The good news about inbound marketing is that it can help you attract high volumes of leads. The challenge then becomes, how do you separate the good, quality leads from the people who are just starting to look around? That’s where lead management, and specifically, lead scoring comes in. With lead scoring, you can attach values to each of your leads based on their professional information and the behavior they’ve exhibited on your website.

For example, you would likely rank a vice president-level lead who has spent time on both your products and pricing page higher than an intern- or coordinator-level lead with the same behavior. You might also rank one VP over another if the first VP has demonstrated a higher level of engagement on your site.

Each of these scores go into a profile of your lead to help you determine when they’re
ready to talk with a sales person. The more time quality leads spend with your content and the better informed they become, the more likely they’ll be interested in hearing from your sales team. Lead scoring takes thought, knowledge of your business operations, and lead management software to set up, but once it’s set, it shouldn’t take much day-to-day management. If you’re considering setting up a lead scoring program, here’s what you need to know to get started and set up a scoring system that benefits your business.

Decide if Your Business Needs Lead Scoring

First and foremost, you need to evaluate whether your business is one that would actually benefit from a lead scoring system. The fact is, it’s not a must-have for every business, and in many cases, scoring leads can actually be a waste of your time. According to MarketingSherpa’s B2B Benchmarking Report, while many are thinking about lead scoring for their business, only 21% of B2B marketers have actually established a lead scoring program.

To evaluate whether lead scoring is right for your business, ask yourself the following questions:

• Is my sales team getting fed with enough leads? If your sales team
  doesn’t even have enough leads to begin with, lead scoring is hardly necessary. Instead, your marketing team should be focusing on generating more leads.
• Does my sales team even call the leads I do send them? Furthermore, do they always complain about bad leads? Lead scoring would probably solve these problems, right? Maybe not. What’s more likely in this situation is that you have a sales/marketing alignment issue on your hands. If your business doesn’t have a service level agreement (SLA) in place between your sales and marketing teams to clarify how many leads marketing must deliver to sales and how many sales must follow up with, sit down together and create one before you even think about lead scoring.
• Do I have enough data to implement lead scoring? In order to implement a lead scoring system, you need to have two types of data in place: demographic information captured by conversion forms, and lead intelligence, or behavioral data based on how a lead interacts with your website. Are you collecting the wrong information from your lead gen forms, or failing to track how leads interact with your site using an analytics and lead management platform? Then you don’t have the right data to start lead scoring.

If you can answer “yes” to all three of these questions, then there’s a good chance your business could benefit from lead scoring, and you should read on.

Identify What Criteria Makes for a Marketing Qualified Lead

The first thing you’ll need to do to set up a lead scoring system is to decide, with your sales organization, which criteria makes for a marketing qualified lead. A marketing qualified lead (or what we geeky marketers like to call an MQL), is a lead who is more likely to become a customer compared to other leads based on their demographic information and their activity on your site before they become a customer. By identifying the individual characteristics that make for an MQL, you can assign point values to each of these qualifications to form the basis of your lead scoring system.

Sit down with your sales managers to determine which demographics, activities, and behaviors make for a marketing qualified lead.

First, discuss which demographics are more likely to buy than others. Are they VP-level executives from certain industries? Do they typically represent small or large businesses? This is the information you’ll be gathering from your conversion/lead-capture forms. Here’s what you should consider, as well as any other criteria that may be important to your business.

Qualifications From a Lead-Capture Form:

• Role/Job Title
• Company Size/Number of Employees
• Company Type/Industry 

Next, look at behaviors that indicate a lead’s type of interest. Here, you’ll need to use your lead intelligence data to conduct some analysis with closed-loop analytics to identify the close rates of each of the conversion events you offer on your website. Next, compare the close rates with one another. You’ll want to identify which conversion events had the highest close rates as well as which activities led to those conversion events. (Note: This blog post can help you with this analysis.) Here’s a sampling of the different criteria you should evaluate.

Types of Interest:

• Requested a demo or specific information
• Viewed a certain type of product page
• Top-of-the funnel interests (e.g. content downloads like ebooks and webinars) vs. more qualified middle-of-the-funnel interests (e.g. product content like pricing pages or a free trial)

The last thing to consider is the activity level of a lead before he/she becomes a customer. How much, at what frequency, and within what span of time does an MQL typically engage with your website before converting into a customer? For example, you’ll want to consider…

Activity Level:

• Number of Web Pages Viewed
• Number of Forms Completed (Content Downloaded or Inquiries Made)
• The Typical Sales Cycle (How long before a lead will never buy?)

