Monthly Archives: March 2010

This is the first of three articles that share findings from The State of Inbound Lead Generation, a new HubSpot report based on statistical analysis of 1,400 customers’ inbound marketing activities. The study identifies lead generation best practices based on results from these companies. The report and this article were written by Sophie L. Schmitt.

Increasing Google Indexed Pages by 50-100 Causes Double-Digit Lead Growth

Our analysis of over 1,400 firms shows a clear positive relationship between pages indexed by Google and the leads a company generates; companies with more indexed pages tend to generate more leads.

To represent the relationship between Google indexed pages and leads, we divided customers evenly into five categories based on number of Google indexed pages. For each of these categories, we graphed the median number of monthly leads. We used median instead of average to lessen the impact of outliers.

The graph above shows the strong positive correlation between the number of Google indexed pages and median leads. More specifically, it reveals that an incremental 50 to 100 indexed pages can cause double-digit lead growth up until customers reach several hundred Google indexed pages. Customers with more than a few hundred indexed pages appear to be in a league of their own as median leads are more than 2x that of the prior category.  

Is Company Size a Factor for Growing Indexed Pages?

It might be reasonable to think that only larger firms have sufficient resources to create hundreds of pages that make it into Google’s database. To test this, we calculated customer size mix for each category of indexed pages. Our proxy for customer size is number of employees.

What we found is that size is not a critical factor for achieving significant volumes of Google indexed pages. Size and number of pages are mildly positively correlated, mostly in the extreme categories of Google indexed pages. While HubSpot’s large customers formed the biggest group with 311+ indexed pages in Google, small and medium-sized customers together outnumbered large ones in this category. In addition, small customers formed the largest group with 176 to 310 Google indexed pages.

Marketing Takeaways

Marketers are likely to ask: What are techniques for growing the number of Google indexed pages on my site?

• Build page volume: consider starting a blog to quickly increase number of pages
• Improve each page’s optimization as per Google’s methodology to maximize chances of having all of your web pages included in the index:
• On-Page Search Engine Optimization: placing keywords in the right places on web pages such that Google and other search engines know what each page of your web site is about, and what keywords to rank you for
• Off-Page Search Engine Optimization: building inbound links from reputable sites, thus demonstrating your popularity to search engines

It is interesting to note that the number of inbound links did not have a meaningful relationship with leads. Inbound links did correlate well, however, with unique visitors. This implies that for those interested in generating leads, quality of sites vs. quantity is more important when building inbound links.

Want to read more? Download the full State of Inbound Lead Generation report.

Live Webinar: The State of Inbound Marketing Lead Generation

Learn how companies are using inbound marketing techniques to generate higher volume and lower cost leads and customers. Date and time: Wednesday, April 7, 2010 at 1:00pm EDT  Reserve Your Spot Now

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We normally don’t write about our products on our marketing blog, but we thought we could share some helpful lessons from our newest customer vertical’s inbound marketing success.

Today, HubSpot is launching HugSpot, our first product to serve the growing singles market.Tweet this news

This new online matchmaking tool was in a private beta for almost three years before launching publicly today. Watch the customer testimonials below to see how HugSpot can help you find relationship success.

How should you use HugSpot to find success in love?

1) Optimize your website for what makes you attractive. What does your ideal partner look for in a lover? Use HugSpot to optimize your website for the keywords that attract your best match.

2)  Create intriguing content through blogging. Why not write a blog article about what you’re looking for in a man or woman. Remarkable content attracts remarkable people.

3) Meet and mingle with singles using the social media tool. Grow your network and show off your stuff. Connect through Twitter and Facebook. Check in on Foursquare to introduce yourself to singles at a bar. Poking encouraged.

4) Flaunt your forms and compelling offers. Asking for a phone number at a party can be hard. By having a form on your site with a compelling offer (“Let me take you to dinner”), people will give you their contact information and become your love lead.

5) Receive lead alerts to dismiss stage five clingers. After you go out on a date with your lead, use HugSpot to receive lead alerts every time he or she visits your website. That way you’ll know when your leads are thinking about you and how often.

6) Use HugSpot “Love Analytics” to assess the development of your budding relationships. Is it your passionate blog articles that attract your best love leads? Perhaps thousands of people flock to your website after viewing your scandalous flickr photos, but only a few convert and give you their number.

How are you using inbound marketing to generate love leads? Are you looking for love online?

Webinar: Always Be Testing: 10 Tips For Increasing Your Lead Conversion Rate

Learn how to convert website visitors into leads (and love leads) with calls to action and landing pages. Download the free webinar to for tips on testing, measuring, and analyzing your marketing programs to improve conversion rate.

