Okay, so you have a company blog and you’ve been getting some traffic, but not enough to justify your blogging efforts. Well, you’re not the only ones, this is a common problem and it can be solved with a simple fix: proper promotion.

How can you promote your blog to effectively drive more traffic?

1. Use social media. Syndicating your blog’s content through social media is an important way to make sure that your content is getting spread as widely as possible. The more people who have access to your content, the more people that are likely to come back for more in the future.
2. Get some great guest bloggers. This isn’t always the easiest thing to do, but, getting some relevant or influential bloggers in your space to write a post for you and then promote their post on their own blog is one of the best ways to drive relevant traffic to your blog. 
3. Submit your blog’s RSS feed to feed directories. Many people who read blogs through RSS feeds will search for relevant blogs in RSS feed directories. If you submit your RSS feed to as many as you can (some are free, some are paid, and some have fairly strict submission rules) then you increase the pool of people who will find your blog. 
4. Create posts that people want to link to. Ever heard of link baiting? Well, it’s an essential tactic for promoting your blog and driving targeted traffic. Link baiting is when you create content that readers like to link to because it is highly quality, interesting, entertaining, and relevant. If you want to learn more about how you can get more inbound links to your blog read our post on, “7 Types of Blog Content Readers Love to Link To.”
5. Make sure your blog is visible on your website. If you don’t promote your blog on your own website, that is the biggest mistake you can make. Make sure you blog is clearly visible from your homepage and easy to access.

Image by Thomas Hawk on Flickr

Twitter and other social media are often regarded as “marketing” tools and are usually believed to be solely part of marketing’s sphere of influence, and it’s true, marketers are the most common users in many businesses, but that doesn’t mean that Twitter can’t be used effectively by sales teams to promote relevant conversations with leads.

1. Research companies and individuals. Before calling a lead you can do some research on the company website and on their twitter accounts. Doing this kind of research can make it easier for you to find out what employees say about the company, personal preferences, and even the company’s/employees ‘ pain points so you can start your conversation off on a more relevant note by showing that you understand the company’s needs.
2. Keep track of industry news and trends. Being aware of changes in your industry and your lead’s industry is a good way to ensure that you are up-to-date and current when heading into a sales conversation. Showing that you understand what’s going on in their space and that you’re dedicated to staying on top of current events can make for a great lead conversation, especially since Twitter often breaks news faster than the rest of the web.  
3. Learn the best times to contact leads. Are you having a hard time getting a hold of a lead? Or are you just looking for the best time for an initial call? Twitter can be a great resource for inside information about leads. Are you leads going on holidays? Are they in the office? Twitter can help you figure out exactly where you leads are, and what the best time is to start a conversation. 
4. Figure out what people are saying about your company. It is always useful for a sales representative to be aware of what people are saying about your company and more specifically your sales team. Is brand sentiment towards your company positive or negative?  Does a quick twitter search show that someone thought your sales team followed up too soon? Or too late? That kind of information can be invaluable for a sales teams’ success. 
5. Learn your lessons and improve your process. One of the best ways to use Twitter to tweak your sales process is to study your critics. There are most likely always going to be people who’ve had a somewhat negative experience with your company. Studying what these people have to say about your company and where you went wrong can be an excellent source of constructive information. 
6. Take a look at your competitors’ fans. This is almost the opposite of the point we mentioned above. Rather than using Twitter to search for what is being said about your company, search Twitter and see what positive things are being said about your competitors. This information can be especially useful for getting ideas on how your team can improve and how you can remain competitive.

Image by Tveskov on Flickr

In the web marketing world, creativity is an essential quality for a compelling, unique and effective marketing initiative. A great example is the recent Old Spice social media campaign  where the creators took an already effective strategy (their original TV ad) which had received great feedback, and used it in a new and exciting way by having the actor respond with personalized videos to tweets he received from fans.

This campaign is a definite example of creativity and we’re pretty sure it couldn’t have been developed in a company that doesn’t foster a culture of innovation.

A recent study performed by IBM on 1500 CEOs in 60 different countries found that that most CEOs rated creativity as the number one leadership quality necessary for business success.