Set and Assign Point Values

Now that you’ve identified and, with your sales organization, agreed on which criteria make for a marketing qualified lead, you can come up with a points system and start assigning point values to each criterion. You can set any point value you’d like, but typically, you’ll want to stick to a 0 to 100 scale and weigh the points in relation to how telling they are about a lead’s readiness to talk to a sales rep — and buy.

Let’s say, for example, your ideal lead is a decision maker at a mid- to large- sized company (500 to 1,500 employees). And maybe in the past, you’ve found that before buying, leads have typically visited at least five pages of your website, viewed the pricing page, and downloaded some top-of-the-funnel content. In other words, they’ve done enough research to talk through a decision. Depending on what you’ve discovered through your MQL analysis, you would weigh each of these qualifications or activities more heavily than others.

A company with 800 employees might get ten points, whereas a company with 20 would get one, and a lead that lists “student” might get negative points. Same goes for someone who has downloaded multiple ebooks vs. none. All of a lead’s points get added up to determine their individual lead score.

Determine What Score Makes a Lead Sales-Ready

Remember, the point of lead scoring is two-fold:

• To avoid harassing leads with contact from Sales before they’re ready to buy and to identify leads who need to be touched with more lead nurturing first
• To maximize the efficiency of your sales team so they can easily identify and work only the leads who are sales-ready

Once you’ve set point values for each of the lead qualification categories listed above, decide at which point a total score would validate sending a lead to your sales team for a conversation. It helps to look at past lead activity when determining this figure, so you know what has historically led to sales conversions.

It’s important to remember that, because a lead’s activity can change from day to day, a lead’s individual score will also change over time. For this reason, lead scoring isn’t something easily done manually. As mentioned above, you’ll need lead management software that enables you to set your lead scoring criteria and auto-score and re-score your leads in real time. For HubSpot customers, the Lead Management Tool and the Lead Grader App makes this a snap. And depending on your CRM, you could then set up alerts based on your custom lead score to notify your sales team when leads have reached that critical score that makes them sales-ready.

Has your business implemented a lead scoring system? How has it improved your marketing and sales processes?

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According to former CEO of AppVee and AndroidApps Alex Ahlund, the average cost to develop a mobile app is $6,453 — and the cost can skyrocket to as much as $150,000 depending on the complexity of the app. Wherever you fall on that spectrum, the money and resources you dedicate to conceptualizing and developing a truly great mobile app can all be put to waste if you don’t orchestrate a proper mobile app launch.

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The benefits of an extensive social reach are clear, but how do you attract the right followers for your company? As with most inbound marketing, relevancy can make or break the effectiveness of your strategy. So to ensure you have a social media following that helps you advance your marketing objectives, start by identifying a set of core topics that reflect the interests of people who typically become your customers.

If you’re a HubSpot customer, you can use the Keywords App and the Social Media Prospects App to help with this. For example, we at HubSpot would choose the terms inbound marketing, social media, marketing automation, and so on to help identify the most appropriate followers. Getting your keywords right from the onset will make it significantly easier to find the most productive connections across social media sites. From there, it’s just a matter of navigating your way through each social network. To make your job easier, let’s break down what to look for on the four major social networks: Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Finding the Right Connections on Google+

When you first sign up, Google+ automatically scans your existing connections to see if any of them are using Google+ and invites you to connect with them by placing them in one of your Google+ Circles. While this isn’t a bad way to make sure you’re staying engaged with your current audience, it doesn’t really expand your reach or introduce you to new people. To do that, you’ll need to submit your keywords for a more detailed Google+ search.

Top Influencers: You can find and search a list of top influencers through SocialStatistics.com’s Google+ statistics. Narrow down the top influencers by location — a feature that is particularly useful for local businesses. For example, a local business in our neck of the woods could narrow down their search to the top Google+ users in Boston.

Targeted Connections: Following top influencers alone, however, may not extend your reach very much, since top users often get too many requests to reciprocate. To achieve a broader reach, use Google+ search with the keywords you established to find other individuals who are interested in the things that matter to your company. HINT: When using Google+ search, you can get even more specific by enclosing terms in quotes — like “market research” — or excluding terms with a minus sign — like “market research” –stocks.

Keyword-Driven Circles: When you find people discussing your keywords, selectively add them to your Circles. Think about naming Circles based on the shared interest area so your overlapping focus area is clear. To keep new connections engaged, just add a “+” or “@” in front of their name to tag them in a future post.