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A movement is brewing across the internet. The hard costs of marketing are plummeting. Money’s role in marketing success, while still important, is now secondary to time, expertise and agility.  To succeed, companies able to make quick decisions, share openly and create remarkable content fast will win, regardless of size. 

Perception is Reality – Can Social Media make your Business Stand Taller?

Before the internet leveled the playing field for marketers, targeted marketing and advertising were the realm of large companies with big budgets.  Brand and reach were the metrics that marketers cared about.  Then the internet came along.  Initially it was still the realm of big companies who were willing to spend a lot on flashy websites and paid banner campaigns.  The advent of inbound and social media marketing have exposed new levers in the still young internet marketing industry.

In the wild of nature, many animals use spines, fur and feathers to create the optical illusion of size and ferocity.  In the internet wild, small companies have so many new tools available to them to put a face forward that is professional and fierce.  I was reminded of this during a weekend walk in my Austin neighborhood where a small colony of wild peacocks lives.  An albino peacock thought I was a threat and went from petite to grandiose in a matter of seconds!

What does this have to do with social media?

That peacock brought to mind the concept of leverage and how the internet provides small businesses an amazing tool to leverage the assets they have to play with the big boys. 

Truly, as a small business with limited budget, what non-monetary assets do you have? 

What are the conceptual feathers you’ve got that can help you get more attention on the web?

• Agility and willingness to learn
• Industry specific know-how & skills
• Industry and local relationships

You’d be surprised at how much you can do with those assets.

Many big businesses just aren’t fast enough to listen to and act upon what the market is telling them.  Your small business should be listening to the social media mentions related to your industry to find out what pain points aren’t being addressed, engage with the community and collaborate on ways to solve those problems.

You are a source of knowledge in your space where inevitably, someone is looking for answers.  Be among the earliest to share your knowledge freely and develop a devoted following of potential customers who will eventually look to you for not only answers, but also products and services.

Take your existing relationships online.  If your industry isn’t at the forefront of internet technology, that’s ok.  Start small and be the one to start that innovation; you might find others looking to you for advice as an entire generation grows up online and will expect every industry there in the future.

According to social media marketing best practices research done by Marketing Sherpa you aren’t too late.  Across businesses of all sizes, less than 30% have a formal process around any aspect of social media marketing.  Embrace your size and agility to make 2010 the year you compete with the big boys just like Orchestra LLC, a software and services company that embraced inbound marketing just last year.

Social Media Leverage in Action – Plumage in Real Life

A combination of industry knowledge, social media engagement and a bit of serendipity let Brad Windecker and the team at Orchestra LLC take advantage of this optical illusion. 

The Orchestra team had been blogging, tweeting and interacting on industry specific forums where potential customers and peers congregate.  One of Orchestra’s tweets was re-tweeted by someone at a big software company and eventually got picked up by the editor of an influential industry newsletter.  That editor reached out to Orchestra to find out if they could republish the small company’s content in their newsletter.  Inclusion in a newsletter that was typically full of content from big companies, this small software and services player looked like a major player. 

While that’s nice, the real upshot of that serendipitous newsletter inclusion is that Orchestra scored a lot of new site visitors, blog readers, and several leads that have led to the final stages of a deal that would pay for their inbound marketing efforts for months over.

Social Media & Inbound Marketing Level the Playing Field

Now, after less than a year of inbound marketing, Orchestra has amassed more than 20,000 YouTube views, 30,000 views on Ulitzer/SYSCON and 1,000+ content tweets. 

That is a lot by many big company standards. 

Brad, Orchestra’s CEO, is getting invited to industry events and conferences to talk about his use of social media and the company’s best practices in software consulting.  These events help Orchestra continue to portray a larger than life image just as they grow and build the business to compete in an arena oft-dominated by big corporations.  These are the types of opportunities that were reserved for an inner circle before social media and inbound marketing on the web leveled the playing field.

How can you use your knowledge and creativity to power inbound marketing initiatives that will let you compete with the big names in your space?  Do you have what it takes to walk big and bold like a peacock?

Find out if how Brad and the Orchestra team made it happen during the free HubSpot Case Study Webinar: Orchestra Delivers New Sales with Social Media next Friday, April 9^th at 12PM EST.

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Last week Facebook’s Ads Newsletter officially announced the availability of their new Conversion Tracking feature which they launched in beta earlier this year.

The concept is very simple, and very similar to how conversion tracking is done in Google AdWords. You create a unique tracking tag for your ad in Facebook and embed the javascript it generates to the landing page on your site.

It is also possible to insert the javascript on your thank you page. This is the page that people reach after filling out a form on your landing page. This combination allows you to get some really slick reporting as seen below.  

Not only do you get the normal ad performance metrics such as impressions, click and click thru rate, but you also see the number of leads you converted and conversion rate which is the holy grail of advertising – determining the ROI of your spend! Right?