While this may not seem like a surprising statement to many of you, it is a very optimistic one for innovative thinkers and thought-leaders. The study found that over 80% of CEOs believe that the business environment is becoming so complex that it is literally impossible to succeed without new ways of thinking and yet less than 50% of the respondents believed that their company’s were prepared to deal effectively with this rising complexity (they didn’t feel that they had the creative competency necessary).

Harvard Business Review wrote a blog post on the study and identified 6 fundamental “moves” that they believe CEOs and business leaders must make to foster cultures of innovation in their organization. These transitional moves are:

1. Meeting people’s needs. Fulfilling employees’ core needs (physical, emotional, mental spiritual) means that they are less preoccupied with unmet needs, and more able to bring engagement to their work.
2. Teaching creativity systematically. The post cites several, “well-defined, widely accepted stages of creative thinking,” that can be trained and taught to your employees. 
3. Nurturing passion. Allowing people to take on roles that excite their imagination is a key element in fostering creativity. 
4. Making the work matter. According to the post, “human beings are meaning-making animals.” Essentially, by making your employees’ work stand for something, or “mean” something to them, they are more likely to engage with the work in a motivated, creative way. 
5. Providing the time. Creative thinking often requires un-interrupted time where employees are free to think without the pressure of deadlines and instant answers. 
6. Valuing renewal. Allowing a recovery period for your employees is essential for the mental renewal required for creativity. In other words, ensure that your employees are taking breaks (around every 90 minutes or so) to renew their energy.

We think that these moves are an excellent starting point for creating an innovative culture in companies. In our experience we also think that all these points are often overlooked. We like to think that we foster creativity here at Marqui, but it still surprised us to see that we should be taking a break every 90 minutes to renew our energy and we certainly weren't up to date with the stages of creative thinking either, which were an interesting eye-opener!

Does your organization have an effective culture in place currently or does it still need to implement these transitions to allow for a more creative ecosystem?

Especially in the marketing space where so much that we do on a daily basis is based in creativity,  a company that doesn’t innovate won’t be able to grow.


Image by Cayusa on Flickr

Most likely if you haven’t already implemented a content management system in your institution you will one day soon. The web is a crucial marketing channel for higher education marketers due to the rising popularity of online enrollment and engagement. With such a large target audience and a high number of content contributors, it is no longer viable or efficient to be running your website with reliance on IT, or highly technical individuals for website updates. As a result, more and more institutions are turning to content management systems as a solution. Implementing a CMS can sometimes be a complicated task, especially in higher education, so we’ve put together a list of our top tips for surviving a CMS implementation.

1. Make sure you understand what your requirements are before you start evaluating vendors. It is important when you are choosing a CMS that you are looking at solutions which have the core functionality that you actually need. Ensuring that you have chosen a CMS that fully meets your needs and can help you reach goals makes for a much easier implementation and training process. Doing a comprehensive analysis of what your organization actually needs, can help choosing your CMS and ultimately implementing it a much simpler process.
2. Don’t get more functionality than you need.  Many CMS solutions are much more complex or too simple for the goals that your organization wants to accomplish. Tools like these are a hassle to implement, and come with an ugly learning curve and often defeat the purpose of trying to make your web content management easier! 
3. Make sure your solution offers training and support. So you think you’ve chosen a vendor, but do they offer training for their solution? You should be choosing a content management system that is easy for non-technical users to pick up quickly and easily, but that doesn’t mean some training isn’t necessary. Choosing a solution that offers training to simplify the implementation process is very useful for a smooth transition, especially in institutions where multiple users across different faculties and with a wide range of web experience will be using the application. 
4. Have a strong website management process in place. One of the best ways to ensure a problem-free implementation is to make sure that you’re not entirely relying on your CMS to solve all of your website problems. If your organization doesn’t have a solid content strategy in place, then a CMS can only do so much to improve your web presence. It’s important that when your CMS is implemented you also have the content development strategy, resources and infrastructure in place to make sure it’s a successful initiative.

Image by Martin Kingsley on Flickr.

This week's post has two blog posts, a presentation on the ROI of social media and a video on the evolution of marketing.

