5 Guaranteed Ways to Generate Leads with Social Media Posted on November 23, 2018December 1, 2022 by Guest Author Struggling to generate new leads for your business? It might be time to look in a new place: social media. In today’s selling market, the best places to find leads are shifting away from traditional channels. Instead, it’s in the social media arena where you can achieve your biggest growth. Social media can provide engaged leads eager to buy—but only if you know how to start with effective outreach. Today, you’ll learn the strategies behind effective lead generation on social media. We’ll explore both paid and unpaid strategies to find high-quality buyers—mostly in the B2B space, but with techniques that can also work wonders if you’re selling B2C. Let’s dig in! Social Media’s Advantage in Generating High-Quality Leads Let’s start by exploring why social media is the secret to great leads. To start off, social media users are more engaged with their networks than many other platforms, including email. In fact, 20% of business users have replaced email with social media as their primary communication method—and 23% of internet users spend almost all their time on social media and blogs. In addition to social media’s prominent place in the worlds of your users, it also has targeting and contact information built in. Unlike emails, which lack location precision or contextual data, platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn let you initiate contact with prospects based on highly specific criteria. That’s probably why, according to Sales for Life, 61% of B2B marketers use social media to increase lead generation. So, what are the most effective ways to reach out to prospects and find new buyers? Strategies to Generate Leads with Social Media Social media lead generation strategies include both free and paid techniques. Let’s look at both. 1. Share and Promote Links to Gated Content The first strategy is to share links to content. Content is one of the most important parts of the buying cycle. Sixty-five percent of buyers feel that content has an impact on purchase decisions, according to HubSpot. So if you aren’t producing content to bring leads into a sale with you, you’re missing out. A great way to grow your email list is with links to gated content—that is, content that requires a signup first. It’s been estimated that up to 80% of B2B content marketing assets are gated. A great example of gating done correctly is this report from Braze on mobile marketing. To see the information, you need to fill out a multi-part lead form. This is a bit longer than some that only require an email (and because of that, likely converts fewer leads than a simpler form), but is a great example of gated content nonetheless. You can (and should) gate content like white papers, reports, videos, and research. You can then share links to these pages on social media, as Braze did with their mobile marketing FAQs. But creating this content will help with more than just getting leads. You’ll also provide content that helps bring those prospects to purchase decisions. According to Sales for Life, 77% of B2B buyers did independent research before talking to a salesperson. This type of content can help bridge the knowledge gap between prospects and buyers. If you already have content like this, you can go ahead and provide a gate to it as-is. If you don’t have a content bank yet, start creating it. You’ll want to find pressing problems that your prospects are facing and create high-quality answers to those problems. The best types of reports involve original research and actionable suggestions. 2. Use Paid Lead Advertising If you’re frustrated with the number or quality of the leads you’re getting, it might be time to ramp up your strategy. You can start implementing a paid strategy for even more consistent lead generation. There are lead generation strategies on nearly every platform nowadays, so your choice of strategy should depend mostly on where your audience is. If you’re in the B2C space, you should probably start with Facebook. Facebook’s lead ads allow prospects to send you their contact information with just a few taps. Facebook automatically populates with their information and all the prospect needs to do is confirm the submission. Since Facebook owns Instagram, they’ve implemented the same type of ad on that platform, too. Instagram lead ads are nearly identical to those on Facebook—you can choose the information to ask for. Once again, this works best with B2C products. A while back, you could also use similar lead-generation cards on Twitter. However, in late 2016, Twitter announced they’d phase out this type of ad. Thankfully, this isn’t a deal breaker. In fact, experts such as Larry Kim of WordStream recommended against using Twitter lead generation cards anyways. He argued that these lead-focused ads tended not to get a very good return on investment, and instead recommended avoiding the “ad” look at all, instead using simple, eye-catching images resembling organic content. Finally, let’s talk about the best source of leads for B2B sales: LinkedIn. According to QuickSprout, 45% of marketers have gained a customer through the platform. If you’re looking for high-qualified B2B leads, LinkedIn is the best place to go. You have a few options when it comes to paid ads on LinkedIn. First, you can sponsor content. This is similar to a sponsored post on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. Next, you can send sponsored InMail messages straight to a prospect’s inbox. And finally, you can sponsor text ads—similar to a standard text ad on a website. Like Facebook’s lead ads, LinkedIn has Lead Gen Form ads which auto-populate with the contact’s information. They’re not available for text ads, but if you’re planning on using sponsored content or sponsored InMail, you should give this format a try. Like Facebook leads, these allow a prospect to quickly give his or her information to you. But with LinkedIn’s focus on business and professionals, you’ll get higher-quality leads. 