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This is a guest post written by Gini Dietrich, founder and CEO of Chicago-based integrated marketing communication firm Arment Dietrich, and Geoff Livingston, an author and marketing strategist who serves as VP, strategic partnerships for Razoo. Gini and Geoff are authors of the new multichannel marketing book, Marketing in the Round.

Online, we often talk about listening to our customers on social channels to help make content decisions in marketing. Moving to a fully integrated marketing picture for enterprise, using social media to compliment traditional market and product development research only makes sense. The very nature of uncontrolled conversations empowers customers to communicate and yield unthought-of insights and new product directions.

However, most companies are still at the basic point of simply making Facebook and Twitter work, much less mastering content for marketing or social web-wide conversations. In fact, last autumn’s Global CMO Study from IBM confirmed that most enterprises just aren’t there yet.

Consider these findings:

1. While 82% of CMOs plan to increase social media use during the next three to five years, only 26% are currently tracking blogs, 42% are tracking third-party reviews, and 48% are tracking consumer reviews to help shape their marketing strategies.
2. 56% of CMOs view social media as a key engagement channel, but they still struggle with capturing valuable customer insight from the unstructured data that customers and potential customers produce.

If you’re one of these companies, you might be wondering how to move beyond the intricacies of community management and inbound marketing to become a company that harnesses social data to drive strategy and product marketing. 

The process can be broken into two main areas: 1) building listening stations and dashboards on relevant topics, and 2) sifting through the data to find actionable intelligence.

To help illustrate these two critical areas, we asked two friends, one from a large enterprise and one from a small enterprise — Richard Binhammer at Dell and Danny Brown at Jugnoo — to open their corporate kimonos and show us how they do it. 

Dell: An Overview

Dell’s work with Ideastorm as a crowdsourced marketing intelligence center is legendary, leading to almost 500 implemented products. Going further, as one of the first social enterprises, Dell’s Social Media Listening & Command Center does more than just seek out Dell conversations to comment on. It also drives relevant reporting throughout the enterprise for strategy and product marketing decisions.

Jugnoo: An Overview

In the past two months, Jugnoo (a social business platform) used social media intelligence to drastically change its JugnooMe social automation platform’s front end. Changes included the addition of features such as social search/monitoring for brand reputation purposes (including sentiment analysis). 

By listening to its users and making product changes, Jugnoo saw:

• 270% increase in registrations from JugnooMe v1.0 to v2.0 in just one week
• 200% increase in toolbars installed
• 225% increase in social posts
• 333% increase in keywords

Build Listening Stations and Dashboards on Relevant Topics

As the IBM study shows, less than half of companies are listening to relevant conversations about them online. Those that do have built comprehensive social media dashboards to see where the conversations are happening, measure social media marketing results, gauge sentiment analysis, and respond intelligently. 

The first critical step in harnessing larger market intelligence is expanding those listening stations to include more topics to drive strategic and product marketing intelligence. For example, add relevant searches and conversation monitoring for competing products, core industry topic areas, significant competitive developments (hires, funding, etc.), key customers, and of course, conversations about your product offering.

Consider that Dell monitors more than 25,000 posts about the company every day, up 21,000 since 2006. Centralized “listening” via Dell’s social media listening command center is critical to keeping an eye on the big picture and overall social media commentary. This intelligence is divvied up into a wide variety of reports that inform the company as a whole and its consumer, small and medium business, public sector, and large enterprise and services business segments. 

Dell actively listens to its competitors’ conversation and how they impact larger macro issues. “We look at what the [competitive] conversations are about as related to our business,” says Binhammer. “This includes the conversations about competitive products and services, industry issues, and individual competitors.”

Similarly, Jugnoo has also added competitive intelligence into its online social media listening process. “The only way we can grow and improve is to see what our competitors are doing well, and how we can improve on that,” says Brown. “There’s no point in just copying – you need to improve, or at the very least integrate your product suite where your competitors may not. Companies like Hootsuite and Traackr are doing an awesome job – these are the guys we look to for best practices and where we can take our products to the next level of their benefits.”

Sift Through the Data

Using relevant conversations about your product, industry topics, and competitive offerings can provide a composite picture for your marketing roundtable and the larger executive team. In many ways, when you open the floodgates and listen to more conversations about a much wider group of data points, qualifying relevant information becomes critical. A company needs to learn not only how to listen, but also which data points to act on.

Every customer’s positive, neutral, and/or negative feedback about industry offerings is important. But repetition and general sentiment trending about product topics and service issues can provide quick touchpoints for the marketing and executive teams to make decisions.