Finding the Right Connections on LinkedIn

Some people conduct a people search in LinkedIn for job titles, but this often casts too large a net for productive connections. Instead, try using the keywords you’ve identified to help you find connections through some of the subgroups and topic threads on LinkedIn.

Groups and Answers: LinkedIn Groups and LinkedIn Answers both provide great opportunities to find the right connections for your business. You don’t need to start a group to get the full benefit of LinkedIn Groups; in fact, you should start out by searching for and joining groups that are relevant to your business, and then connecting with group contributors. You can use the same approach with LinkedIn Answers. Connect with people who are already talking about your core topics, and pose your own questions and connect with the respondents. The trick to making connections on LinkedIn is to avoid cold connections. Make sure you contribute to the group or comment on an Answers post before trying to connect with the individual who placed it.

NEW! Connect via Skills & Expertise: In beta right now, LinkedIn has a new tool called Skills & Expertise that enables you to search for individuals and companies based on the skills and interests they list. Let’s say you want to connect with people who are interested in market research or have a background in it. You can search LinkedIn Skills & Expertise to find groups, companies, and individuals associated with that topic.

Finding the Right Connections on Twitter

Top Influencers: Much like Google+, it’s fairly easy to find top influencers for a given topic on Twitter. You can find them by taking a look at Twitter’s recommended lists of who to follow for the topics you’ve selected, or by searching Tweet Grader’s Twitter Elite or Klout for top users. Again, remember to balance these “top tweeters” with more targeted tweeters who match your interests, despite their audience size.

Targeted Connections: Once you get past the big influencers in your space, take a look at the lists of people who follow them. Or, search Twitter for mentions of your keywords and follow individuals who talk about those topics frequently. Sometimes connections with lower follower rates can actually be better influencers for your company, particularly if they display a meaningful connection to your company and will become enthusiastic brand advocates online.   

Beware of Auto-Follows: There are a lot of third-party Twitter applications that promise to rapidly scale up your followers by auto-following. Not only does Twitter actively discourage and remove you from search results when you use these apps, but this type of automation is also not a productive practice for your company either. Don’t get mixed up with followers that use these applications.

Finding the Right Connections on Facebook

Making brand new connections on Facebook can be a little bit trickier because it doesn’t have the culture of business networking that LinkedIn does, nor does it have the non-reciprocal follow expectations as Twitter and Google+. Still, there are a couple of good tactics for making relevant connections to your Facebook business page.

Leverage Your Existing Fans: Whether you start off with 12 fans or 200, it’s worth engaging your existing fans in the effort to grow your page’s reach. Give your fans content that is worth sharing; as each successive fan shares your content, your page’s exposure will grow. A referral from a friend can be far more effective and targeted than any other outreach you do on your own.

Facebook Ads: If you’ve determined that Facebook is the right channel for your company and you have the budget to put toward paid promotion, you can use Facebook’s advertising center to zero in on the right audience and promote your page. If you’re promoting a page, target your ad to a very specific segment of viewers and ask them to Like your page right in the ad. For more on this, take a look at HubSpot’ free ebook on getting Facebook advertising right.

Use the Right Incentives: Holding a sexy giveaway promotion may get you a lot of Likes, but it may not be the right types of people doing the Liking. Facebook page incentives can come in many forms; make sure you’re deploying one that reflects the interests of your core audience. For example, if your company builds custom closets, you may want to give away a tip sheet on getting organized to anyone who likes your page. HINT: HubSpot customers should check out the Facebook Welcome App, an add-on tool that helps you set up incentives like these on your page.

Doing This All in a Scalable Way

When you’re first getting started, growing your social media community can seem like a daunting task. The best way to tackle it is to dedicate ten minutes a day – no more, no less – to finding people online that would add value to your community and, in turn, get value from connecting with you.

Set small goals. Aim to add ten new followers to your networks a day and keep them engaged by scheduling interesting posts throughout the week. HubSpot users should take a look at the new Social Media Publishing App to streamline this even further.

Finally, use analytics to keep track of how your efforts are affecting your reach, website traffic, and lead totals so you can adjust your efforts accordingly. In the end, social media outreach isn’t all that different than making connections in the real world; be friendly, persistent, and intentional.

How do you choose who to follow on your company’s social media accounts?

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A certain group of consumers has been gaining attention from marketers recently, because of the strong role they play in the purchasing decision; these power purchasers are known as Generation Y. Whether they’re part of the target audience to which you sell or not, this group is worth considering as part of your inbound marketing strategy because there’s a strong likelihood they either will become part of your target audience in the future, or because they already influence your target audience now.