3. Host a Live Event The next strategy to generate leads through social media is through live events. This doesn’t mean conferences or in-person meetups, but content generated in-the-moment online. According to HubSpot, webinars and webcasts are the single most effective content tactic for B2B marketers, beating out blogs, case studies, and research reports. The most basic version of an event of this type is a webinar. These are typically held live (but can also be recorded and replayed later). Here’s an example of a webinar lead generation page from Neil Patel. You will, of course, need to set this up on your own site, but you can use social media to draw in leads to promote it. By sharing it on social media, you can expand your reach and start generating more leads by leveraging your existing social connections. A simple post to the webinar registration page works fine. Here’s how Cleriti promotes their webinar on Twitter. If you’d rather try out a live event with a more native-friendly feel, you can host an FAQ or presentation on Facebook Live. While most of the activity on Facebook Live is B2C, there are still huge opportunities for drawing in B2B leads. ExpertVoice, for example, hosts Facebook Live chats and interviews. The audience engagement keeps their brand strong and they view Facebook Live as a platform for lead generation. Finally, you can host a live tweet chat. These posit you as an influencer in the industry and give a strong impression of your brand. For example, SEMRush features #semrushchat, driving people to converse about SEO and their brand on a regular basis. But be warned—this is more of a long-term strategy. SEMRush builds credibility in the eyes of their prospects that bring in buyers later on, but likely doesn’t generate leads each #semrushchat. 4. Run a Referral Campaign If you’re willing to spend some money to generate more leads through social media, you can use a referral campaign. To make this work, you’ll need to encourage customers to share on social media, track new signups through their referral link, and compensate referrers. It can be a lot to manage yourself, so to speed up the process you’ll find a lot of use in an automatic program to handle the details for you. A great system for this is LeadDyno, which will handle affiliate payouts and will even provide affiliates with social media messages you’ve crafted for them. Finally, you can use a new philosophy to maximize your leads—social selling. 5. Sell on Social Social selling isn’t quite like the other recommendations. It’s not a technique or strategy—it’s a different way to think about selling. Instead of using cold pitching and leads, it’s a sales process built on relationships and education. But it’s not just a theory or a fad. While it’s a relatively new mindset, research and numbers show that it’s highly effective at generating high-quality leads on social media. According to PostBeyond, 73% of salespeople who use social selling outperformed their peers and exceeded their sales quota 23% more often. So, how does social selling work? It’s built around a few main principles: leverage social connections, deliver value and engage with prospects. While you could use social selling in real life in a variety of settings, we’re going to focus on the digital realm. What does it look like for social media? Well, the first step is to get your profiles set up. You’ll want to build out a credible social media profile that shows you’re an expert—but also trustworthy and willing to provide an honest and valuable perspective. LinkedIn’s professional focus provides the most opportunities for this. To build out your LinkedIn profile, Marcus Murphy at Digital Marketer recommends getting endorsements for your skills, ideally the 99+ maximum that LinkedIn will display. You’ll also want to develop a communication plan that revolves around your audience and their wants, needs, and problems. Murphy recommends writing and sharing great content. You can then look at the analysis behind your posts to see who’s engaging and what type of people are interacting with your content. It’s a good way to start finding prospects you can then reach out to. Once you have a credible profile and people engaging with your content, you can start finding prospects to connect with. Share great content, provide value, and build relationships. One of the best ways to do this is by contacting a prospect, engaging them and building a relationship—and only then moving the conversation offline. This type of outreach is most effective at driving quality leads and building up your sales platform on social media. Conclusion You can’t ignore social media when it comes to generating leads and sales. Social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are swarming with prospects eager to buy from you—if you know how to find them. Now, you’ve got a playbook for generating high-quality leads on social media. Start by looking at a mindset of social selling. Rather than just cold-pitching, work to provide value across different channels to those who are most interested in buying from you. Boost the awareness of your company or brand with resources, like white papers and reports. To generate leads from these works, offer gates that generate contact follow up methods. Promote the content you’ve created and your social media channels through paid advertising, live events, and even referrals if you like. Keep the focus on building up relationships before the sale. With a solid social media lead strategy, you’ll tap into a highly effective pool of prospects that can change the face of your business forever. Author Bio Emil Kristensen is the CMO and co-founder of Sleeknote: a company that helps e-commerce brands engage their site visitors—without hurting the user experience.
