Mar
24

CRM Acceleration Boston Recap

Yesterday I had the opportunity to attend the CRM Acceleration event at the Hilton Woburn, sponsored by BrainSell and SugarCRM. Speakers included Dharmesh Shah of HubSpot, Mitch Lieberman of SugarCRM, Umberto Milletti of InsideView, Martin Schneider of Sugar CRM, and Chip Meyers of Insource, followed by a panel discussion.

I always like to take opportunities such as this one to act as a sponge by absorbing as much of the information, atmosphere, and contacts as I can. The speakers provided great information that is crucial for businesses to understand today, whether they are implementing or considering any inbound marketing techniques or not, as it is becoming ever so important in the business world.

Below are the great takeaways from the event:

Get Found Using Inbound Marketing:

First, know that Google LOVES blogs, so naturally the searchability of your company’s blog will not be hard to obtain. If you update the information on your blog on a consistent basis, Google rewards you by listing your blog even higher for particular search queries since it is able to crawl your site more often. If you update once a year, Google deems it less important, thus does not crawl as often, and searchability can dramatically decrease.

If your company does not have the bandwith to keep up with a blog on a consistent basis, Dharmesh suggested to at least write two blogs: one on why you are in business and what differentiates you from all the other fish in the sea. The second should cover a great customer success story to demonstrate physical benefits of your service to a real client. Even if this is all your company has time to write about, it can be a great platform for potential clients (leads) to read what you are about and how you help businesses succeed.

While blogging, remember to talk in ‘human’ talk as Dharmesh stated. Don’t write in that marketing gobbledygook that people try to write in to sound fancy and smart. Although it does look nice, people go to blogs for a simple, straightforward read that does not further confuse them, so save your gobbledygook for your direct mail pieces.

Now, some may say, “Well I work in a boring industry, why would people want to read a blog about this industry?”.

The answer to that is simple: If people are willing to buy in your industry, they will be willing and ready to read your blogs. Don’t ever assume that people will not do something, because you are in fact in business due to your customers and they care about what they can get from your company. If you can provide something extra to them even in a boring industry, you have begun to differentiate yourself.

If your company does have the bandwidth to blog on a more consistent basis (at least once weekly, preferably), read on…

When blogging, talk about the industry’s problems, not your solution. You may wonder why you can’t sell your product in your blogs since the CEO or CFO wants to see some ROI on your marketing efforts. I am not saying you cannot sell your product, you just shouldn’t do it right away. You must first build up credibility in your blog by not talking about yourself, but by talking about issues that your customers/prospects care about. Once that is strongly established, then you can begin talking about your solutions to those issues. People can see through the purpose of your blogs if you put a call to action on your early blogs.

Make sure that in your blog content, you stand for something. This means that you choose one side of the fence or another on a particular issue, and not somewhere in the middle. The reasoning behind this is that people will either love you or hate you for this, but those that love you will REALLY love you. It also shows that you have the capability to take a firm stance and back it up, demonstrating expertise and credibility in a particular industry or topic.

Next, make it very, very easy to share your content. Have easily accessible links to share on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, email, etc. on each blog post.

What is a ‘Social Business’?

A social business is involved with building mutually beneficial relationships with customers. Social CRM is essentially the company’s response to the customer’s control of a situation. In this new business ecosystem, customers produce the content, and businesses must decide whether to get involved with the conversations.

In a social business…

1. People are the platform

2. Information is co-created. This means that information flows from the outside in, instead of the inside out. The customer defines the product or service and the value it will provide, and the business must respond. (Think of how Apple operates).

3. Power is distributed physically and virtually.

4. You must be transparent with information, people involved, and expected goals.

5. You must be interdependent; trust is crucial!

Who is the ‘Social Customer’?

1. They are demanding because they now have a voice.

2. They are mobile. Don’t discard mobile, as it can be a viable communication platform because mobile usage and mobile Internet has increased dramatically (a simple Google search will show this).

3. They trust their peers. For B2B, 59% engaged with their peers who helped address their challenge to find a solution.

4. They are knowledgeable. For B2B, 78% started with an informal information gathering process, such as a Google search. This demonstrates how critical being visible through search engines is to helping a customer begin their purchase decision with you.

5. They are resourceful: 41% of customers follow online discussions to find out information, and 37% post questions about topics to get results from peers.

The new era of sales:

1. Sell your brand in the way that your customers want to buy.

2. Create buyers, don’t sell your product.

3. Recognize that prospects want to receive information that is relevant to their current initiatives or business challenges, they don’t care about you or your product right away.

4. Discover key events to create the perfect sales opening; prospects will be more receptive.

5. Listen to the social buzz to learn what is not necessarily in the news but is important to prospects.

6. Focus on synchronizing the buying and selling cycles. Fact: Only 20% of sales reps are prepared for sales calls. Give reps the tools and technology to be prepared for the selling pitch when they deem the prospect is ready to receive it.

In summary, social CRM involves engagement, being adaptive, listening, being open, building different communities around your product, and enabling others to share and promote your brand.

Social business with social customers involves using technology to solve a problem for the customer. You as a business must make the lead feel comfortable, valued and enabled in order for them to trust you and feel motivated to learn more from you.

Always keep in mind that your customers just may know more about your products/services than you do, but embrace that! Make those people your brand experts and evangelists and recognize them in your brand community(ies).

Feb
09

Love Thy Inbound Marketing Theories

Inbound Marketing just makes sense.