Let’s break down who these power purchasers are, some of the interesting demographics and inclinations research has uncovered about their role in the buying process, and see how we can align our marketing strategy to better leverage their influence.

Generation Y as a Power Purchaser

Also known as Millennials, this group refers to those born between 1977 and 1994, and it accounts for 25% of the US population. That may not seem like a lot (or maybe it does), but Generation Y is estimated to be the largest consumer group in US history. According to MarketingProfs via a Bazaarvoice survey, Millennials’ annual spending power of over $200 billion will eclipse Baby Boomers’ by 2017. With that kind of purchasing power, what should we as marketers know about this huge demographic of power purchasers, and how do we alter our marketing strategy to align with their purchasing habits?

Many marketers think the recommendation of a friend or family member is the ultimate green light for consumers, but it turns out that Gen Y cares about recommendations from strangers more. More than 8 in 10 say user-generated content from people they don’t know influences what they buy and indicates brand quality, while 51% say it is actually more important than the opinions of their friends and family, and far more trustworthy than website content.

So what are Millennials buying based off all this user-generated content? The top purchases they will not make without first consulting others’ opinions run the gamut:

How to Target the Largest Consumer Group Ever in the US

Knowing user-generated content is important to Millennials, what should marketers be doing to align our strategies with the way they prefer to research and execute purchases?

65% of users aged 18-24 considered information shared on social networks when making a purchasing decision (source: eMarketer). On top of that, 2/3 of consumers use search engines to help them research and make purchase decisions (source: eConsultancy). So if you haven’t already, get your brand visibility in the social sphere and in search engines, and get control over your online reputation.

When you consider how much more closely social media and search have been aligning over the past year, it makes sense that integrating them both in your marketing strategy will help you achieve more visibility with this crowd that cares what others have to say about you more than what you have to say about you. In fact, Socialnomics reports that if you take a look at the world’s largest brands, 25% of their search results return user-generated content from review sites, blogs, and social media updates. Millennials have integrated social media into their day to day lives, making access to the opinions of others easier than ever. With so much knowledge at their hands, you need to ensure information about your business is easy to find — whether from you, their network, or total strangers.

Getting Started With User-Generated Content

It’s strange to say you need to get started with user-generated content…it’s your users that need to get started, right? Well, you have to make it easy for them to do, and sometimes a little nudge in the right direction on top of ease of use doesn’t hurt, either. Here’s the secret sauce for getting your customers, fans, and followers to sing your praises online so you can get the kind of influence you need over Gen Y — whether they’re your target customer today or years down the road.

1.) Make reviews easy to give on your website. 73% of Millennials say that consumers care more about customer opinions than companies themselves do. They also think companies don’t offer enough ways to share feedback. Be the company that proves them wrong and gives them what they want. Enable comment functions, provide star rating systems for your products, and create forums for people to easily discuss what they love about your company. Moderate these areas of your site so when issues crop up, you’re able to provide a timely response to problems that might otherwise harm your reputation.

2.) Take control over your online reputation. Speaking of harming your reputation, people are probably talking about you online in places other than your website. Namely, their own blogs and online review sites. You can’t ask people to take down a negative blog post about you, but you can take control of online review sites that frequently rank in the top of search engine results pages anyway. Claim your listing on review sites, determine whether your presence is positive, negative, or absent, and become an active participant in guiding a positive conversation about your brand on those sites. Our next tip will tell you how.

3.) Solicit reviews from your best customers. You can make your presence on online review sites and your own website positive by soliciting positive reviews from your best customers. There’s nothing wrong with asking happy customers to write a review. Think about getting customer reviews like getting inbound links: you can’t pay for it, but there’s nothing wrong with asking for one from the appropriate people. Consider adding a request for reviews in the bottom of your email marketing messages targeted at current customers. Get your sales and support team in in the action, too — as the front lines of your organization, they are poised to identify those who are willing to evangelize your brand. Incentivize them to solicit positive reviews whenever they’re speaking to a happy customer, making their volume of positive reviews part of a bonus program.

4.) Create case studies. Case studies are an ideal content format to supplement user-generated content, because it highlights a customer’s opinion like Millennials love but gives you control over how the information is presented. This content can also take on multiple formats — video, PDF, slideshow, blog post — all of which are easy to share and disseminate online.