When harnessing the new data, try to visualize it using charts, graphs, maps, and other visualization techniques. Let the pictures tell you what the top customer and product trends are.

 

 

If you’re struggling to figure out how to deliver this information, go back to marketing basics. Another method is to analyze competitor moves and offerings in the context of a traditional strength, weakness, opportunity, and threat analysis (SWOT). Simply present your social data within this commonly accepted framework.  Just a refresher on a SWOT analyses:

• Strengths: What internal assets or behaviors give your business an advantage in the marketplace?
• Weaknesses: Which internal defects and issues can prevent you from succeeding?
• Opportunities: Are there external factors you can take advantage of?
• Threats: Who and what can stop your business from succeeding?

A Traditional SWOT Analysis

 

Your company has an objective—it might be a specific initiative with a product, or it might be general market performance for the year. That objective is the focus of your SWOT analysis. State it clearly, and keep it in mind above all else when writing your SWOT report. While social data trends can be fascinating, if they are off-topic, they probably are irrelevant. It’s important not to become distracted by shiny objects and to stay on mission. 

Once you have developed your social marketing intelligence report for the larger marketing and executive teams, you can put it to good use.

“Because we’re a start-up where every team has access to the other, and we work in a cross-team development, [social intelligence] affects every part,” says Brown. “Feedback from our customers is relayed to customer service and our retention team, who in turn meet with the product team. Product analyzes then meets with Development, who then work with R&D to determine the feasibility of new feature requests and new technology based on user trends, etc.”

“These then get mocked up, approved by Product and Marketing, developed, and released into our platform,” Brown continued. “Our beta users then get to use, test, and offer more feedback, and then determine whether a product update stays and makes it to the public platform due later this year.”

Dell provides a series of daily, weekly, and monthly reports based on its social intelligence. Reports cover specific topical or announcement daily reports looking at the size, sentiment, locations, who was leading the conversations, etc. 

“On a daily basis, we report and assess the top-moving topics in social media related to Dell (positive and negative),” says Binhammer. “We identify critical product and service issues and have a weekly review of these. We also have an in-depth monthly report on key findings across the social Web.”

“We find our listening and tracking of information on the web is often a ‘leading indicator’ of a product issue that requires our product teams’ attention, such as the need for a new driver or software fix on some hardware issues that emerge over time,” added Binhammer. “A team follows through on these issues to bring the various parts of our business together to solve things. This fosters Dell’s being more closely connected to customers and constantly in touch in order to be a better business.”

Are you harnessing social data to influence product decisions? Share your experiences in the comments!

It’s a topic that is running rampant around the web. How do you measure ROI from Facebook? Is anyone (besides Fortune 500 brands with multi-million dollar budgets) generating ROI from Facebook? And if so, how?

The difficulty with establishing ROI on Facebook has typically been tracking, but luckily, Facebook recently made a bunch of updates to help marketers tackle this problem. And while Facebook is heading in the right direction, SMB marketers (and all marketers) need more, and they need it now.

So what’s the best way to track Facebook ROI? You’re about to find out. This post will show you how to determine whether your Facebook ad spend is generating you the kind of ROI you need to justify the expense.

How to Measure the ROI of Your Facebook Ads

In order to determine the ROI of your Facebook ad spend, you first need to be able to properly track your Facebook connections. You can attract connections on Facebook two ways: by running paid ads, or by posting updates to your business page. If you’re posting updates to your fan base, running ads to grow your audience via cost per connection campaigns is often difficult to measure. Necessary data that Facebook provides to properly track includes:

• Spend
• Clicks
• Connections
• Cost per click

But even with this data that Facebook provides, you still need a tracking solution that tells you your cost per connection. You could calculate that manually using data from Facebook by taking your spend and dividing it by your number of connections. But since we like to do things more efficiently here at HubSpot, we use a Facebook ads tracking app that easily allows you to see all of the metrics that are available within the Facebook user interface, and also provides you with that crucial cost per connection data. This is a time saving feature that allows marketers to quickly see which campaigns are cost effective, and which ones need work.

 

Now that you have that cost per connection data, it’s time to start promoting your offers! You know, so you can turn those connections into leads. As you promote your offers to your audience, it’s imperative to be able to track who converts into a lead, so be sure to use landing pages that are integrated with your closed-loop analytics software. When we do this with HubSpot, for example, we can see all of the leads that were driven by Facebook with the following lead information:

• Date
• Event trigger
• Lead source
• Contact information
• Lead quality
• Sales details

 

 

Now, we can understand which campaigns and segments are more interested in our offerings, and as leads turn to sales, ROI is easily realized with every new customer. And all of that information lives within your marketing software for your sales and marketing team to reference!