Well, here is the problem with Facebook Conversion Tracking:

1. You’re collecting information outside of your system

Marketers beware! While the conversion tracking dashboard provides a lot of great intel, that information is outside your systems.  Good luck trying to tie it to all your other marketing efforts unless you use their API to import all that information to your system. The average Joe or Jane marketer is probably not going to do that!

2. More invasive code to your site

So do you really want Facebook to know what visitors are doing on your site by placing their code on your pages?  Will you follow suit if Twitter offers the same service?  How much 3rd party code will you keep stuffing into your pages, giving companies your data for free while paying them for theirs?  You are after all paying them to understand how your visitors are doing on their site while they are getting to learn about their visitors on your site for free!

3.  It’s another dashboard to worry about

How many tools do you use to check your email? One, perhaps two because you separated your personal email from work email.  So how  many tools will you log into to understand your marketing? Google? Facebook? Twitter? LinkedIn? YouTube? With the need to spread your activity amongst social sites you will need to track them all, but could managing so many tools spread you too thin? 

All social sites should aspire to provide the level of insight that Facebook is providing.  It is critical for marketers to understand how their time and dollars spent is yielding results.  At the same time there is a need to simplify and centralize to make our lives easier!

Have you used Facebook conversion tracking or have you thought about it?  Please share your thoughts in the comments!
 

Photo credit: Marco Bellucci

Live Webinar: Social Media Optimization Is The New SEO With Brian Solis

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When it comes to lead generation for your services, your website may impact your ability to generate new leads more than you think. Of the more than 200 buyers surveyed—from companies of all sizes—83% report that a service provider’s website holds at least “some influence” over their decision to engage in initial discussions.

The survey was conducted by RainToday.com and included more than 200 buyers responsible for more than $1.7 billion in professional services purchased, such as accounting and financial services; architecture, engineering, and construction services; human resources consulting; IT consulting and services; legal services; management consulting; marketing, advertising, and public relations; and training services.

According to the survey, this is a significant increase compared to 2005, when 69% of buyers assigned websites at least “some influence” over this decision. Furthermore, the number of people who say websites have “a great deal of influence” rose to 28% compared with 16% in 2005.

Think of your website as the hub for your marketing and thought leadership activities. No matter what lead generation tactics you employ, the first stop a prospect is going to make is your website. It is the place they go to learn about your services, register for events, read articles and blog posts, sign up for a newsletter, download a white paper, etc. It is where they go to form an initial impression of you.

What does your website say about you? Will prospects like what they see and be interested enough to contact you and start a discussion? Or, will they move on to your competitor’s site and offerings? 

Free Webinar: Website Redesign for 2010

Learn how to redesign your website with an internet marketing strategy in mind with Mike Volpe, HubSpot’s VP of Marketing. Download the Webinar Now and learn how to turn your website into an internet marketing machine.

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Our first effort at a live HubSpot webinar was better than we expected (thank goodness!).  We were prepared with a few web sites to review with the 1500 registrants of our live optimization event and we were able to call two marketing managers and discuss what they were trying to achieve with their website and get real-time feedback. 

Mike and I enjoyed it so much that we’re going to do this weekly and we’ll do everything live! 

Company: Information Mapping – Website Grader score: 96 

With a score of 96, you’d think there might not be much room for improving. Wrong!  Mike and I both found a few areas we thought this website could do better.  

Our suggestions for improvements:

1. Start a blog.  With a blog providing regular content they will be able to generate more inbound links.

2. Reduce the amount of Call to Action clutter on their Home Page.  So many offers, it is very distracting.

3. Stop using Information Mapping in the title tag and on every page, and start utilizing descriptive, long-tail keywords was an easy fix and one to surely juice up their SEO presence.   

Company: Mesiro & Fink – Website Grader Score: 6

This is a three-month-old site and has been nicely optimized by an SEO firm they hired, so their score of 6 came as a bit of shock to Cynthia when we talked to her during the webinar.  She’s concerned that this site is not generating the number of leads that they expected.  Here’s a few things that Mike & I thought might be helpful:

1. Put a telephone field on the form.  The form is nice and visible but the immediate need for someone with their skill set might necessitate a telephone call instead of an email.

2. Attach the social media efforts they are making to the website and make sure the name of the firm is being used in their Twitter handle.  Currently, they are using a more generic name to tweet.

3. Contribute more actively to their blog and make sure the posts are more educational and less self-promotional in nature.

Company: BT-TelConsult – Website Grader score: 44

This is a big company.  British-Telecom could afford to do just about anything they wanted, right?  Well, it appears that they might want to consider a few tweaks to their site if they want people to contact them.