5 Ways to Show Your Team You’re Thankful Posted on November 22, 2018November 14, 2018 by Jonathan Herrick It’s always important to show employees you appreciate them—and Thanksgiving season is a great time to do that. Many entrepreneurs are so caught up in the rush of daily work, that they don’t take the time to show gratitude to the team members who support them in their dream of building their business. If you’ve been neglecting to tell them how much you care, now is the perfect time. So how do you demonstrate just how much they mean to you? Here are some ideas: Stay on schedule. Research shows that workers who have more control over their time are healthier than those who lack it. Even if you can’t offer flexible hours because of the nature of your business, you can give employees more ability to control their time by sticking to a predictable schedule they can plan things like daycare around. Set a public goal among your team of having everyone leave work on time every day, so they can run their personal lives in an organized way. Create a challenge where you give the team points for every day the whole group leaves on time, and offer a team reward—such a special outing—if everyone achieves a certain benchmark, such as leaving on time 90% of the time. Exercises like this not only encourage teamwork—by giving everyone else an incentive to help those who are jammed up—but also will motivate your team to focus their efforts better. And your employees will no doubt appreciate having some clarity on when their workday actually ends, something many don’t have when the lines are blurry. Create a level playing field. You don’t have to run a big company to give your employees the tools and resources they need to be successful. Whether its a CRM, or a messaging tool like Slack, the right tools can go a long way into making sure your employees feel supported. Don’t know what tools they need? Spend some time with each employee to learn what repetitive tasks they deal with day in and day out and leverage technology to eliminate the mundane part of their job. Another way to say “Thanks” is to invest in their professional development. There are a ton of online courses and workshops designed to help your employees further their skill set. As a business leader your only as good as the team around you. Investing in a few tools and resources can not only help your employees work more efficiently, but it shows that you care about them as people. Give them time to recharge. Just as entrepreneurs benefit from time away from the business to sharpen the saw, employees do, too. Ask employees to suggest a lunch-and-learn or offsite on a topic that would benefit them personally, whether it’s in an area like meditation, which will help them indirectly, or a concrete skill, like mastering Instagram marketing—then bring in an outside expert to help them master it. Allow them to do their learning on the clock, so it doesn’t cut into their personal time. Invest in wellness. Consider offering a new perk related to wellness, such as a once-a-week onsite yoga lesson from a local instructor or lunch once a month from a new healthy restaurant in your community. If you have no budget to invest, making your workplace more active by opting for stand-up or walking meetings when you can. The more your employees benefit, the more you will, too. With medical costs rising for many firms, anything you can do to help employees stay healthy could help you keep costs in check. Thank their loved ones. Every employee has people in their life who care about them and are affected when work places extra demands on them from time to time. With many companies heading into a busy season in December, now is an ideal time to send a thank-you note to the folks they share their lives with to thank them for all they do to support your employee. If your team is small, consider writing the notes by hand—the personal touch will stand out in an age of texts and emails. Imagine how your employees will feel when they come home from work and their spouse, children or parents knows what a contribution they are making, and you’ll quickly see why this approach is so powerful. We all like being appreciated, and at a time when many employees have options for finding other jobs, it’s more important than ever to let them know you care. The more valued they feel, the greater their contribution will be to helping you achieve your own goals for the business.
Why Drip Campaigns are the Overlooked Timesaver Your Business Needs Posted on November 21, 2018July 31, 2020 by Jessica Lunk Wouldn’t it be great if you could nurture leads into sales automatically? If you could send emails to potential leads that were always relevant? If your sales pipeline was always full and your conversion rates always increased? With drip email marketing, these things are possible. Drip email marketing, otherwise known as drip email campaigns, automates part of your marketing and sales process to convert leads into customers. It can take some time and effort to get set up, but once you’ve got it up and running—it just does its thing. In this article, we’ll discuss more about how drip campaigns can be the overlooked time saver your business needs. Email Marketing Basics Broadly speaking, there are two categories to email marketing: email blasts & drip campaigns. Email blasts are sent to subsections of an organization’s mailing list as standalone messages. They usually contain generalized information with a brief and explicit call to action (CTA). A blast email is fairly basic, since it’s not personalized. They’re fairly simple to write and send, so they’re a popular choice with many businesses. Drip marketing campaigns, on the other hand, are personalized emails sent as a series over a specific period of time. A drip campaign uses targeted email lists and specific content that’s tailored to the needs or interests of that subset of customers or potential customers. Once configured, drip marketing automatically sends emails to segments of your contacts based on time elapsed or other criteria. Diving into Drip Campaigns Drip campaigns, also known as drip marketing, automated email campaign, drip email campaigns, lifecycle emails, autoresponders, and marketing automation, is one of many marketing strategies used by savvy marketers today. They are a communication strategy that “drips” a series of messages to customers, leads, or prospects over time. Drip campaigns are usually email-based, but other media can also be used. Basically, drip campaigns give people the right information at the right time. Emails are sent based on specific timelines or user actions—for example, when a user signs up for an account or clicks through to your website but doesn’t complete a purchase. The email messages are all written in advance, and a timeline is built for the campaign. As a very basic example, let’s say a user signs up for an account on your website. A “thank you” email is sent immediately. Another email is scheduled for one week later with a tempting offer. The next of these sales emails is sent two days after that, with a valuable coupon. Because these emails are previously written, you don’t have to do anything. The drip campaign sends the emails out on the schedule you created. How Does a Drip Campaign Work? Drip email marketing campaigns can send messages or other content based on parameters like time or action. Let’s say your business exhibits at a local conference. You gather the email address of the contacts you made, and add them to your prospecting list. You might not want to send the same emails to people who aren’t your customers yet. Instead, you can set up a drip email campaign that introduces leads to your business. Here’s an example of a time-based drip campaign: The first email might go out the same day of the conference, the second is sent the next week, and a final email in the campaign is scheduled for the week after that. An example of an action-based drip campaign might look like this: new leads receive an email when they sign up for your list. They receive an email with an offer and click the call to action. They enter your sales funnel and become a customer. Now they are moved to a list for customers. Your customer list sends periodic emails with enticing offers to drive repeat business. Why