To make all of this a little clearer, let’s use an example of how one might establish the ROI of a Facebook ad. We’ll use an example from one of our own campaigns.

Step 1: Create a Facebook ad that includes a lead generating offer. If you need helping creating a Facebook ad, reference this ebook for some assistance!

 

 

Step 2: Send users to a unique landing page so they can redeem the offer in your ad. Remember, this is how you’ll turn those Facebook connections into leads! And of course, we’ve written a handy guide to creating an effective landing page.

 

 

Step 3: For the sake of this example, we’ll assume the visitor converted on the landing page. The next step is to analyze the data.

 

 

Again, we use the HubSpot Facebook ads app to do our analyzing, though you can get the data from a combination of Facebook ad analytics and your own closed-loop marketing software. But regardless of which tool you use, you should look at the following data points to track your lead generation campaigns over time:

• Spend
• Clicks
• Leads
• Cost per lead
• Customers
• Cost per customer

With this additional data readily available, measuring ROI is easy, because it puts direct spend up against revenue generated to truly measure ROI on Facebook.

Trying to track ROI from social media can be a nightmare, especially if you aren’t using the proper tools. Tracking, cost association, and revenue measurement are paramount when it comes to driving new business with Facebook. Without having the ability to do those things, the time you do spend on Facebook will become a cyclical headache that just won’t go away.

How do you determine the ROI of your Facebook ad spend?

 

It’s easy to think of ways to use social media for B2C marketing. But many B2B marketers, while noting the importance of social media, have still struggled to find their footing in the social media marketing game. What are you supposed to do, throw Farmville sheep at your leads until they realize they do, in fact, need your product or service?

Alright, you probably haven’t gotten that desperate, but MarketingProfs did shed some light on the issue earlier this week in its post about going B2B on social sites, and I think the topic deserves some serious attention. In fact, eMarketer reports that 52% of US small businesses don’t feel they are marketed to by other businesses effectively, while 46% feel they’re being “sold” to instead of “spoken” to. You know what a great solution for that problem is? Social media! You know, where you are “social” with people instead of pushing the hard sell?

So this post will break down how you can be successful on the 6 most popular social networks: LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, YouTube, and Pinterest. Some won’t be too much of a stretch for you, but I think you’ll be surprised at the potential available with others!

LinkedIn for B2B Marketers

Did you know that LinkedIn is 277% more effective for lead generation than Facebook and Twitter? If you’re a B2B marketer, this certainly shouldn’t surprise you — of all the social networks listed in this blog post, LinkedIn provides the most natural transition into social media for many B2B organizations. That’s because it’s a social network made specifically for professionals! So to ease you into this B2B social media program, I thought it’d be best to start with the social network that has the most natural B2B applications. Check out these ways you can use LinkedIn in your B2B marketing!

1) Share your presentation slides. You already have tons of great content living in your various slide decks, and you don’t have a lot of time to create new lead gen content. Why not add a call-to-action in those slides, repurpose them as lead generation content, and share it on LinkedIn? They’ve actually made it pretty easy for you to do, too. LinkedIn has a SlideShare app called SlideShare Presentations that lets you easily import presentations from your SlideShare account and share the content with LinkedIn members!

2) Get more visibility for your blog with an RSS feed. Visitors to your company page should be greeted with quality content from your business, and LinkedIn makes it easy by letting you provide an RSS of your most recent company blog posts. Use this to drive traffic back to your blog from LinkedIn!

 

 

3) Promote new content with company status updates. Your blog’s RSS isn’t the only way to get your content out to the masses on LinkedIn. Your company status update is a simple way to broadcast your latest and greatest content — but for some reason, so many companies are neglecting to leverage the functionality. At HubSpot, we update our LinkedIn company status 4 times a day, each time publishing either a new blog post, or a lead generation offer. That way we can, you know, drive traffic to our website and generate leads. (Bonus Tip: If your blog runs on WordPress, LinkedIn has a WordPress app that lets you automatically publish the posts you publish on your blog to your LinkedIn profile, and instantly notify your LinkedIn network of the new post.)