1. They had a telephone number on their site (if you looked for it) but wouldn’t an email form be better if someone was looking for consulting help?  

2. No Blog!  A company of this size is perfectly poised to leverage their army of consultants in talking about the Telecommunications vertical.  They could have tons of blog posts that would help them with the next key point.

3. Only 162 indexed pages.  Clearly, they need more content, more frequently which would give them more inbound links (currently just 29!).

Company: Photos by Orion – Website Grader Score: 21

This new site has a very passionate business manager, Katherine.  We were able to talk to her about this site at great length and it was great to have an opportunity to understand how a creative person sees the web.  There were a few points we wanted to help Katharine with and most of them had to do with design. 

This is a new site and we wanted her to do more than a few things in order to optimize it.

1. Move away from frames in the web site.  The difficulty of having two bars to navigate can be confusing.

2. Eliminate the knocked-out white on black background, a favorite of designers around the world, yet notoriously difficult to read.  

3. Connect the blog that has some excellent content on it directly into the website.  The content would be a terrific lead generation tool for this site.

4. Add geographical keywords to the title tags.

5. Use more pictures of portraits and wedding photography in the site, especially on the home page.  The beautiful butterfly is nice, but it is not their business.  

Join us on Tuesday, April 6 at 1 PM for our next Live Optimization Webinar.  Please submit your site and we’ll look forward to talking to you live!

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Last week, I had the opportunity to hear Porter Gale speak about how Virgin America has launched and marketed a new airline with a much smaller budget than their competition. To build their brand and sales, Porter and Virgin America have used a clever combination of inbound marketing tactics like event buzz, cool content and social media interactions.

1. Select Your Target Customer and Grok Them. Knowing that they were launching in only a few cities the first few years, Virgin America knew that they could not win the frequent business traveler who needs a huge network of airports and lots of schedule options. Virgin America decided to focus on a tech savvy and online-centric consumer, which made sense given their hub is in San Francisco and they serve cities like Los Angeles, Boston, New York and Seattle. Virgin America designs their entire customer experience around this consumer, from offering inflight wifi internet service to having touch screen entertainment systems to using channels like YouTube and Twitter to communicate with their audience and even having colored “mood lighting” on planes.
2. Create Buzz Worthy Experiences. Virgin does not have enough money to compete with other larger airlines using outbound marketing (think of all the TV ads you see for air travel), so they rely on their customers to create content and share that content to build their brand. How do they get their customers to create and share content? They give their customers experiences worth talking about. They do everything they can to make the flight experience remarkable – they offer food on demand whenever you want – not just when the cart passes, they have power plugs at your seat for laptops and other devices, and a touch screen entertainment system offering music, TV and movies. Then they let the magic happen and the customers talk about those experiences.
3. Connect, Don’t Market. We’ve talked a lot in our webinars and in this blog about how it is critical in social media marketing to be a valuable resource, not broadcast the benefits of your product. Virgin America lives that to the fullest – they see social media as a communication channel, not a broadcast medium, and they use it as an opportunity to learn and improve about their product and experience, not a channel to pump out their latest specials. Looking at Twitter specifically and using Twitter Grade as a measure of impact, Virgin America gets 100 with 63,000 followers which is a strong presence. However, some of their competition got started earlier and pushed harder, and have achieved even more remarkable results: Southwest gets 100 as well but has over 1 million followers, and similarly JetBlue gets 100 but has 1.6 million followers.
4. Leverage partnerships. When Virgin America launched service to Las Vegas, they did a partnership with the TV show Entourage, and got tons and tons of media exposure for free by cross promoting the show and their airline. And Entourage is a show that has a lot of viewership with their target audience of younger and tech savvy consumers, so the connection made sense. Other examples are a partnership with YouTube where they live streamed from one of their airplanes during a YouTube Live event, and working with Victoria’s Secret to have an in flight fashion show.

What do you think? Are there any lessons from Virgin America that apply to marketing your business?

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Foursquare is a popular location-based social network that keeps track of users’ whereabouts. People “check-in” at various locations, letting their friends know where they are and allowing them to find you or recommend places to go nearby. People can check-in at cafes, bars, restaurants, parks, offices, etc.

When users check-in using Foursquare, they can unlock interesting badges based on the places and frequency of their visits. You can unlock the “Gym Rat” badge if you hit the gym 3+ times per week, the “Explorer” badge if you checked into 25 different venues, or even the “Crunked” badge if you stop by 4+ places in one night!

Foursquare Grader measures your “Foursquare mojo” by analyzing your usage and giving you a grade and rank based on your comparison to other Foursquare users. The Top 10 Badges are presented above using Foursquare Grader data.

Live Webinar: Social Media Optimization Is The New SEO With Brian Solis

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