5.) Encourage social discussion. Social posts are showing up in search results, so use your social media presence to encourage discussion from your fans and followers. Ask for their opinion about your products and services, highlight customer success stories, and ask them to share their experiences using your products or services. Whether these posts are indexed or not, many Millennials will visit your social media accounts to assess how much they like and trust you while they make a purchasing decision. Seeing your social network engaging with you on those accounts will paint you in a very positive light.

Sometimes marketers are reticent of pursuing user-generated content because it forces them to relinquish control. But remember that Millennials have spent the better part of their lives on the internet and were the first wave of blogging and social media adopters. As such, they are better at parsing through fluff on the web and can distinguish between critical content and that which is an unfounded rant or rave. That means content you publish, content you solicit from others, reviews posted to blogs and review sites, and social media comments all go through a sniff test that’s ingrained in how Gen Y consumes information online. If the content being published by you — or by others about you — isn’t quality, these folks are good at filtering it out of their purchase decision-making process.

How important is Gen Y to your marketing? Do you target them directly, or as influencers of your target audience?

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In marketing, offers are the gateways to lead generation. Without them, site visitors have no way of getting converted into leads. They are also a critical tool for nurturing existing leads into a position that makes them more sales-ready. But gosh, isn’t the word ‘offer’ so utterly vague and abstract? What the heck is a marketing offer, and what are the qualities of a good one?

Because we see so many marketers get tripped up on this concept, let’s discuss exactly what a marketing offer can be, highlight the characteristics of an effective offer, and explain how you can start using them the right way.

What an Offer Isn’t

Sometimes the best way to explain what something is, is to first identify what it isn’t. Unfortunately, many of the things marketers sometimes consider to be marketing offers aren’t actually offers at all. First, let’s clarify. What marketers should classify as an offer is something of value that a website visitor must complete a form to get access to. And yeah, sure — you can put just about anything behind a form. But there are certain things that, when put behind a form, just won’t contribute much of anything for your lead gen or lead nurturing initiatives. We’re not saying you shouldn’t bother with these types of content. What we’re saying is that you shouldn’t put them behind forms or rely on them to effectively generate and nurture leads.

Here are some great examples of things you should never consider to be a marketing offer:

• ‘Contact Us!’ Okay, so you can put this one behind a form if it’s one that allows site visitors to email you. But this will never bring in leads as effectively as true offers will.
• Product-Centric Content: We’re talking brochures, product videos, etc. Yes, these can be great tools to introduce to leads who are close to making a purchasing decision, but there’s no reason they should be gated behind a form. You should want your site visitors to be able to access this type of content freely and frictionlessly. And if site visitors are looking at this type of content, they’re likely already in your sales funnel and much closer to making a purchasing decision.
• Customer Case Studies: Just like product-centric content, customer case studies are likely something you want to make it very easy for visitors to access. Making a visitor or lead fill out a form is unnecessary.
• Fact Sheets: Simply put, fact sheets and other company-focused content is not lead generation material. 

What an Offer Is 

The good news is, you have quite a few great options at your disposal in terms of the types of offers you can, well, offer your target audience…

• Ebooks
• Guides
• Webinars (Live & Archived)
• Slideshows
• Kits
• Industry Case Studies
• New Industry Research
• Templates
• Free Tools
• Free Trials
• Product Demos
• Consultations
• Coupons

What Makes an Offer a Good One?

While the types of offers we mentioned above are all great options for marketing offers, there are a number of qualities that an offer should possess in order for it to be effective for lead generation and nurturing. Here are our top three:

1. Is High Quality/Premium and Valuable to Your Target Audience

The important thing to remember is that, if you’re requiring a site visitor to complete a form in order to obtain your offer, the value of that offer needs to be compelling enough to convince those visitors to fill out the form. People don’t like to give up their contact information freely, and your lead-capture form will create some friction. So if you start putting mediocre, low-value offers behind your forms, your business will start to get known for bad offers that aren’t worth the form completion, seriously hurting your lead generation and nurturing goals.

In the simplest sense, an offer is valuable if it addresses the problems, needs, and interests of your target audience. This value could also mean different things for offers used in different stages of the sales process. For example, an offer you’re promoting to generate net new leads at the top of your funnel (like, say, an educational ebook or a webinar) is likely valuable because it educates your prospects and fulfills a need. A free product trial, on the other hand, may not be as educational in nature, but it’s still a very valuable offer for existing leads you’re trying to nurture and who are closer to making a purchasing decision.