Use Drip Campaigns? The best reason to use drip campaigns is because they’re effective. According to Zapier, “people who read your drip emails are far more likely to click the links in them, with a 119% increase in click rate from drip emails.” Drip emails help by automating tedious early-stage sales processes by delivering timely information to users while creating and nurturing leads. Drip Campaign Ideas Some types of drip campaigns include: Welcome campaign, introducing new leads and prospects to your company Onboarding campaign, introducing a new client to your company and providing resources for collaboration post-sale Top-of-mind campaign, to regularly engage with leads who are not quite sales-ready over a longer period of time through consistent touch points Competitive campaign, differentiating your product or service from the competition Re-engagement campaign, focused on encouraging inactive leads to reenter the sales process Tools Needed to Launch a Drip Campaign To pull off your drip campaign strategy, you need marketing automation software to deliver your emails based on your unique requirements. With marketing automation software, you can track the behavior of your contacts across your website and see how they interact with your email campaigns. Then, create your email drip campaign to send the right message at the right time. Here’s a simple example of how to create a drip campaign with BenchmarkONE’s marketing automation. Say you are a marketing agency that offers three services: Website Design Search Engine Optimization Pay Per Click Advertising You have a form on your website where your visitors can request an checklist for optimizing their website design. Since you know that these visitors are interested in web design, it’s the perfect opportunity to nurture them with relevant, timely emails. Here’s an example of automations we can add to our Online Form in BenchmarkONE: Add a Tag, “Interested in Website Design.” This is useful for segmenting these prospects. Send an Autoresponder email that contains the checklist requested from the download form. Update the contact’s record to a “Prospect” status and add “Website Checklist Download” as their lead source Start your drip campaign – “Interested in Web Design.” Here’s an example of the campaign you might create in BenchmarkONE: Day 1: Send the email “10 Ways to Improve Website Conversions, According to the Experts.” Day 8: Send the email “Website Design: DIY or Hire the Pros?” Day 15: Send teh email: “Hear from the Pros: 10 Website Design Mistakes to Avoid.” Day 22: Send the email “Ready to Chat About Web Design?” Now, when a potential customer requests the checklist for optimizing their website, you can follow-up with them and stay top-of-mind, all through your simple, yet powerful drip campaign.
6 Common Grammatical Errors and Why They Make Your Business Look Unprofessional Posted on November 19, 2018November 14, 2018 by Allie Wolff Before the internet, we had no idea that grammar elicited such strong emotions. But now, it seems like the grammar police are everywhere – at work, in your Facebook feed, even in your memes. For some, grammar policing is no more than an opportunity to show how well they paid attention in school: “everyone knows you can’t end a sentence with a preposition.” But for others, you’d think a misplaced modifier was grounds for capital punishment. Although we think grammar flubs are forgivable in casual conversation, there’s really no excuse for these six most common grammatical errors in the business world. A word to the wise, before we jump in: this isn’t a rant about the importance of being “technically” correct in your copy. There are plenty of phrases that are grammatically sound, yet completely awkward and off-putting, and have no place in good copy (don’t say “this is a situation out of which you must get.” Say, “get outta there!”) On the other hand, in great copywriting, you’ll find tons of sentence fragments and other technical faux-pas – and they can be very powerful. The items that made this list are the most serious offenders that will make your business look careless or obscure your intended meaning. These are the mistakes that could legitimately cost you your next (or first) big client. #1: It’s not “its” when it’s “it is.” Confused? Then this one’s for you. The apostrophe in “it’s” is just like the apostrophe in “don’t” or “shouldn’t” – a sign that you’re looking at a contraction, which is essentially two words spliced together. “It’s” stands for “it is.” However, “its” is a possessive pronoun, as in, “I gave my favorite coat its own hanger.” The hanger belongs to the coat – its hanger. It’s clear why these terms get confused, since we sometimes see apostrophes in other possessive terms, like “Jessica’s house” or “Walmart’s produce department.” If you have trouble remembering this one, just remember: you can’t make “it is” into a contraction without putting an apostrophe in there – which means that “its” must be the other guy, the possessive pronoun. #2: You’re your own worst enemy. And a similar note, “you’re” is a contraction for “you are” – leaving “your” (you guessed it) as the only option for the possessive pronoun version. #3: Comma usage. It seems there are as many ways to misuse a comma as there are ways to construct a sentence, but here are the most common errors: Missing comma. “Let’s eat mom!” Without the comma after “eat,” this reads like we’re going to eat mom, which is hopefully not the intention. Comma overuse. If you’re hypervigilant about avoiding the problem above, you may err on the side of caution by plunking commas down willy-nilly – but don’t! The easiest way to tell if a comma is misused is to read your sentence aloud. If the comma provides breathing room in a logical place, as it does in this sentence, it’s probably safe to keep it. If it interrupts the flow of your ideas, leave it out. Comma in place of a coordinating conjunction. When you have two independent clauses, they need to be conjoined with a conjunction like “and” or “but” (or even a semicolon) rather than a comma. For instance: Correct: I did my first sales call, and it went well. Also correct: I did my first sales call; it went well. Incorrect: I did my first sales call, it went well. #4: Misplaced, or dangling, modifiers. A modifier is a word (often an adjective or adverb) that describes, or modifies, some other word. For instance, in “pretty house,” the modifier would be “pretty.” A misplaced modifier (also called a dangling modifier) is one that obscures the meaning of a sentence because the modifier is too far away from the word it’s describing. For example, let’s say you think your mom’s gigantic Victorian mansion is creepy, so you write, “my creepy mom’s house.” Because “creepy” sits next to “mom,” it sounds like you think your mom is creepy – not the house. The solution is to keep your modifiers close to the people, places, or things they’re describing. “Mom’s creepy house” is much better. #5: Run-on sentences. You’ve likely heard of a run-on sentence, but can you spot one? Contrary to popular belief, they don’t have to be a mile long, but they do always combine two or more main clauses incorrectly. For instance: Correct: The dog was scared, so he barked. Run-On: The dog was scared he barked. Fix run-ons by attaching these clauses with conjunctions (and, so, but, for), adding a semicolon, or separating them into two distinct sentences. #6: Unnecessarily long sentences. Keep long sentences to a minimum. Complex or highly passive sentences don’t convince your reader that you’re smart. While they may serve to bolster your ego, they’re doing nothing to bolster your bottom line. Keep it simple. #6: Typos. While typos aren’t technically breaches of grammar rules, they’re one of the most common mistakes in business and copywriting. A typo on an important landing page may cost you the sale – if you’re that careless in your work, how can a prospect trust you with their time and money? Further, typos in blogs and URLs can hurt your site’s searchability, and even lead to dreaded 404 errors and time-consuming 301 redirects. If you can afford it, hire a professional copy editor or spring for a premium Grammarly subscription. If you can’t, at a minimum, re-read everything you write once before you publish it.
