Inbound Marketing and Marketing Automation are relatively new fields representing a new way to market. Some people call the whole approach Marketing 2.0; we call it Inbound Marketing Automation or IMA.

As opposed to the old techniques of Outbound Marketing, Inbound relies on having your website get found on the web. Today, more than 90% of B2B buyers begin their search for a solution to their need online. To make this statistic even more significant, consider that 85% of people don’t progress beyond the 1st page of Google’s results to their search query. Essentially, if you’re not on page one, you’re not there!

If you’re thinking that this kind of thing is a little too much like the next silver bullet, and perhaps as ineffective as the last one, allow me to set your mind at rest: Inbound Marketing Automation really does work:

1. Most people more than double their website traffic using it
2. Conversion rate increases of more than 250% are frequent
3. The average cost to acquire a lead is 60% less compared to Outbound Approaches.

With that as your incentive, then, lets start by clarifying an important point: Inbound Marketing Automation is best thought of as a process. Yes, it consists of a set of tools, and yes, you do use them via specific techniques. But to gain maximum benefit its best to consider the Process as a way to tie them all together and thus ensure that the whole system is greater than the sum of its parts.

Formal Process Descriptions should be based on the Continuous Process Improvements mantra of Think, Plan, Do, Measure and Repeat. This link provides a good example of such a process description, this one dealing with How to run a B2B Twitter Campaign.

Three points to consider while you design the Process:

1. Holistic Websites are the only way to fly…

As a regular reader of Pete’s blog, you will know that he promotes the concept of a Holistic Website – a website which is carefully designed upfront to accommodate the results of your SEO effort, is easily extended to include a Blog and the other forms of Social Media marketing, has its copy and content properly designed around its keyword phrases, and, of course, is ready for your IMA system to plug into when you switch it on.

2. Design your Marketing Strategy

But before you start designing this Holistic Website (or renovating your existing one), the very first thing to think about is your Marketing Strategy. If you have already articulated a comprehensive strategy including its online components, you will obviously omit this step. But if your strategy is out of date (or – gasp – doesn’t exist!), or doesn’t cover the online aspects of the new marketing approach, then proceeding on without it is a bad idea. You are, after all, going to base your whole website (all the copy, graphics, structure and content) on the keywords and core competencies you define in the strategy. If you get the strategy wrong, your entire effort which follows this step is a waste of precious resources.

3. Key performance indicators and metrics
Armed with your strategy, you can now turn your attention to defining some key goals for adding Inbound Marketing to your website. As the famous slogan so succinctly puts it, the goals are usually, More Sales Leads of higher quality at lower cost. Once you have your objectives stated clearly, think of the metrics you will use to both measure the current values now and decide how best to portray these metrics as a trend thereby making it easy to monitor your progress towards your goal.

Okay, now for the overview.

The major thrust behind Inbound Marketing’s success, is that done right, your ideal prospects come knocking on your door and give you permission to sell them something. It’s a lot like the Field of Dreams: If you build a great website, the buyers will come.

And because the buyers may number in their thousands (perhaps even hundreds of thousands), you will need the aforementioned process involving software tools and techniques to manage it all. But please note: This is an all or nothing approach. Automating a part of the whole process is akin to speeding up the flow of water in the middle of a river. It makes that part rush for sure, but the overall throughput doesn’t change.

With that in mind, a good example system is shown below.

Components of Inbound Marketing Automation

1) Your Content. A subject unto itself, but the whole process depends on having content that makes your site the destination of choice for people interested in your field. Tools here help create it, display it, disseminate, promote and catalogue it. Our blog offers some ideas on how to create such content (website details at the end).

2) SEO and PPC Tools. Search Engine Marketing includes tools for Organic Search (SEO) and those for Pay-Per-Click (PPC). There are tools to help you devise the right Keyword strategy; others to assist in developing your advertising campaigns; yet more tools score your website, analyze its traffic share, determine your SERP (Search Engine Results Page) ranking, assess incoming and outgoing links, and on and on.

3) Social Media Marketing tools help you run your SMM Campaigns. Reputation Analytics monitor the social networks to determine the “buzz” around your products/services and company. These tools also help you to find the most authoritative or influential blogs and websites for your area. There are tools to help with Twitter, Blogging, LinkedIn and all of the may social media platforms and because this is a hot topic, there are many articles on how and what and when – again our blog covers the subject well.

4) Demand Generator packages capture, score and grade visitors on their profiles and digital footprints, and then nurture them from cold leads to hot prospects via drip-email campaigns run via Automation Rules.