2. Aligns With Your Business and the Products/Services You Offer

A great marketing offer complements the products and services your business sells. That educational ebook is probably not very focused on how awesome your products and services are, but it should address concepts that align with your paid offerings. For example, HubSpot sells inbound marketing software, so our offers focus on helping prospects with their marketing challenges. These offers help set HubSpot apart as an industry thought leader and educate prospects about the problems our software helps to solve.

3. Targeted to the Right Buyer Persona at the Right Time

As we hinted at before, a truly great marketing offer also takes into account a person’s point in the sales process as well as that buyer persona‘s specific interests and needs. How this really comes into play is in lead nurturing campaigns and how you decide which calls-to-action (CTAs) to place where on your website.

If you use lead management software, you can easily collect key pieces of information (AKA lead intelligence) about your prospects that will help you segment your leads into nurturing campaigns based on their buyer persona, their point in the sales process, and what you can determine their interests are based on their activity on your website. Sending them offers that appeal to those interests as well as how close they are to making a purchasing decision can help you better qualify a lead before he/she gets handed off to sales. For example, if your business is in plumbing and a first-time visitor comes to your site and downloads an ebook on how to unclog a minor plumbing backup, you might enter them into a lead nurturing campaign that then invites them to also attend a webinar about common plumbing problems and how to fix them. As they move further through the sales cycle, you could then offer them a coupon that discounts your services for that (apparently) not-so-minor drain problem they’re having.

The same concept applies to how you choose which calls-to-action should be placed on different pages of your website. For example, if you conduct analysis that shows that your blog is typically how new visitors find you (whether through social media, search engines, or another referrer), you can infer that many people who land on your blog are first-time visitors to your website. Therefore, on your blog, you should probably place CTAs for offers that appeal to people who are just entering the top of your funnel and know little about your company (like an educational webinar, ebook, or kit, for example). On the other hand, a visitor on something like a product page probably indicates someone who is much closer to a purchasing decision. What might be more valuable to those types of visitors is a CTA for something like a free product trial, or a demo if you’re a software vendor.

How to Leverage Your Offers Effectively

Now that you have a much clearer understanding of what makes a good marketing offer (and what doesn’t), let’s dive into some offer best practices. After all, you can create a ton of great offers, but if you’re not using them to your best advantage, they’re not going to do much good to generate and nurture leads.

1. Create a lot of targeted offers. First things first. With all that talk about targeting and segmenting the right offers to the right buyer persona (at the right time), you can probably guess that what all that translates to is a need for a variety of offers. Building up an arsenal of offers is the toughest part of the whole process, but it can mean the difference between good results and awesome results. Create a spreadsheet that allows you to list the offers you currently have, highlight the holes in your group of offers (for what topic are you missing an offer that your audience would appreciate?), and map offers to the various points in your business’ sales process. Then slowly work through your offer to-do list, gradually filling in those gaps.

2. Put offers behind lead-capture forms. If offers are the gateways to lead generation, lead-capture forms (AKA conversion forms) are the gateways to your offers. Always place your offers on landing pages, gated by forms. This allows you to collect information that helps you qualify a new or reconverting lead and track what they’ve downloaded from you throughout the sales cycle.

3. Create calls-to-action, and place them appropriately. We mentioned this above, but it’s an important one. Create CTAs for each of your offers, and align them with the pages on your website. In other words, if you’re that plumber we mentioned above and you just wrote a blog post about the best and worst products to unclog a drain, you might place a CTA for your free guide to the best plumbing products of 2012. Once you have created awesome-looking CTA buttons for your site and you’re moving onto ninja status, you can also test different versions of your CTAs to determine which ones generate the best click-through rate.

4. Create blog content around your offers. Take that last best practice one step further, and create content specifically around your new offers to help launch and promote them. So if you just created that ‘Best Plumbing Products of 2012′ guide, why not write a blog article that highlights the top 5 products mentioned in the guide and couple that with your CTA, explaining that readers can learn more by downloading the new guide? Excerpts make for easy blog content, so you’ll be killing two birds with one stone!

5. Promote your offers in social media. The promotion of your offers shouldn’t have to remain on your website. Use social media as a promotional vehicle by sharing links to the landing pages for your offers and briefly explaining their value in your tweets, Facebook/Google+/LinkedIn posts. Spend some time to build your social media reach so you can expose your offers to as large an audience as possible.

6. Use them in email marketing and lead nurturing. As we mentioned above, offers are critical to a business’ lead nurturing efforts, but you can also promote them using general email marketing as dedicated sends. Promote your new offer in a dedicated email send that only highlights that one offer and conveys its value. If it’s a very general offer that every buyer persona in your audience would enjoy regardless of their point in the sales cycle, send it to your entire list. If it’s a more targeted offer, segment your list, and send it only to the people to whom it will appeal.