5 Office Tasks That Should Be Automated Posted on November 16, 2018November 19, 2018 by Erin Posey Without question, your team works hard. That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re working smart, however. As a business leader, it’s your job to provide guidance, not only on what should (or shouldn’t) get done, but also on how that work is accomplished. If your team is currently performing a lot of manual tasks, you are undoubtedly letting them down (and probably losing money in the process). Streamlining workflows by automating routine, repetitive manual tasks can dramatically boost productivity and efficiency. It’ll also make your team much happier. Here are a few inefficiencies that could easily be automated today. Communication Tracking Keeping tabs on where customers are in the sales process is important. But if your reps are wasting precious time documenting all the details of their interactions, their talents are going to waste. Using a CRM as a repository for incoming and outgoing emails and automatically seeing those messages on the appropriate client records is a much better way to track and manage client communication. Lead Scoring Manually scoring leads isn’t just time-consuming on the front end. It’s also a process that is wrought with inefficiencies throughout as well. One mistake and your sales reps could be sent on a wild goose chase, trying to track down leads that aren’t qualified after all. Improper allocation of time and resources like this could easily result in a missed opportunity to convert a lead that’s hot. Conversely, a CRM can automatically alert agents when hot prospects exhibit buying behavior, saving time and improving results. Appointment Scheduling Chasing down appointments is a huge time waster, yet this is something that many teams are bogged down with on a daily basis. Imagine how much more successful your company could be if the skills of your employees could be put to use nurturing relationships and providing better support instead of managing their calendars. Automating this task eliminates waste and optimizes human resources. We recommend tools like Calendly and Acuity Scheduling to get the job done – without the manual labor. Data Gathering In order to more effectively target your leads, your sales reps need to have a clear understanding of the “big picture.” That is, when and how prospects are getting in touch with your company as well as where they are in the process. Having a single dashboard where all client interactions are consolidated enables reps to quickly pinpoint where a prospect is in the funnel and what the next steps should be. A CRM can easily facilitate this. Compiling and Pulling Reports Most companies list growth as one of their top priorities, which requires constant tracking to ensure that objectives and milestones are consistently being met. Reports on such things as projected sales, pipeline value and actual revenue must be run regularly – a task that can be time-consuming when done manually. There’s also an increased possibility of human error. By turning over the reporting to an automated platform, these errors are eliminated and all the information needed can easily be obtained at a few clicks of a keyboard. These are just a handful of the many ways automation can make your organization more profitable (and the lives of your employees more enjoyable).
Here are the 7 Best Marketing Software Alternatives to HubSpot Posted on November 15, 2018March 8, 2023 by Jonathan Herrick No one can deny that HubSpot is a great CRM and marketing solution for larger firms looking to have all of their tools in one place. But is an all-in-one platform the best choice for your business? The truth is that not all SMBs (small to mid-sized businesses) need an extensive automation platform. For many smaller businesses, HubSpot may not only be overkill…it may actually be less effective than using best of breed tools integrated together. As an SMB you might not have the huge budget that enterprise businesses do. So before committing to a long-term contract with HubSpot, here are a few marketing software alternatives to help you build a more affordable and more effective marketing stack than HubSpot’s. For landing pages: Unbounce HubSpot hails Unbounce as the leading lead-form tool, and there’s good reason. The software is easy to use, with drag-and-drop tools and deep analytics to see how your pages are performing. If your company needs a specific landing page that’s distinct from the rest of your site – or if your site is just a single landing page – Unbounce could be the right solution. Plans start at just $79 a month, which makes it a cost-effective way to capture more leads and build your subscriber list. For blogging: WordPress Nobody disputes that WordPress, the world’s leading blog platform (nearly 50% of all websites use WordPress), is easy to use and integrates nicely with many other marketing tools. Its longevity in the market has given it a wealth of free resources available online, from templates to troubleshooting guides to integrations. Specifically compared to HubSpot, WordPress is a far more powerful content management system, with a wide array of plugins, widgets, coding flexibility and site-speed enhancement. It’s great for tagging and organizing media and posts on your site. Plus, it’s theoretically free: some templates and plugins cost money, and you’ll likely want to hire a developer to augment any given theme, but the resources are out there. For analytics: Google Analytics Google’s free analytics software is easy to install and gives you the data you need to better understand what’s working and what isn’t. With Google Analytics you get info on: Daily site visitors and unique site visitors each month What channels are driving traffic to your site – SEO, PPC, referral, etc. Time spent on site, pages viewed, and demographic/technographic data Which landing page people are entering your website from Which pages are getting the most traffic As a free app from the most popular search engine, Google Analytics is a must-have when it comes to website tracking. HubSpot’s analytics are basic; you can only really view your number of users and progression over previous months. With Google Analytics, you can check specific time periods of traffic; discover what browser, operating system and device your audience is using; dig into specific content by country; see what percentage of viewers look at multiple pages; and create reports for all this. Plus, because it’s Google, there’s a