4) Highlight your products/services to a targeted audience. LinkedIn provides dedicated tabs on your company page on which you can promote your products and services. I mean, that right there is one thing you should check off your social media marketing to-do list if you’re not already leveraging the space. But you can take it a step further by creating different variations of the tabs and targeting them to your different buyer personas. That means you can adjust your messaging and value proposition for each audience, then target based on information like company size, industry, geographic location, job function, and seniority level! If you need help creating these targeted tabs, take a look at this blog post for an in-depth explanation.

5) Generate leads on your products/services tab. If targeting wasn’t enough to excite you, you can actually generate leads on your products/services tab by creating clickable banners (called the Product and Service Spotlight) to fill the space provided. Or if leads aren’t your primary goal, get creative! Create a banner that promotes your next event, or you could even work on generating more subscribers for your blog. You can also combine this with the targeting feature we just discussed to create up to three variations of the banner so you can achieve greater relevancy.

6) Email your LinkedIn Group members. If you’re managing a group on LinkedIn — perhaps you’ve established a group for your industry or trade like we’ve done with our Inbound Marketers Group — you can send an email to those group members promoting your latest marketing initiative. LinkedIn allows you to send one email per week to your group.

7) Keep your blog fed using LinkedIn Answers. We’ve written an entire blog post about how to use LinkedIn Answers to improve your marketing; that’s how cool the feature is! LinkedIn Answers is a place for people to ask and answer questions, which provides for great thought leadership opportunity and lets you network with industry influencers. Plus, you can promote your own content when answering others’ questions, use the questions people commonly ask as topic fodder for your own blog, and even identify guest bloggers who can do some writing for you!

Conduct market research using LinkedIn polls. Did you know that LinkedIn has a polling feature? They do, and the best part of it is, it’s so insanely simple to use.

 

 

Just type in your question, the answer options, the duration of the poll’s run time, and hit ‘Share.’ You can even publish it to Twitter (which you’ll certainly be using after you read about Twitter’s B2B uses later in this post)! You can post these polls in your own LinkedIn group, or in another group for some seriously niche market research, provided they haven’t restricted the functionality to admins only.

Pinterest for B2B Marketers

Okay, maybe LinkedIn was obvious for B2B marketers (though I hope you still got some new ideas to try), but Pinterest? What should I do, pin pictures of puppies and wedding dresses? How on earth does a B2B organization use Pinterest to feed its marketing machine? Like this.

1) Pin pictures of your product. Yes, even if your product is “boring.” If you haven’t taken a gander at General Electric’s Pinterest boards yet, head over there for some inspiration! Not all of their boards are product-focused though — they’ve actually done a great job leveraging user-generated content with their #GEInspiredMe campaign — but they also have fun product-oriented boards like ‘Badass Machines,’ ‘GE Garages,’ and ‘From the Factory Floor.’ Showing their product in many different lights gives them the opportunity to gain market share with engineers, historians, and artists with their Pinterest boards, not all of whom would give two hoots about their brand in other circumstances.

2) Pin infographics, data, and charts. But my B2B organization doesn’t have a product; we’re service-oriented! No prob. Visual content is huge in marketing these days! If you’re creating any sort of visual content — infographics, data visualizations, charts and graphs, even industry cartoons — you should create pinboards for them on your Pinterest account. For an example, take a look at HubSpot’s ‘Marketing Infographics’ board on Pinterest. And yes, we are a B2B organization! (Bonus Tip: Be sure to add a Pin It button next to visual content on your website and blog, too, so your visitors can do some of your Pinterest social sharing for you!)

 

 

3) Pin covers of printed books and ebooks. If you’re creating your own lead generation ebooks, writing printed books, or just want to promote great content written by others, you can pin the covers of those books to dedicated pinboards as well. If you’re pinning ebooks, link the images to a landing page dedicated to that ebook so you can generate leads. If you’re pinning written books, link the images to a page (like Amazon) on which a visitor could buy that book so you’re actually generating revenue from your efforts.

 

 

4) Drive traffic to your website. With each pin, you have the ability to also post a link back to your website (or elsewhere, if you choose). That way, when someone oohs and aahs over a pin of your latest infographic, they can click back to your website to find it along with, say, the accompanying blog post you wrote when you published it. In HubSpot’s own Pinterest experiments, we’ve found that having many boards with many pins is the best way to drive traffic back to your site. In a two week time period, a single pin only sent a bit of traffic to our site, but the whole of our pins combined sent tremendous amounts! Take a look for yourself.