5) The hot prospects (those who achieve a sufficiently high score) are fed into your CRM system enabling your sales people to place very effective sales calls.

Prospecting Heaven would look like this…

Imagine visitors arrive on your site, attracted by your excellent keyword and SEO strategy, and all that amazing Social Media Marketing you’re doing daily. They find, when they get there, that your site is a perfect match to the keyword phrase they keyed in (because you created your marketing strategy and keyword phrases well, and then used the holistic approach to build the website and write its copy). So they don’t bounce off and they do begin exploring…

They find your thought-provoking content and register to get it. They read it and hustle back for more. Because they are now an official Prospect (i.e. they have given you their name and email address), they are inserted into the first of your drip-email nurturing campaigns and from here on, they are managed automatically. Nurtured and cared for, according to your best sales and marketing practices which are encoded in your Inbound Marketing system’s Business or Automation Rules. Your prospects are cared for flawlessly, repeatably and 24/7. And with each automated drip-email element of every campaign, provided with just the right response to nudge them to the next step in their buying cycle.

Your marketing people are freed from the drudgery of managing leads and responding to routine inquiries allowing them to create brilliant new campaigns, and your sales people no longer spend time on people who are “just looking”, but instead concentrate their efforts on the hot prospects who are ready to buy now. This is how Inbound Marketing Automation increases your revenues while lowering your costs and thus boosts profit significantly.

Posted by Tim Fagan on Thursday, October 1, 2009,
CEO of HomeFinder.com

Things were simpler then, more familiar. You knew who to call, what to do and what to expect.

I’m talking about the good old days of real estate advertising.

Back then, you dealt with the sales rep for the local paper over a cup of coffee. Maybe you sponsored a little league team or bought a spot on the back of the church bulletin. And your audience? You could count on them to be in just a few places, at the same times, week in and week out.

Those days are long gone, a fact that has been amply documented. I won’t belabor that point.

The more important question is this: Now that the game has changed, how can we make it simpler for real estate advertisers?

Think about it: The average agent, broker or brokerage marketing director is faced with a panoply of media, formats and creative challenges these days.

On the table are:

• SEM/pay-per-click
• Brand display ads
• Direct response display ads
• Syndication
• Video
• Mobile
• Print

And this, mind you, is a growing list. Video wasn’t there three years ago; mobile wasn’t there just one year ago. Next year you may need to consider your strategy for Tweet ads, or feel pressure to get into the “augmented reality” game.

I know, it’s a little scary. And most brokers, and darn near all agents, don’t have the in-house talent to master all these platforms. Nor do they have the budget needed to hire a digital agency that does.

What to do?

Here are a few recommendations, from both the advertiser and publisher side of the business.

For advertisers (brokers and agents)

When Google launched Adwords back in 2002, thousands of brokers and agents jumped on the opportunity. After all, who wouldn’t explore performance-based advertising?

The problem was few practitioners had the time or skill necessary to optimize an SEM campaign. Results for many were disappointing.

My point: Pick media you are confident you can execute well in. If your marketing department has a good designer, you may want to focus on display ads. If you have a great headline/call to action writer on your team, SEM may be a good choice. If you or your broker performs well in front of the camera, start syndicating video.

Stick to that which you are capable executing well.

Secondly, for digital media, make sure you think beyond the click. By this I mean where the user is taken when they click on your ad. Whether this is a property detail page or a more conventional landing page, you have to make certain you present the user with something that is clear, consistent in message and look with the ad that got them to click, and loaded with a strong call to action.

If you can’t execute beyond the click, don’t bother.

For publishers

We as publishers – those site owners or media channels that sell advertising to brokers and agents – can also do our share to simplify the advertising ecosystem.

For one, we can offer cross-platform buys. At HomeFinder, we offer national exposure through HomeFinder.com combined with local placement on individual newspaper sites. Brokers and agents like this because it allows them to kill two birds with one stone.

Adwords now has a mobile offering. Several companies are marrying listings syndication with distribution to YouTube.

We are getting there. But we need to move more quickly to offer integrated packages that streamline the process for our advertisers.

Second, publishers should do more to share best practices with their advertisers. Many sales people take a consultative approach with broker and agent clients as far as structuring an ad buy, but I’m talking about something more.

For example, a strong case can be made that any large publisher would do well to hire an in-house marketing specialist available to help clients evaluate creative, craft messaging and optimize landing pages. If that sounds over the top, consider that newspapers sometimes create ads for smaller clients.