Most students graduating college with a marketing or advertising degree know the in’s and out’s of traditional outbound marketing theories, but they are outdated techniques today. During my college career I always sat in class wondering why companies bothered with mass television or direct mail campaigns if the response rates were hard to track or very low. It just did not make sense!

Upon graduation I have been studying all about inbound marketing, and love it. Today, virtually everything is online. Therefore, business must be online too. Think of the last time you waited around to hear about a product on a television ad or in a magazine. Instead, I bet you are looking up product features on Google, Facebook’ing friends to ask for their suggestions, or going to YouTube to find a product demonstration. This is because the Internet allows all types of information to be available at our fingertips 24/7.

Why inbound marketing?
Advertising online is a lot cheaper and highly targeted.
Being on Twitter and Facebook is free (aside from time and personnel needed to work on updating it)
Uploading videos on YouTube is free
Creating a quality website is comparatively inexpensive
Developing a ning community for your target market is inexpensive as well


It only makes sense to employ inbound marketing techniques for your business today! If your consumers are online, you must be as well. Plain and simple. Our economy has changed dramatically in the past decade. Ten years ago, television, radio, and magazines were highly effective because people were tuning in and did not know how to block out traditional advertisements. Today, we have TiVo, iPods, Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s new iPad, and now the boom of Internet business.

It is also very easy to track your progress online. Google Analytics is a free way to track visits, traffic sources, and page effectiveness on your website. A new start up, HubSpot (located in Cambridge, MA) has their own excellent program to track leads and conversion on all of your sites, even social media sites. These tracking devices are much more precise than traditional ways of measuring results on television or radio.

A great resource to learn all the critical basics of inbound marketing is Inbound Marketing by Hubspot’s founders, Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah. To read my most important takeaway’s from this book, please see my recent blog about it. HubSpot also has developed an Inbound Marketing University which I am taking right now.

Is your company currently using inbound marketing techniques. If not, why not?

Jan
22

Inbound Marketing: My Review

To say that Inbound Marketing by @Hubspot’s founders @BrianHalligan and @Dharmesh was an amazing read would be an understatement. I recently finished college with a Marketing Communications/Advertising major, but this book completely revolutionized my theories of marketing. The authors ask the reader at the beginning of the book to take every outbound marketing theory they learned and disregard it. Now at first this made me regret spending over $130,000 on college tuition, but I realized that my traditional marketing background helps to support the reasoning behind why inbound marketing just makes sense.

Below are the most critical and interesting pieces from the book that everyone should pay attention to:

1. Realize that ten years ago, traditional marketing techniques (i.e. television, radio, magazine advertising) did work very well; especially for companies like GE. However, how people are much better at ‘blocking’ these messages out. This is where inbound marketing comes into play.

2. “It’s not what you say–it’s what others say about you.” People have become more skeptical about what companies say about themselves. It is much better to have customers come looking for you, find your content incredible, and spread the good word.

3. Create a REMARKABLE strategy. Your content strategy must be very unique and highly valuable to your customers. This not only drives them to your site, but increases the chance that they will become a lead and customer. Remarkable content also increases the likelihood that more people will link your site to theirs, which in turn increases your ranking on Google.

4. While traditional marketing methods tested the ‘width of your wallet’, inbound marketing is much different. If done right, you can spend much less money and create an incredible web presence.

5. Create a blog. Blogging is more powerful than ever. If you write about incredible topics that are valuable and relative to your audience’s interests, they will talk about you. Blogging also gives you credibility and increases your visibility on the web.

6. Subscribe to other people’s blogs. By reading what others are saying about your industry, you can reflect on their articles in your own blogs, start a conversation with the others by commenting on their blogs, and therefore you increase your visibility.

7. Get found on Google. You must know which types of keywords are best to be found by Google. If you use a highly common keyword, you will get lost in search results. Start off with less popular but still relevant keywords. Also, focus on the keywords you assign to each page on your website for increased visibility.

8. Recognize the power of inbound links. The more links that are created on other sites to your page, the better ranking you will have in Google. Do not ask others to put your links on their site outright; make sure they value your content and are willing to do so. The more high-power sites that add your link to theirs, the better ranking Google will give you.

9. Get found using social media sites. Create a consistent image of your brand by the look and feel of your pages, pictures, bio, etc. Post valuable and interesting topics on your sites so people will want to engage in conversations with you. Focus on getting found on Digg (even though this is a tricky thing to do), get discovered on StumbleUpon, and be searched for on YouTube

10. Learn how to convert your visitors into leads (make compelling yet simple calls to action and track your progress), convert prospects into leads (use highly effective landing pages, easy to fill out contact forms) and convert leads to customers (figure out what stage in the buying process each customer is in and keep in contact with the lead)

11. Pick the best people to hire for inbound marketing. Hire ‘Digital Citizens’. Digital Citizens are those that have an RSS reader, read blogs, rank high up in Google, use Delicious, write their own blog, use social networks and update them regularly, and post videos on YouTube. Hire those who are very analytical since inbound marketing is all about measurements and data. Hire those with a large web reach. Make sure they have lots of content, have subscribers to their blog, many followers on social networks, etc. Finally, make sure they are content creators. If they create remarkable content that attracts others, they will spread good word about your company as well.

12. Watch your competition. Some of the best CEO’s and leaders tend to be more on-edge about what competition is doing, but this is a good thing.

For more information on Inbound Marketing, Hubspot created their own Inbound Marketing University.

Now, onto reading Steve Garfield’s Get Seen book!

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