 

 

5) Generate leads from pins. Because you’re an awesome B2B inbound marketer (still trying to find the ROI in social, of course), you know all that pin traffic you’re generating is useless if you don’t actually convert it into leads. Luckily, you can generate leads from Pinterest, too! When choosing the link to associate with each pin, consider choosing a relevant landing page instead of just any web page. For example, we might pull a graph from our 2012 State of Inbound Marketing report, pin it, and then link back to the landing page where the report can be redeemed in order to turn that pin traffic into a lead. And if the image you’re pinning doesn’t have a landing page associated with it, be sure to include well-optimized calls-to-action on the page to which you’re driving traffic to increase the likelihood that Pinterest traffic converts.

Twitter for B2B Marketers

From purely anecdotal research, Twitter seems to be a bit of a polarizing entity. Some have sworn their sole allegiance to the tiny blue bird, while others think the stream is cluttered, unwieldy, and totally useless. While I have my own opinions for my personal use, this is business we’re talking about, and there is certainly tremendous potential to enhance your B2B marketing initiatives on Twitter. Let’s learn how!

1) Grow your reach. Technically, all of these social networks will help you grow your reach. But Twitter is the easiest way to do it at a high volume, so instead of telling you about it for every social media network, I’m going to focus on it here. But you can apply these principles to every social network you use!

Think of reach like the six degrees of Kevin Bacon for social media. It’s the idea that your content and influence extends beyond your first degree connections. Sure, they’re part of your reach, but so are their connections, and even their connections’ connections! It’s important because it gets more eyes on your traffic and lead generating content, and gives you more street cred with Google’s algorithm. That’s right, the more people that share your content, the more authoritative Google believes you are! So follow others on Twitter, and several times a day tweet the blog posts you write, your lead generating offers, and other peoples’ content. If you do this regularly, you will expand your Twitter reach and get more eyes on the content that makes your marketing successful. I guarantee it.

2) Ask employees to tweet your content. You can spearhead your company’s Twitter marketing alone, or you can amplify the results by getting your entire company involved. This is how you can take Twitter reach to the next level. Let’s use HubSpot as a case study. We encourage all of our employees to maintain an active social media presence. As such, an overwhelming percentage of HubSpotters are on Twitter. And you know what happens every time we, say, write a blog post? Hundreds of people tweet about it. And you know what that does? It gets their networks of hundreds and thousands seeing, reading, and retweeting that content, too … and it takes a matter of seconds to accomplish. Starting to see the potential with Twitter, yet?

3) Grow blog subscribers. Since you’ll already be tweeting about your blog content on a regular basis, why not leverage the power of Twitter to also increase your number of blog subscribers? Create a dedicated landing page just for signing up blog subscribers, and use Twitter to publicize the landing page, ideally after you’ve just tweeted some amazing blog content that helps you make your case!

Want to stay up-to-date on the latest marketing articles? Subscribe to the @HubSpot blog! ow.ly/aMvYn

— HubSpot (@HubSpot) May 8, 2012

4) Generate leads on Twitter, too! Yes, you can also generate leads on Twitter. In fact, we’ve written an entire guide to generating leads on Twitter, specifically for B2B organizations, too! Not only can you craft tweets with your lead generating offers and links to landing pages, but you can also customize your Twitter background with calls-to-action, and even monitor for competitive and industry search terms to find prospects that are looking for your solution in real time.

5) Host a Twitter chat. Although currently on hiatus, HubSpot has hosted several Twitter chats that help us generate leads, grow our reach, interact with our community, and expand our thought leadership. Twitter chats are virtual meetings on Twitter, held together by a common hashtag — ours is #inboundchat, for example. If you’re interested in holding your own Twitter chat, check out this blog post for a step-by-step guide to setting it up.

6) Solve customer service issues in real time. Even if you don’t want them to, people will use social media as an outlet to air their grievances. You can either be proactive about engaging in that conversation, or let the Negative Nancies control the conversation. We recommend the former. And Twitter is an ideal platform for this because it works in real time! Either set up a separate social media account dedicated to customer service, or simply monitor your Twitter account for problems that may arise, and quickly route them to the appropriate person for a resolution.

7) Use hashtags to generate buzz around live events. If you’re hosting an event, use hashtags to communicate on Twitter so attendees can all engage in one conversation together. Not only will their networks see all of the buzz around your event (remember the concept of reach!), but your attendees will also be able to network, and you’ll get real-time feedback from attendees about your event.