7. Align offers with prospects’ point in the sales process. This is another one we’ve already talked about, but it’s worth emphasizing. Aligning the offers you use in your lead nurturing campaigns and in the CTAs on your website with a prospect’s likely position in the sales cycle will not only help to better qualify a lead, but it may also shorten the sales cycle, as a prospect will be much closer to a purchasing decision with a ton of knowledge about your business before he/she even talks to a sales person.

8. Track performance with your analytics software. Measure the performance of your offers. This will help you identify which types and topics of offers are successful in generating leads and customers so you can create more offers around those topics or in those formats, helping you become a much more effective marketer. Do your prospects prefer webinars to ebooks? Do they only care about certain topics that your offers are addressing? Use what you know to improve your lead generation and lead nurturing efforts in the future.

How many offers are in your back pocket? How much do they factor into your business’ lead generation and nurturing efforts?

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Content creation is central to your inbound marketing success, but as your volume of written content increases, inconsistencies are also bound to arise. Whether due to lack of clarity in your own head about the style with which you want to write, or disjointed communication across the content creators in your organization, failure to decide upon and document accepted editorial guidelines is a recipe for inconsistent messaging and an incoherent brand experience.

That’s why most companies that rely on content as a central part of their marketing strategy develop an editorial style guide. When creating an editorial style guide, you’re not discussing the operations of content creation — like editorial calendaring or search engine optimization of content — nor are you going into the detail of a brand style guide like the nitty gritty on visual style and use of your logo. Rather, your editorial style guide will guide writers by providing a set of standards to which they must adhere when creating content for your website, eliminating confusion, guess work, and debates over what boils down to a matter of editorial opinion among grammar and content geeks.

By putting in time up front to writing this editorial style guide, you’ll save time spent answering the same questions over and over; get new hires and guest contributors on the same page more quickly; and publish content that is consistent in tone, quality, and presentation, reflecting a more professional brand experience. Now let’s break down, page by page, exactly what information to include in a comprehensive editorial style guide so you can go create one for your company.

Section 1: Grammar

Decide which established style manual you will follow. Most businesses adopt either the AP Stylebook, or the Chicago Manual of Style. You can purchase online subscriptions to these manuals for your employees to reference, the login for which you should also include in this section of the editorial style guide to make access simple. You might find employees are more likely to reference these tools when provided with an online subscription that contains a search function, instead of a paper book through which they have to flip to find their answers.

These style guides provide a good basis for basic grammar rules, but you’ll also probably want to make some exceptions to the rules therein for the sake of branding and style. This is the section of your editorial style guide to outline those exceptions and also highlight some of the most rules that commonly arise when writing for your company that people should commit to memory (regardless of whether it is aligned with or against AP or Chicago style). For example:

• What do you capitalize? Do you capitalize the name of your product, for example? Are there certain prepositions you want capitalized in your title despite your style book’s recommendations?
• What do you abbreviate? Would you type “a.k.a.” or “aka”?
• Do you use an Oxford comma?
• How do you spell words in your industry that don’t have a definitive spelling? Is it “ebook”, “Ebook”, or “e-book”? What about “website” versus “web site”?

Listing answers to common questions like these in the first part of your editorial style guide will give people an easy resource to reference that saves you time and encourages consistency. Feel free to continue adding to this list as more confusions arise and get resolved during the content creation process. You’re creating your own style guide, so feel free to borrow different rules from different style guides. The important thing is that you use the same rules consistently throughout all the content you create.

Section 2: Style and Tone

This section of the editorial style guide should address something less concrete than grammar rules but arguably the most important content in your editorial style guide: how your content should sound to the reader. Can writers use the first person? How do you feel about the use of industry jargon? Think about the words you would use to describe your content in an ideal world. Which of these adjectives do you want your content to evoke?

• Conversational
• Educational
• Academic
• Funny
• Controversial
• Irreverent
• Artistic
• Objective
• Sophisticated

You might think you want your content to be all of the above, but force yourself to prioritize just a few, explain why it’s important to achieve this style and tone in your content, and provide examples of content (excerpts are fine) that are successful in doing so. If there are stylistic characteristics your content absolutely should not have, this is the section in which to include that information, too. When deciding on style and tone, be sure to consider your target audience and buyer personas in the process. Which style and tone would resonate best with them? Which brings us to our next page…

Section 3: Personas

This section occurs after the Style and Tone section of the editorial style guide, because understanding your target audience helps clarify for the writer the style and tone for which you’re striving. The two are so intertwined that it would also be acceptable to place this as the second section in your editorial style guide, and move Style and Tone to page 3.

