The Innovative Marketer's Blog

Twitter can help your company increase engagement, build or expand your following, gain influence and attract new business.  Many marketers—in an effort to amplify their reach and influence to a wide captive audience—make the mistake of over-automating their social media and blasting promotional spam, while failing to foster engagement or really listen to their audience.  These marketers perform social media marketing like spambots in a misguided effort to make their inbound marketing content reach far and wide.  Twitter is a social network, so your marketing there must be social as well and not overly salesy.  Instead, transform your company into a trusted and credible informational resource and post original and curated highly shareable content—chock-full of relevant, smart and valuable solutions and insight. 

LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network with over 200 million users.  The social network is great for making new connections, staying up-to-date on relevant industry news and trends, sharing your original content, building a following and boosting visibility.  LinkedIn is the best social medium for B2B companies.  The social network has a visitor-to-lead conversion ratio of 2.74%, which is outstanding and greatly outranks the conversion rates of Facebook and Twitter.  Although the high conversion rate is very appealing, refrain from engaging in overly “salesy” marketing on LinkedIn.  After all, it is a social network, so be social, focus on being an informational resource and provide links to highly shareable content full of relevant, valuable solutions and insight.  LinkedIn is a rich opportunity to increase engagement, promote your company, gain influence, attract leads and win new business.  

If you’re like most business owners or marketing executives, in 2012 you looked at your marketing as a cost center. We've all done it. You assumed your marketing would cost you more than you could measure that it added to your bottom line. History and experience told you that is how marketing should be considered.

So you created a budget sometime in Q4 2012 and allocated ‘spend’ based on what you believed it would take to achieve certain unmeasurable objectives like increasing visibility, improving awareness or launching a new product, taking into account competitive market conditions and business goals. If you did this, your 2013 is going to be a lot like 2012 and marketing will again be a marginally valuable cost center. Is this kind of marketing effective? Is it making your business more competitive? Does this kind of marketing support your revenue goals? What if instead you required that your marketing investments were directly tied to revenue or better, more revenue than they cost?

Marketing Should Take a Cue from Sales in 2013

When I first started in sales, most people at the time assumed that selling success was largely a genetic thing. Some people were just naturally talented revenue generators just like some people seem to be born as gifted artists or musicians. You either had it or you didn't. But Xerox and others challenged that perception with the idea that all successful sales people had certain behaviors in common and that those behaviors could be taught, developed, improved and repeated. Successful selling was a process, not an art. Over time the entire CRM industry evolved from this one simple notion. Similarly, it’s a trap to assume that successful marketing is an art. Doing so leads to the idea that marketing should be viewed as an unmeasurable or subjective activity and a (bottomless) money pit with no hope of measurably contributing to revenue. On the contrary, successful marketing results from a process that you follow faithfully and refine continuously.

Strategic use of Twitter is a rich avenue to create engagement, promote your company, build a following, generate leads, gain influence and garner new business.  Many marketers—in an effort to expand their reach and influence to a mass audience—make the mistake of over-automating their social media and robotically blast out promotional spam without fostering relationships with prospects and clients or listening to their audience.  These marketers unintentionally post like spambots in order to give their inbound marketing content a wider audience.  However, Twitter is a social network, so your marketing on the network should be social too and not overly “salesy.”  You should focus on being an informational resource and providing links to highly shareable content full of relevant, valuable solutions and insight. 

LinkedIn is the gold standard for online professional networking.  The social network is a great place for individuals, companies and organizations to network with industry contacts, make new connections, stay up-to-date on relevant news and trends, share content, create a following and increase brand awareness and lead conversions.  One of the most impressive facts about LinkedIn is that it has a visitor-to-lead conversion rate of 2.74% —almost three times higher than the conversion rates of Facebook and Twitter.  As the world’s largest and most influential professional network and a rich avenue for lead generation and conversion, you and your company should certainly start taking full advantage of all LinkedIn has to offer.  Sharing high-quality content, actively participating in industry discourse and building a following via LinkedIn could win you a reputation as a thought leader and increased publicity and reach for your company. 

This week, I am attending HubSpot’s Inbound 2012, the world’s largest gathering of inbound marketers.  The conference has featured great keynote speakers, including Hubpot CEO Brian Halligan, HubSpot CTO Darmesh Shah, David Meerman Scott, Rand Fishkin, Susan Cain and Gary Vaynerchuk.  Today, I will focus on a seminar given by David Carpenter of Connection Model, Cut the Geek Speak and Triple Your Earnings.  In order to win long contracts with high value and high margin, you need to learn how to craft custom-tailored language and positions and ask the right questions to position your agency for C-level marketing success.  Engaging business principals about business growth through analysis and targeted online marketing is the key to achieving inbound marketing success at the enterprise level.  David Carpenter outlined a 15-point plan for high-level inbound marketing, which I will share with you now.    

As marketers, we often speak or write about the advantages of social media in marketing. If you look back over the history of the Innovative Marketer’s blog, we’ve regularly discussed insights and perspectives about the ways social media can help your business, school or non-profit. In many organizations, CMOs and marketing directors have been making similar pitches internally.