YouTube for B2B Marketers

YouTube doesn’t always get a lot of air time in social media marketing discussions, perhaps because not all marketers are equipped with the ability to easily create high quality videos … or perhaps because you feel like you have nothing to create a video about. While we understand these hurdles, there are still some great ways to use YouTube for those B2B marketers who do have the bandwidth to create video. If you’re creating videos for your B2B marketing now, or you plan to in the future, make sure you leverage YouTube in the following ways to make it successful.

1) Publish case studies. You might have case study videos on your website — we certainly do! Why not create a YouTube account for your company that features those videos, as well? Remember, videos show up in search results, too, and don’t forget about who owns YouTube. Their name rhymes with Shmoogle.

2) Take product tours. Case studies aren’t the only quality video content a B2B company can create. If you’re a product-oriented business, you can also use a video to take your prospects on a little tour that’s more engaging than simply reading some copy about what you create. And don’t tell me it’s too boring … we create marketing software and found a way to shoot videos showcasing our product! And then, just like your case study videos, upload those bad boys to YouTube, and be sure to promote them via your other social media channels for maximum visibility.

3) Create how-to videos. But I’m not a product-oriented business! That’s fine! Your prospects and customers still have problems then need solved, and questions they need answered. Be the person to do that via video! We do this all the time when we get questions that end up being really hard to explain in writing — this video that shows you how to analyze Facebook Insights is our most recent example that required no special technology to shoot. Oh yeah, it also lives on our YouTube channel, and in two weeks has already received over 2,500 views (and counting). (Bonus Tip: To get more views for your videos, write a blog post that summarizes the content contained therein, and embed the video within the post!)

4) Optimize your YouTube videos for search. Like I mentioned, YouTube videos show up in organic search engine results. So if you’re at all concerned with SEO (what inbound marketer isn’t?), YouTube is an important part of your strategy. And there’s a way to optimize the videos you upload to YouTube that will give you a leg up on your competition, too! Visit this blog post for the full YouTube optimization rundown.

5) And yes, you can generate leads on YouTube, too! I’m starting to sound like a broken record on this social media lead generation, aren’t I? But many marketers really are surprised to learn there’s lead generation potential on YouTube, and it’s because it requires a little creativity. At the end of every video you create, include a call-to-action and landing page URL to direct visitors back to your website to redeem an offer germane to the subject of the video. You can also include links to landing pages in the video description section on YouTube, and if you want to put a little paid muscle behind your videos, experiment with CTAs using YouTube’s overlay ads!

Google+ for B2B Marketers

I know I said Twitter was a polarizing entity, but maybe I should have reserved a little of that sentiment for Google+, too. Despite all of the hoopla surrounding the launch of Google+ brand pages last fall, many marketers have resisted spending time on the social network. We’ve even written a blog post evaluating whether it really is worth your time. But even if you’re not a believer (hey, not every social network is right for every marketer), there is still plenty of potential for B2B marketers. If you decide to spend some time marketing your business on Google+, here’s how you can do it successfully!

1) Livestream a Hangout! Just this week, Google+ finally started rolling out Hangouts on Air to everyone. That means you can easily hang out with up to 9 people using the video function on Google+, and you can livestream the hangout for all the world to see. How do B2B marketers get some leverage out of this? You’re limited only by your creativity, but we also provided a great tutorial along some great ways to put it to use here, which include company announcements, webinars, industry expert roundtable discussions or interviews, virtual conferences, livestreaming in-person events, user groups, and Q&A sessions.

2) Use Circles to target your content. Many B2B marketers are reticent to join social networks because they don’t want to bother people with content that isn’t relevant to their entire audience. After all, you might have multiple product and service lines that overlap barely, if at all! But Google+ has helped remedy this with Google+ Circles. Circles allow your followers to identify what type of content they are interested in, so instead of blanketing your entire follower base with content that is only relevant to just a fraction, you can publish content to specific Circles that contain followers interested in that subject matter.

3) Get your content more visibility in search. Just as your YouTube videos can show up in organic search results, your content can also get much more organic search visibility using Google+, since Google started incorporating content shared on its social network into the SERPs. As such, you should add the +1 button to the content on your site so others can share it with just the push of a button, and begin sharing your content regularly via Google+ status updates to increase the likelihood you appear in organic search results for related search terms.

Facebook for B2B Marketers

I thought I’d leave the sheep-thrower for last.

Facebook: the one that started it all! It was once just for college students, then it expanded to the rest of Generation Y, and now your grandma is friend requesting you. And you know what? B2B marketers shouldn’t be missing out on it! Here’s how you can turn what started as a friend-to-friend social network into a business-to-business one.

