Posted by Stacie Chalmers on Tue, Jul 13, 2010 @ 10:00 AM
Hubspot is a tool! And like all tools if it’s not being used correctly you won’t achieve the results you desire or expect and that it is capable of delivering.
As a Hubspot Partner and Hubspot client I thought I’d share some of the ways I personally use the Hubspot tools. And like most of you out there, I too am time poor and guilty of not being consistent or using my Hubspot tool correctly.
Today’s article is about the Social Media Tool.
I plan on sharing more about the tools on Hubspot and how they help business so please subscribe to this blog if you would like to receive my Inbound Marketing and Hubspot updates.
The Social Media Tool:
Click on the top tab “Promote” and then “Social Media”
If you haven’t already, set up the keywords you would like to be tracking across the social mediasphere and add in the relevant filters by clicking on ‘edit’.
This is also where you set up your social media accounts. Click on the option 'social media account' and choose to 'add' the accounts you have ie: Facebook, Linked, Twitter and Youtube. Then scroll down to choose how you want to use them. There are options for choosing whether you want them included in your Reach report or if you want to auto publish your blog to them when you publish your blog, or if you want to be able to access them from the social media tool. And there is an option to have the link show up in the "Follow Me" widget.
Why is this tool so important?
No matter what your business goals are or strategies to achieve them, monitoring the social mediasphere for relevant keywords is a valuable tactic and here’s why:
1. Competitor Analysis: Monitor your competitors’ brand names, company, key personnel and stay up to date with what they’re doing.
2. Research and Development: By monitoring what prospects are saying about your industry you may learn about new ways to market your product or service, or how you need to change your current products to better meet market demand or make valuable connections.
3. Lead Generation: By monitoring keywords that represent the problem or need you provide a solution for, you have the opportunity to meet and connect with new people who may become valuable business partners or clients.
4. Build Authority: By monitoring keywords that represent your industry and area of expertise you have the opportunity to connect with bloggers and individuals who are posting questions on Linked In. This provides a great opportunity to share your knowledge and position yourself as knowledgeable in your industry.
5. Link Building: Comment on blogs to get inbound links. The focus really needs to be on providing a valuable comment, otherwise you can do more damage to your reputation than good. But with that being said, remember that commenting often provides a link to your website so this should be part of your ongoing inbound link tactics.
6. Awareness: Engaging on social media sites is like networking, letting people know about your company, product or brand without using any pushy sales tactics.
If you use Hubspot I would love to hear from you. Are you wondering how to use a particular tool or how it’s going to help your business? If you want to add to my list of benefits for using the Social Media Tool, Hubspot client or not, please do.
If you liked this post, please don’t forget to click on the ‘like’ button at the top. Thank you for reading.
Posted by Stacie Chalmers on Thu, May 06, 2010 @ 12:37 PM
It's become evident to me that one of the biggest marketing challenges for business owners is how to measure their marketing and return on investment (ROI).
I've included a link at the bottom of this blog to an excel sheet for Measuring Marketing and ROI which I've adapted from a document received from Hubspot. But before you jump ahead and download the excel sheet, take the time to review my notes on what you should do before starting any marketing and what to measure.
Before You Start
Before starting out with any marketing take the time to plan and set goals. The benefit of doing this is to make sure you get the best return out of your marketing efforts. Often marketers will blame a particular marketing tactic when really it was the message. You need to know what your goals are, who your customers are and what they want, before you even begin an effective marketing campaign.
From here you can craft your marketing message, addressing problems and outcomes that speak to the value system of your prospects. If you have the budget I would suggest speaking with a professional marketing consultant. They will work with you to create a Marketing Plan that will communicate your message (value proposition) to your prospects (target market) via different channels, and develop a lead nurturing program that will attract prospects into your sales funnel, and keep them moving down the funnel until they are ready to convert to a customer.
All your marketing efforts need to be monitored. Test and measure, test and measure and test and measure again, to see what yields the best returns.
What To Measure
There are a lot of different metrics out there but what really matters is what is impacting the bottom line.
Visitors: What's driving traffic (visitors) to your site
Leads: What's encouraging the visitors to convert to a lead.
Customers: What's encouraging the leads to convert to a customer
Personally, I believe Hubspot offers the best tools for monitoring specific marketing campaigns. One of the great features of the Hubspot tools is that it allows you to track specific marketing tactics, even something as simple as a Tweet (ie Tweeted with a link to blog). I find it interesting to see how much extra traffic I get just by changing my status in LinkedIn.
Converting Your Visitors Into Leads
A visitor becomes a lead once they've indicated some interest in your product/service.
Of course traffic on its own doesn't mean much if there are no conversions. This is where a professional marketing consultant can really help. Once you have visitors to your site you need to:
1. Offer the information they are looking for and
2. Give them a compelling reason to provide you with their valuable contact details.
What can you offer that is of value to your prospects? Some suggestions are: Blog subscriptions, eNewsletters, free ebook, free tool or kit. And don't just direct all your traffic to your home page, offer a link to a ‘landing page' which is designed to convert visitors to leads. Without this in place, your marketing efforts will seem futile if no visitors are converting.
Test and measure. Change your offer, heading, message, channel and landing page to see which yields a better result.
Download this Measuring Marketing and ROI excel sheet to track your results, compare and measure against different channels and campaigns.Check out the tools at Hubspot and test drive their 7 day free trial. Remember to start out with a plan and seek professional marketing advice if needed.