Moving forward

We will never again see a world where advertising is straightforward and audiences are concentrated. Our time is one of multiple, often blended, media channels and atomized audiences.

Our aim should be to make that reality more manageable.

If you are not using long-tail keywords in your pay per click campaigns, you could be missing out on huge profits. Following is why.

PPC Marketing and the Way Web Surfers Search
The web is growing by 100,000 new websites per day, according to some internet marketing experts. Why is this important? Quite simply, gone are the days where you can optimize your site or PPC ads using a few strong keywords and show up in results. With an ever-crowded market place, you have to drill down further.

And, this is where the long tail keyword comes into play. For those who don’t know, long tail keywords are simply multi-phrase search queries web surfers type in to find stuff. Usually, these phrases contain three or four words, but they could be longer.

1.) Higher Conversions: The more info a surfer types in when they are searching for things on the web, the more serious they tend to be about buying.
For example, consider the following long-tail keyword phrases: A womens one piece swimsuit and a womens one piece swimsuit size 10. Both of these appear to be pretty serious buyers, but the woman who puts in her size is looking for something specific. Shes more than likely ready to buy if she can find a one-piece swimsuit in her size.

2.) More Visitors: Long tail keywords will bring more traffic to your site. Everybody optimizes their pages and their ads for the most popular keywords in their niche. This is to be expected. But, when you optimize your web pages and ads using long tail keywords, what you wind up with is a lot more pages that are being indexed and ranking for targeted phrases related to your niche. If you use different long tail keywords in various pay per click marketing campaigns, you can really increase your traffic and your sales.

3.) Higher SERP Ranking: Piggybacking on the last point, because much of the competition ignores long tail keywords, it makes it much easier to rank higher in search engines. Of course, this means more visibility, which means more traffic, which leads to more sales.

4.) Cheaper: You’ll likely spend less on long tail keywords because the competition ignores them. This means the cost of your PPC campaigns can be less, while actually bringing in more traffic.

The Bottom Line on Long Tail Keywords and Pay Per Click Marketing: Long tail keywords are hard workers. They bring in more traffic; they bring in targeted traffic; and they increase your sites visibility, everything you want a keyword to do.

By Lisa Lacy, ClickZ,   			Sep 25, 2009

Time spent on social networking sites nearly tripled in the past year, and ad spending on those sites very nearly kept pace, according to new data from The Nielsen Company.

Consumer activity on social networking and blogging sites accounted for 17 percent of all time on the Internet in August 2009, up from 6 percent a year ago, Nielsen estimates. At the same time, it believes ad spending on social networking and blogging sites grew 119 percent, from an estimated $49 million in August 2008 to $108 million last month. Expressed as a percentage of total U.S. online ad spend, ad expenditures on social networking sites climbed from 7 percent in August 2008 to 15 percent last month.

While they may be directionally accurate, Nielsen’s precise spending figures should be taken with a grain of salt. Media value estimated by Nielsen and other firms is based on rate card pricing and does not necessarily reflect true media costs.

Jon Gibs, VP of media analytics at Nielsen Online, said, “Outside of maybe video, these sites have been some of the core drivers of Internet growth and so there’s been a natural tendency for dollars to flow in that direction.”

Few will be surprised to learn Facebook has been the main beneficiary of the spikes in user activity and ad spending. A recent blog post from Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg noted the site now has 300 million users worldwide, up from about 100 million last September. The company does not break out active U.S. users, but according to Nielsen, Facebook had 38.2 million users in August 2008 and 103.8 million in the U.S. one year later.

It’s not just the number of Facebook users that’s growing. Gibs said the average person now spends five hours and 46 minutes per month on the site, up from one hour and 40 minutes in August 2008.

As a result, Facebook has seen significant growth in ad impressions, accounting for 14.7 percent share of U.S. display ad views last month, up from 1.8 percent in January.

According to Nielsen, while several industries decreased their overall online ad spend year-over-year in August — including travel, business-to-business, automotive, software, financial services, and telecommunications — spending on the top social network sites increased across the board.

The entertainment industry led in growing its online ad dollars, increasing ad spending on social networking sites by 812 percent. Travel advertisers increased their ad spend on those sites by 364 percent.

Gibs noted that advertisers have historically had concerns about social media advertising but these numbers indicate they have since overcome their fears.

It’s August, and with over 100 ads posted I get only 3 or 4 responses, and from those, only 1 or 2 turn into actual showings. There must be a better way