1) Generate leads. If you read the entirety of this post, you shouldn’t be surprised that you can generate leads on Facebook, too. Yes, you can publish links to lead gen offers to do it. But there’s one method that’s unique to Facebook that should also be mentioned! With the new Facebook Timeline rollout, while you cannot include calls-to-action in your cover photo, you can include them in the “Views & Apps” section of your page, right under the cover photo! Take a look at how B2B company Distilled did this on its Facebook page to help generate more leads. (Bonus Tip: You can also use this section to get more visibility for your blog or apps you’ve created for your business!)

 

 

2) Optimize for lead generation with pins and stars. When you do publish your lead generation content to your Timeline, get it even more visibility using pins and stars. Pins allow you to anchor one update to the top of your Timeline for up to 7 days, and stars have the effect of expanding the update so that it takes up more of your Timeline real estate, drawing more eyes to the lead generation offer. This not only results in more leads, but also more engagement from Facebook fans, which is crucial to getting your updates into users’ news feeds, according to Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm.

3) Build an industry community. Now that you know how to generate leads for your business on Facebook, consider building an industry community to convert! The B2B community is full of people trying to be better, faster, and stronger than their fellow employees, higher-ups, and industry competition. Establish your Facebook page as the place to get the information that will help them do that. Publish educational content from yourself and others, publish new research (you can even publish those fancy charts and graphs you created for your Pinterest boards!), and pose provocative questions that will get your audience thinking and talking. If your Facebook fans recognize you as the go-to place for information in your industry, they will eventually become your customer or refer others your way — because you’re the best out there!

4) Use Facebook for networking. LinkedIn isn’t the only social network that can help you expand your professional network. B2B organizations often rely on in-person events like conferences and trade shows to network with the right people, and Facebook’s location-based services can make you even more successful in these endeavors. Next time you attend an event, promote your presence by checking in on Foursquare, Facebook Places, or your other favorite location-based service so others within your Facebook network are alerted to your presence. What a great way to not only stand out from the crowd, but also find others to connect with (many that you may have only spoken to through your Facebook Timeline until this point)!

5) Make use of Open Graph. You know when you see an update that says, “Bobby McGee read 10 Reasons Lady Gaga and Newt Gingrich Should Get Married on The Washington Post” and you are prompted to let an app access your profile before you can read the article? That’s a result of Open Graph, which has allowed third-party developers to create apps that show a user’s engagement with the app on Facebook. Develop an app of your own to get your brand more visibility on Facebook. You could create a customer testimonial app, a customer achievements app, a content library app to promote your amazing content, or even a free trial app to get customers using your product!

6) Create Facebook coupons. You may have heard that Facebook is testing coupons with ecommerce and brick-and-mortar businesses. If your B2B falls into one of those two buckets, soon you’ll be able to not only create coupons for your customers on Facebook, but also leverage Facebook advertising to pay for more visibility for those offers!

I’m certain there are more B2B applications for marketing on each of these social networks; share your ideas in the comments!

Image credit: 10ch

 

When it comes to getting your website found in search, little things can make a big difference. But sometimes it’s hard to find the time — or know where to start. Here’s an idea: Set aside 15 minutes in the next week to conduct an audit of what you think are 5 of your most influential web pages. (For HubSpot Professional or Enterprise level customers, you can get a list of these via the Conversion Assists report). Then audit those pages with the following six steps to make sure you have all your SEO bases covered.

Step 1: Check Your Meta Descriptions

Every page of your website should have a meta description. Meta descriptions are short summaries of what can be found on that page. For example, the meta description of this page is: “A checklist of items on your web pages that can improve your search engine optimization.” Meta descriptions show up in search results along with the link to your page.

 

 

When you audit your site’s most important pages, make sure you set your meta descriptions and check that the following is true:

• Your Meta Description is Not Too Long: If your meta description is longer than 150 characters, aspects of it may get cut off by search engines. Make sure your summary is brief and front-loaded with good keywords to give readers a sense of what they’ll find on the page.
• Your Meta Description is Unique: Remember, the goal of the meta description is to set the searchers’ expectations about what can be found on that page. Having multiple pages with the same description doesn’t serve that purpose.
• Your Meta Description Does Not Contain the Page Title: Reusing the page title for your meta description is a missed opportunity and can look strange to internet searchers. Instead, use the meta description to elaborate on the promise of your title.

Note: If you’re a HubSpot customer, you can use HubSpot’s Pages tool — an analytics report that automatically diagnoses and shows you how to fix SEO errors — to help you with your SEO audit.