Whichever way you choose, know that the personas in your editorial style guide don’t need to go as in depth as the personas you hand to your sales and marketing team. Those might include detailed information like objections that arise in the sales process and how to overcome them, and tips on identifying these personas “in the wild” or when you get them on the phone. These personas should be more brief, pulling out the highlights from your in-depth marketing personas that concisely explain who your target audience is, their pain points, the value your company provides, how they like to be communicated with, and a picture to give writers a visual to keep in mind when creating content.

If your writers understand your target audience, many questions that would normally arise during content creation are easily answered with common sense based on their knowledge of your readers.

Section 4: Content Structure

Content can come in many structures, not all of which may be right for your audience; your editorial style guide should outline which are appropriate and encouraged for your website. This will be particularly important if you outsource content creation or rely on many contributors to keep your business blog running. Consider these possible content structures when deciding the acceptable forms your content can take:

• How-To Guides
• Top Lists
• Debates Over Controversial Topics
• Serialized Content
• Data
• News
• Interviews
• Infographics
• Product, Service, or Content Reviews
• Pro/Con lists
• Video Content
• Audio Content
• Comics

As with the common grammatical errors and exceptions in the first section of your editorial style guide, you will probably encounter new content formats that you want to include on this list. Continue to edit this section as you understand which content formats perform well (or underperform) and are an important (or harmful) part of your content strategy.

Section 5: Graphics and Formatting

Like your personas, this section should be light in the editorial style guide; you can create a separate brand style guide that goes into more detail on the visual elements associated with your brand. You should, however, delineate visual details that are common to the content creation process.

• Outline from where writers can source images and how to attribute that source within the content — should they link to it at the bottom of their content, include an image caption, or work in the artist credit within the copy?
• When should images align to the right, to the left, or in the center?
• Should text wrap around images?
• What are the RGB and hex codes for your text and headers?
• What typeface should be used?
• Can writers use italics, bolding, or underlining? If so, is usage limited to certain occasions, like bolding headings and hyperlinks?
• What kind of bullets should be used — square, round, or other — and how do they align with the rest of your text?
• How should numbered lists appear — “1″, “1.” or “1.)”?

Many of these graphical elements can be preset in your content management system (CMS), but they can also be easily overridden when writers copy and paste content from elsewhere with formatting attached or by an overzealous writer with a flair for design. Outline these core expectations in your editorial style guide, and refer those with more advanced needs to your brand style guide.

Section 6: Approved and Unapproved Content

Great content often cites research and data from third party sources. Make your writer’s job easier by providing approved industry resources from which they can draw, and even more importantly, resources from which they cannot draw. Break up this section of your editorial style guide into two sections: recommended and approved industry resources, and “do not mentions.”

The information in the “do not mention” section should include competitors and unreliable resources, but it should also mention controversial topics and opinions that should be avoided at all costs. For example, many companies strictly prohibit any mention of politics or religion in their content or have provisions that explain when it is acceptable and how to frame the discussion. This is the section of your editorial style guide to explain the intricacies of such controversies as they relate to your brand so you can prevent reputation management catastrophes.

Section 7: Sourcing

With great research comes great responsibility…and unfortunately a lot of choices, too. Clear up the confusion around how to properly cite research by deciding on one methodology and documenting it in your editorial style guide. Explain how to create footnotes, references, links to external cites, or even bibliographies if they are relevant to your company. This section of your editorial style guide doesn’t need to be long; just write down the rules, and provide some examples of proper citations so writers can easily attribute their sources properly.

Illustrating the Difference Between Right and Wrong

Every section of your editorial style guide can benefit from real life examples of the concepts you’re explaining, whether you include those examples on the same page or as an appendix at the end of the guide. For example, when talking about proper formatting, include a visual example of a well-formatted blog post with call-outs that detail why the elements therein are successful. Or if you’re discussing grammar usage, provide an incorrect example, then mark it up to show how a writer could fix it to align with your editorial style guide. Bridging your requirements with proper executions from your actual website will help illustrate these concepts more clearly and cut down on follow-up questions and instances of exceptions to the rules you’ve laid out.

Do you have an editorial style guide for your company? What else do you include in yours?

Image credit: RambergMediaImages

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