need for improved trust-building mechanisms. While the BBB will remain an important player in this landscape, small business owners should take the time to build credibility for their companies independently of other parties. With emerging new media technologies and online tools, building reputation as a small business and communicating with customers has never been easier. Lets look at a few ways small business owners can build their credibility on their own.

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• New Charts: Bloggers and Blog Readers on the Rise
  Hubspot | Nov 16, 2010 | Permalink
  In “Technorati State of the Blogosphere 2009,” author Matt Sussman writes: “While blog postings often focus on the local issues of the specific blogger, the audience of such blogs is much less limited than other forms of media have been historically. An internet-connected world has expanded the marketplace of ideas available to any individual anywhere.” In the early days of the medium, a blog was the only available outlet for people or companies that wanted to establish a feedback loop with their target audiences. Today, blogging is one of a variety of options businesses use to communicate with customers, including social networking, microblogging, photo- and video-sharing, and customer reviews. At the same time, the growing use of blogging by m...
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• Get More Out of PPC with Targeted Landing Pages & Lead Nurturing
  Hubspot | Nov 15, 2010 | Permalink
  If getting more 'clicks' out of your PPC campaign is the primary goal of your online ads, now is the time to re-evaluate not only your metrics but some of the tactics you can implement to get a better return on that investment.  While inbound marketing emphasizes organic traffic, there are reasons to use PPC as a complement to your inbound efforts. HubSpot customer, Huthwaite, an international sales training company, decreased their cost per PPC lead from $400 to $10 by focusing on quality conversions instead of click volume.  Here are some of the most important things they did that you should consider today: Bidding on a small number of keywords limits your ability to rank on them - so go broad and target 1000 keywords not 100
  Using a sole Ad Group limits you to just...
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• Celebrating "I Love to Write (Marketing Stuff) Day"
  Hubspot | Nov 15, 2010 | Permalink
  As a marketing professional, I have to write constantly.  And, the type of writing that I do usually consists of email message creation.  Emails to current customers, emails to sales prospects, emails to friends of the company...emails, emails, emails.  And, all of those messages involve a degree of selling.  Only occasionally do I have the opportunity to step outside the world of business writing and when I do, it is uncomfortable. I found "I Love to Write Day" while researching some blog topic ideas for this month.  Since the inception of "ILTWD" in 2002, nine states have officially recognized the day and 22,000 schools celebrate it.   The 9th annual celebration, according to "I Love to Write Day" founder John Riddle, "is to have people of all ages spend time writing. They can write a...
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• How to Get More Leads From Existing Content
  Hubspot | Nov 15, 2010 | Permalink
  In an inbound marketing culture where there is a strong emphasis on the regular creation of fresh, original content, it's easy to overlook the potential of evergreen content. Taking advantage of evergreen content, or content you previously published, can have a number of benefits. Due to the fact that you put a lot of thought, time, and effort into your content, it only makes sense to re-purpose it. Evergreen content may not be fresh, but it can still attract visitors to your website and generate leads for your business. We've discussed the basics of promoting evergreen content in social media before, so here are some tips for using landing pages and marketing analytics to derive more value from your evergreen content.

  Create Landing Pages

  When we talk about evergreen content, ...
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• Answered: 10 Common Social Media Marketing Questions
  Hubspot | Nov 14, 2010 | Permalink
  Can dipping your toe in the water be more detrimental than diving all the way in? Yes, when it comes to using social media for marketing your business. Dipping your toe in the water by launching a small social media experiment or hiring an intern to manage community engagement will deliver insignificant or vague results. It is not going to change the way you are doing business. As HubSpot’s VP of Marketing Mike Volpe explained in a recent webinar, social media needs to be part of a comprehensive inbound marketing strategy in order to yield visible results. Here are 10 thought-provoking questions about social mediathat emerged from the same webinar:

  1. How should organizations measure social media success?

  Social media success should be measured using the same metrics you would...
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