wealth of how-to information available for newbies. For Marketing Automation and CRM: BenchmarkONE While BenchmarkONE doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of HubSpot, it packs a core feature set SMBs love at 1/10 of the cost of HubSpot’s platform. BenchmarkONE has a breezy interface that allows you to add information to user profiles that stays with them from their initial contact as a lead to their eventual conversion to a customer. BenchmarkONE rolls up sales, marketing and customer relationship management into one sales and marketing software – letting teams work together well and preventing customers from getting lost in a bureaucratic shuffle. Combine that with BenchmarkONE’s built-in email marketing tools, and you get all the features you need to capture, nurture and convert more visitors and prospects into customers. Pricing starts at just $29. With BenchmarkONE, there are no contracts and an abundance of resources such as live support and training to get you up and running in no time. Image courtesy of Hootsuite For social media: Hootsuite Another software to check out is Hootsuite – a social media software that allows you to monitor your social channels tidily and conveniently. A big feature for Hootsuite is its organizational structure: you can schedule posts to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and Google+, and view them all in a single calendar. You can also create different tabs on the main dashboard, allowing you to cleanly check your mentions, private messages, recent followers or news feed for each social platform in a different column. With a modest payment plan for growing teams, it’s one of the best freemium digital marketing tools around. For keyword tracking and planning: Rankie software and Google AdWords HubSpot allows you to track keywords in Google, effectively an add-on research tool for pay-per-click marketers. But HubSpot’s keyword-research tool doesn’t help generate many new ideas. Instead, a better option would be to find a specialized keyword tracker, such as the WordPress plugin, Rankie, which offers tracking analysis in a deeper way. Google AdWords, meanwhile, has a specialized tool called Google Keyword Planner that utilizes its status as a primary source to tell you what keywords are worth investing in through SEO and paid channels. By using these seven sales and marketing alternatives to HubSpot you’ll build a more budget-friendly marketing stack that’s a better fit for your business. Need a little help putting the right tools together? Check out this super helpful marketing stack builder. It’s a quick and easy resource to help you compare tools within your budget. Happy hunting!
This One Tool Will Change the Way You Design Forever Posted on November 13, 2018November 13, 2018 by Jessica Lunk If you’ve ever right-clicked a webpage, noticed “Inspect” at the bottom of the menu, and clicked, you’ve invariably had one of these three reactions: What’s this for? Oh, no, it’s code. Get me out of here! This is the greatest thing ever. If you haven’t quite achieved that level-three realization yet, that’s what we’re here for: to share exactly how the “Inspect” or “Inspect Element” tool can save you massive time as a marketer or designer, even if the only thing that doesn’t terrify you about Javascript is its implicit relation to coffee. What is the Inspector? The inspector is an internet browser tool that helps you see the underlying blueprint of any webpage. You don’t have to be the administrator of a website to see the CSS, Javascript, and other code that goes into the creation of a website – you don’t even have to be a coder. Anybody can do this. When you use the Inspector tool, you’ll not only be able to see which colors, fonts, images, and other graphics are on the page, but you’ll be able to change those elements in your browser. If you’re a marketer or designer, stop for a moment to think how helpful this is. Instead of spending valuable time creating mockups or examples of what a client’s website could look like, you can make visual changes in real time over a conference call to explain what you mean. You can use your desktop browser to emulate a mobile device, to preview content and ensure it’s responsive. You can alter web copy to show how a tweak in messaging would improve the page’s appearance. You can swap out images and revamp the color scheme, all without the hassle and danger of messing with the actual code on a site. How to Use the Inspector Tool This tool has multiple capabilities, so we’ll focus on how marketers can use it to alter, test, and study different web design elements in Chrome (if you’re not in Chrome, see this guide for how to open the Inspector). Navigate to the page you want, right click, then click “Inspect.” In the top left of the pane that opens, you’ll see two icons: Click the first, and it allows you to hover over any element on that page and see its attributes. Click the second, and you’ll toggle to the mobile version of that site. In the main menu at the top, you’ll see several options – from Elements to Console, Sources, Network, and Performance. We’ll be working in the “Elements” tab. Here, you can: Search for specific elements on a page. Open the hamburger menu on the top right and click “Search.” Enter your query: you may want to look for a specific color, header type, metadata, or font name so you can replace it with alternatives. This tool is also handy if you’re looking to ensure none of your old brand colors (or taglines, or logos) are present on a website. Live-edit style elements on a page. With the “Styles” tab open, scroll down through the pane to the element you want to change, click on it, and type a new value. Hit “Enter” or “Tab” to save it. Here are some elements on a webpage that you might experiment with: Update colors. On the webpage side of your screen, go to the section you’d like to work on. With the “cursor on a square” icon highlighted, click the element whose color you want to change. Type in a new hexcode for that color to change it. If you’d like to change the color of a CSS element sitewide (say, all H2 headers), use the “search” tool to find the line of code that dictates the color of all H2 headers and change it there. Change images. Click the “cursor on a square” icon in the top left of the main panel, and click the image you want to change. Locate the link of the image you want to change and replace it with a link to another image. Note that your new image will have to exist online, so you may need to upload it to