Step Two: Review Your Page Title

Page titles are among the main cues a search engine gets about the content and quality of a particular web page. In the HTML code of your page, your title is found between the <title> and </title> tags. Oftentimes, people assume that the first headline on their page is the title, but to be considered a title in search, it must be between the <title> tags in your page. If you’re not certain, go to the View menu of your browser, and select “View Source.” Then search for title tag. Titles of pages also show up when the page appears in search results as well as in the browser tab associated with it.

 

 

As you name your pages, keep in mind the following tips.

• Make the Page Title Unique: This has similar reasoning to the meta description we mentioned above. If you have multiple pages with the same name (your company name, for example), it will dilute the SEO of your page and may confuse internet browsers.
• Keep the Page Title Brief: Most search engines only show about 70 characters of a title on their results pages. Try to keep your titles within that limit. If you’re having trouble, at least try to use the most important keywords toward the beginning of the title.
• Don’t Include the Domain Name: Including your domain name in a page title rarely adds value since your domain name is already used in the link. It also tends to take up the character space you should be using for your more useful keywords. If you need to include your domain name in the title, make sure it comes at the end. For example, the title tag on our blog is: Internet Marketing Blog | HubSpot.

Step 3: Optimize Your H1 Tags

Within a web page, your most important headline should get an H1 tag. For HubSpot customers using HubSpot’s content management system, the headlines of your pages will automatically be given an H1 tag in the HTML. If you don’t use HubSpot, just make sure that in the HTML version of your website, you include the following: <h1>Headline Text</h1>. Within that headline text, use include the keywords you want the page to rank for in search.

The main thing to know about using H1 tags to optimize your web pages is that you shouldn’t use too many of them. Too many H1 tags on a web page can get your page sidelined by Google and other search engines. Ideally, stick to one H1 tag and use <h2> or <h3> tags for all other headers.

Step 4: Make Images More User/Search Friendly With Alt Text

Images add to the quality of your web pages. In fact, you may have noticed how HubSpot always includes images in its blog posts. But to get the most out of your web pages, every image you use should include what’s called an “Alternative Attribution,” or “Alt Text.”  Alt text is a written version of what appears in the image that displays up whenever the image isn’t able to load for one reason or another. Use your alt text to incorporate keywords, but do so in a way that is understandable and useful. For example, the Alt Text on the following image is: “SEO advice on images from HubSpot Pages.”

 

 

Step 5: Optimize the Anchor Text of Your Links

We all know how important internal and inbound links are to helping people find your content online. When it comes to search, the text that is hyperlinked, also known as “Anchor Text,” is just as important. Search engines use anchor text to help determine what’s covered on the page that it’s linking to. This is true for external sites linking to your content and for your own internal links. Here are a couple of tips to follow as you’re crafting your pages’ anchor text:

• Beware of “Click Here”: Let’s say you have 100 links to your page about free unicorns. Knowing what you now know about how search engines use anchor text, would you rather all of those links tell the search engine that your page is about “free unicorns” or about “click here”? In other words, the best way to handle the anchor text for your page about free unicorns would be: “Learn more about HubSpot’s free unicorns.”
• Make the First Anchor Text Count: The pros over at SEOmoz conducted some experiments on anchor text and found that if two links are targeting the same URL, only the first link’s anchor text is used by Google. Therefore, if you link to the same page more than once, make sure the anchor text for the first link on the page is well-optimized for your keywords.

Step 6: Leverage Calls-to-Action

Calls-to-action (CTAs) may not be the first thing you think about when you’re trying to optimize your website for search, but they should be a close second. After all, why work hard to generate all that search traffic unless you can channel some of it into taking an action?

Be sure to optimize the pages on your website with appropriate calls-to-action, keeping in mind that different calls-to-action will generate different responses, and that different pages on your website will attract visitors in different stages of the sales cycle. Not sure how to determine which of your CTAs belongs on what website pages? Check out this in-depth blog post to help you select the right CTA for every page on your site. And if you’re a HubSpot customer, you can use HubSpot’s Call-to-Action module to create and A/B test CTAs. Just be sure to avoid these common CTA mistakes.

Once you’ve completed this six-step audit of your top 5 pages, you should start to see some improvement in your search engine optimization and the performance of those pages. Then you can use the same set of steps to improve upon the rest of the pages throughout your site. And if you run into questions or experience some early successes, we’d love to hear about them in the comments below!

Image Credit: StuSeeger