I would really like to know if this post provides you with practical solutions to Measuring Marketing and ROI?
Posted by Stacie Chalmers on Wed, Jul 15, 2009 @ 12:33 PM
I find so many business owners, especially in small business, have a misconception about the ‘true' purpose of their website and therefore, aren't getting the most value out of their website. The most overlooked marketing tool that (almost) every business has is their website. Many business owners, when they start, set up a website because it's what is expected nowadays. Your prospects expect to find you on line and it's where your competitors are, so of course you need a website if you want people to take you seriously.
No matter what you ‘think' the purpose of your website is, it should be to generate leads and conversions.
The average website conversion is 1-2%, proper SEO could double your traffic and an effective call to action can increase your conversion to 4-5%. If you know how many visitors you're getting to your site on a monthly basis and how many are converting to leads, do the math.
So how do you implement some fundamental Inbound Marketing strategies like SEO and lead generation to improve your business?
There is a lot that can be done on-page (on your website) and off-page (internet) with Inbound Marketing to boost your organic rankings and convert visitors once they're on your site. But here are 5 SEO and lead generation tips to get you started and improve the value of your website.
1. Choose the right keyword phrases:
a. Know who your audience is, who's coming to your site and why.
b. Choose keywords that your audience is using and that you can rank for in the search engines. There's no use going after high traffic keywords if its next to impossible to rank for them.
2. Make sure each page on your website is optimized for unique keyword phrases (not the same keywords for every page):
a. Page title
b. Meta description
c. H1 tags
d. Content
e. Internal links
3. Inbound Links
a. Don't direct all your traffic to your home page
b. Make sure the links directing traffic to your site are hyperlinked with keywords relevant for the page.
c. Set up relevant landing pages that have a compelling offer to encourage visitors to fill out a form or contact you in some manner.
4. Have a call to action on each page.
5. Set up some form of analytics to track your results.
In recent weeks I've conducted many website audits with Hubspot's Website Grader tool and I would say 90% are missing fundamental Inbound Marketing strategies like SEO and lead conversion. Is this your website?
If so, here's your action plan:
1. Check your website out yourself at Hubspot Website Grader or contact an Inbound Marketing consultant to do it for you.
2. Then set yourself some conservative goals such as: increase your traffic by 10% and conversions by 1%.
3. Make some simple changes as mentioned above, or contact an Inbound Marketing consultant to help you.
4. Monitor the results. Tweak. Test. Monitor.
I would love to hear how these tips and the action plan have helped you. And your results.
If you know someone who would get value out of this blog post please pass it on.
Posted by Stacie Chalmers on Wed, Jul 08, 2009 @ 03:50 PM
It's become evident to me that one of the biggest marketing challenges for business owners is how to measure their inbound marketing and return on investment (ROI).
I've included a link at the bottom of this blog to an excel sheet for Measuring Marketing and ROI which I've adapted from a document received from Hubspot. But before you jump ahead and download the excel sheet, take the time to review my notes on what you should do before starting any marketing and what to measure.
Before You Start
Before starting out with any marketing take the time to plan and set goals. The benefit of doing this is to make sure you get the best return out of your marketing efforts. Often marketers will blame a particular marketing tactic when really it was the message. You need to know what your goals are, who your customers are and what they want, before you even begin an effective marketing campaign.
From here you can craft your marketing message, addressing problems and outcomes that speak to the value system of your prospects. If you have the budget I would suggest speaking with a professional marketing consultant. They will work with you to create a Marketing Plan that will communicate your message (value proposition) to your prospects (target market) via different channels, and develop a lead nurturing program that will attract prospects into your sales funnel, and keep them moving down the funnel until they are ready to convert to a customer.
All your marketing efforts need to be monitored. Test and measure, test and measure and test and measure again, to see what yields the best returns.
What To Measure
There are a lot of different metrics out there but what really matters is what is impacting the bottom line.
Visitors: What's driving traffic (visitors) to your site
Leads: What's encouraging the visitors to convert to a lead.
Customers: What's encouraging the leads to convert to a customer
Personally, I believe Hubspot offers the best tools for monitoring specific marketing campaigns. One of the great features of the Hubspot tools is that it allows you to track specific marketing tactics, even something as simple as a Tweet (ie Tweeted with a link to blog). I find it interesting to see how much extra traffic I get just by changing my status in LinkedIn.
Converting Your Visitors Into Leads
A visitor becomes a lead once they've indicated some interest in your product/service.
Of course traffic on its own doesn't mean much if there are no conversions. This is where a professional marketing consultant can really help. Once you have visitors to your site you need to:
1. Offer the information they are looking for and
2. Give them a compelling reason to provide you with their valuable contact details.
What can you offer that is of value to your prospects? Some suggestions are: Blog subscriptions, eNewsletters, free ebook, free tool or kit. And don't just direct all your traffic to your home page, offer a link to a ‘landing page' which is designed to convert visitors to leads. Without this in place, your marketing efforts will seem futile if no visitors are converting.
Test and measure. Change your offer, heading, message, channel and landing page to see which yields a better result.
Download this Measuring Marketing and ROI excel sheet to track your results, compare and measure against different channels and campaigns.Check out the tools at Hubspot and test drive their 7 day free trial. Remember to start out with a plan and seek professional marketing advice if needed.
I would really like to know if this post provides you with practical solutions to Measuring Marketing and ROI?