your WordPress media library (or other library) to generate a link. Switch up written content. Have a new idea for a tagline or call-to-action that you’re sure will improve conversions? Test out its look and feel on your existing site. Here’s how: click the “cursor on a square” icon in the top left of the main panel. Then, click the text box you want to change. This will highlight the section of code that denotes which text to display. From there you can simply change the text inline. And voila! Reformat page elements. You can change line height, font size, margins and padding, headers, and more in the “Styles” tab within the inspector tool. You can manually scroll through the code to find these values, or you can use the “Search” function to locate them. Save changes for later. Since changes made in “Inspect Element” aren’t permanent, you’ll need some way to retain them for your own purposes (or to show a client or colleague later). To save your changes as an HTML file, right-click on the webpage itself, and click “View Source.” This will open a new tab with all of the altered code, where you can right-click again and “Save As” an HTML file. Alternately, you can copy and paste the code into a document and save it there. View metadata. This is useful if you’re studying a competitors’ page to inform your SEO strategy. Use the search function to find meta descriptions and other data that you want to study. There you have it! Of course, you’re not limited to the elements we’ve called out in this piece: depending on your comfort level with code, you could change button styles, widget placement, and more. Take it for a spin: we promise you won’t be disappointed.
5 Ways to Figure Out What Your Audience Really Wants to Read Posted on November 12, 2018 by Allie Wolff Content marketing is great, blogging is awesome, inbound is the future — but it only works if people actually care about what you’re putting out. Brainstorming blog topics can be one of the most energizing, creative and time-consuming activities when it comes to inbound marketing. But it’s a bedrock of the system. You need to do it, and you should invest the proper amount of time in getting it right. The good news: brainstorming blog topics is not a single-use action in and of itself. It’s a multipurpose strategy and incorporates keyword research for search engine marketing, website traffic analysis, social media analysis and customer service reflection. It’s all connected. When it comes to wrapping all that up in inbound marketing, it helps to think of it as a direct address to your audience. In other words, don’t think of brainstorming content strategy as a cumbersome step to write articles that disappear into the Internet. Think of it as a necessary element to enhance into your entire marketing strategy. See what your audience expects of you. Sometimes marketers and creatives aim to be prophetic — give the people something they don’t even realize they want! But when you need to create content on a weekly or even daily schedule, you don’t always have that luxury. If you want a reliable piece of new content, give the people what you already know they want. That means browsing your analytics dashboard to pinpoint your website’s most popular pages, integrating heat maps through tools like Crazy Egg to show exactly which parts of your site users are clicking on, and analyzing on-site search queries to learn what they’re most interested in after they’ve arrived. By understanding what attracts people who’ve already found your site, and digging into those second and third clicks, you’re carving out a valuable niche based on what you know you’re already doing right. Expand on the ways people are already finding your site. The above notion applies to search engine marketing as well. Let’s say you wrote a blog post about the most cost-effective ways to build a social media following (which your agency can help with!). It alone reliably draws in 100 users a day to your website. That’s a clue to double-down on that topic and expand it with a few other pieces, then link them together. That piece of content would become what some call a cornerstone post, a popular pillar of your site that you refer back to. Write related pieces that reference how popular that initial piece is and blast them across social media. Lean into your own hype — don’t replicate it, but expand upon it. Study your social followers. We don’t just mean looking at your built-in Facebook or Twitter analytics, though those are certainly helpful. What we suggest you do, rather, is dig into the nitty-gritty of a handful of your individual social followers to get a sense of what they like. Find your most engaged Twitter followers and browse their timelines. Click through to your Facebook commenters’ profiles to see what they share (if their profiles are public). The point isn’t to spy on them, but to get a sense of their personality. It’s like expanding your buyer persona. What do your fans comment on? What do they like or dislike? What inspires them? Use those ideas to generate your own social, newsletter and website content. Odds are, if they’re engaged fans, they’re a good representation of the kind of person you want to attract. Turn to your CRM. If you keep logs of your customer and prospect interactions, such as chats or emails, scan over them to get a sense of your customer base. What do they think of your company? What do they like or dislike? This is valuable from a customer-satisfaction vantage point, obviously, and also from a sales perspective, but don’t forget the power it lends to marketers, too. The better you understand your customers, the better you can attract new, like-minded ones. Ask people what they want to read. This one’s fairly obvious, but not a lot of marketers do it. If you want to know what people want to read, just ask. Consider a message like this: “Hey, fans! Do you have any burning questions for us? Want to know about how we operate? Curious about a topic your business needs help with? Let us know what you want us to write about next month, and we’ll happily oblige!” Some marketers might be wary of opening up a door like that since it creates the possibility that nobody will care or respond to your call-out. But you should never let fear of failure stop you from trying. Even if just one or two fans reply, that’s enough to engage them right back and follow up once you’ve created the content. There’s not always a secret strategy for finding out what people want to read. Sometimes, all you have to do is ask.
12 Google Apps Hacks That Will Make Your Life Easier Posted on November 8, 2018November 8, 2018 by Jonathan Herrick Google has become more than just an omnipresent brand that culls your personal data to determine your exact location, music preferences, home address, commute time and interests and sell that to advertisers. Google is also the maker of a bunch of neat workplace tools. (And can thus mine more personal data and enhance its own corporate agenda and artificial intelligence, but, you know, free tools! Woo!) Hey, we’re not complaining. Google Docs, Google Drive and Google Calendar are indispensable to some people, especially entrepreneurs who wrangle remote workers or small-business owners who rely on free software to keep overhead costs low. So what if the Google Overlords can read everything we’re writing? Having flight confirmations automatically pop up in Google Calendar is pretty convenient. If you’re going to succumb to the Age of No Privacy, you may as well get as efficient as possible by hacking its tools, because Google’s apps are better than just free software. They’re also really good, deep and reliable. And odds are you’re not taking advantage of them the way you should be. Hacks for Google Docs Never lose a draft. With a meticulously backed-up revision history that automatically refreshes every few seconds, you can literally see every edit anyone’s made in a Google Doc. But this hack is a little hidden. Look to the right of the nav bar, where it says “ All changes saved in Drive”, and click that to bring up the complete history of that document. It summarizes each change broadly (according to when you actually sat down to edit it), but expanding those folders will reveal a line-by-line breakdown of every edit. Delete anything you want — it’ll all be saved in the cloud. Work offline. No access to the Internet? You can still edit the doc, it just won’t save automatically as described above. Instead, you’ll have to wait to reconnect to the Internet, at which point your doc will update automatically. Be sure offline editing is enabled by clicking the menu button from the Google Docs home screen, checking your settings and enabling the offline compatibility. Find your collaborators. If multiple people are working on a document, it’s easy to lose track of each other. You’ll see their icon appear in the top right beside the chat icon — simply click their icon and you’ll shoot to where they’re looking. (You can also open the chat box, which doesn’t open automatically when others are typing, and whose notification icon is pretty subtle. Not everyone knows that you can chat while working, but that’s another useful Google Docs hack.) Search the web without leaving Docs. You see that weird star in a square in the bottom right corner? Click it, and you’ll be able to browse the web without leaving Google Docs. It will automatically scan your document for relevant terms, but you can search for anything. It’s a handy way to avoid opening new tabs and flipping back and forth, which is exactly the kind of efficiency hack that can boost your productivity. Add any tools you like. See the “Add-ons” button in the nav bar, sandwiched between “Tools” and “Help”? Click it. You can download (for free) any add-on you like, which often help improve writing efficiency: easier bibliographies, a robust commenting system, rhyme finders and templates are all available. Hacks for Google Calendar Create a video conference. If you click the “Add conferencing” button, you’ll see the option to turn the meeting into a Google Hangout. Hangouts is a great free tool that people can call into or sign onto via their desktop (or phones, with the Hangouts app); it allows users to show docs from their Google Drives, and highlights who’s talking at any given moment. It’s an intuitive Skype competitor that integrates well into Google Calendar — just add the video conferencing option and Google will create a URL guests can use to log into the meeting room. Create different calendars to organize your life. Under “My Calendars” in the left menu area, you can create new calendars and assign them any colors you like. Google automatically suggests “Tasks” and “Reminders,” while holidays and calendars shared with you get their own special treatment as well, but you’re free to customize your own life with different personalized calendars: one for vacation, one for home, one for work. Find a time that works for everyone. Not sure when to fit in a meeting between busy people? When creating a meeting, select “Find a Time”, then click and drag your cursor over any times that work for you. Once everyone else has done the same, you’ll be able to quickly and easily find a time for a meeting that works for everyone. Hacks for Google Drive Open PDFs as a workable image or document. Sometimes, PDFs can be enormous and difficult to open without a special program like Adobe Acrobat, and even then they aren’t always searchable as text PDFs. If you download a PDF to Google Drive, you can open it with Google Docs to interact with it more easily. Share docs quickly. You can create a shareable link for any document you have in Google Drive, even if they don’t have access to your Drive — just right-click the item and choose “Get shareable link”. No need to download it, upload it as an email attachment and send it off; just share the link and it’s done. Learn the keyboard shortcuts. Google Drive has an army of keyboard shortcuts, often as easy as clicking a single letter (e.g. “O” opens any doc that’s highlighted). To see them all, click Shift + / to bring up a full list of keyboard shortcuts you almost certainly have never looked at before — as close to a Google apps hack as anything out there. Backup on your desktop with Google’s add-ons. “Backup and Sync” is the personal version, whereas Drive File Stream is for businesses. Regardless, both are free to download and allow you to access your Google Drive from any device with connection to Google’s cloud. It’s a great hack for making available anything added to Drive from any device or SD card.