This post from the aimClear Blog contains a list of 57 takes on the new Facebook Places service and is a great resource for everything you'd like to know about Facebook's newest initiative.

This presentation from Olivier Alain Blanchard gives great insight into how businesses can leverage social media to improve ROI and the business justification for getting involved in the social networking space.

This video from the CakeGoup on the evolution of marketing from "basically selling" to the media being in the hands of the people is an engaging visual representation of how marketing has changed over time.

Are you having trouble getting inspired to write your blog content? This post from the Communications Conversations blog has some good tips for getting back on track with writing compelling blog content.


Image by Bryan Wright on Flickr

The first impression you make on your visitors when they arrive at your website is crucial, but this is often more focused on the design aspects, which are the very first things that your visitors take in. What do you do once that initial impression is over? Does your website have the kind of copy that encourages your readers to stick around?

If you can’t keep your readers' attention then nothing else that you’ve done on your website really matters, and with the enormous amounts of competition available online, if you can’t keep your visitors interested, another website that potentially can is just a click away.

So, how can you help keep your readers attention?

1. Use Images. Images can create very strong emotional reactions in readers, leaving them open to the effects of your persuasive copy. With a great image you can capture your readers’ attention and build interest before they’ve even started to read your copy.  By creating an emotional connection between a picture and your copy, you’ve already engage your readers interest on a deeper level than your copy alone could.
2. Tell a Story.  Nothing illustrates a point like a compelling story. Content that is filled with specific real-life details is much more compelling than discussing general concepts and the more you can relate your copy to your reader by highlighting the similarities between them and your product, the more likely you are to encourage them to continue reading. 
3. Ask Questions.  Many copywriters will use questions to help relate website readers’ pain points with a company’s product or services. Asking questions can help to draw the reader in by helping them relate their problems with the solutions you offer, helping them to paint a picture and engaging their curiosity, after all, chances are that if you ask a question that’s relevant your readers are going to stick around to find out the answer. 
4. Include Internal Links. Including hyperlinks within your copy to other areas of your website can help your visitors navigate more easily, and can entice them to explore your website in more depth. If a reader arrives at a page and while reading sees a hyperlink to another area of your site that they find interesting it is easy for them to continue to browse the copy that your site has to offer. 
5. Avoid Using a Passive Voice. Using a passive voice results in your copy have more words than necessary while an active voice can help your copy be direct and authoritative.  Avoiding flowery copy and getting right to the point, is a good way to get the important information on your site across to your visitors and this is a key step in keeping their attention.

Here’s an example of active versus passive voice:

Passive: “The ball was thrown by the boy.”
Active: “The boy threw the ball.”

Grabbing your readers’ attention and encouraging them to stick around starts with having “sticky” website copy. Using these simple tricks to enhance your current web copywriting practices can help you increase the chances that your visitors will stay on your site rather than clicking away.

Proper search engine optimization (SEO) is a key aspect of every web marketing strategy (or it should be) but many times optimizing a website is seen as an afterthought to design when a company is trying to revamp its website. When it comes to designing a website that will be optimized from the get-go, it is essential that your company’s marketing team be involved from conceptualization straight through to launch. Why is this? Well that’s where we come to of  part 1 our biggest website redesign mistake with regards to SEO.

Part 1: Leaving your website’s SEO until the website is already designed.

For some reason, a lot of people seem to believe that SEO is a process that should begin once a website is already up and running, when this is in fact that opposite of what should really be taking place. Would you go on a trip before you pack? Would you wait until you were sunburnt before applying sunscreen? Well, maybe you would, but I think we can both agree it would be a poor decision. The same goes for trying to implement SEO once your website has alrady been designed and built.

When your SEO is done properly, it helps you to determine the type of content that should be present on your site to help it rank well in search engines from the time it launches onwards, and, realistically, you shouldn’t be designing a website if you don’t know what content will be on it, right? Now, we’re not saying that you should design your website specifically around the keywords you’ve determined it will be easier to rank for during keyword research. What we’re saying is that determining how  your customers find you and what they are looking for on websites in your industry is an important step in determining what content will be present on your website, and, depending on what kind of content your site needs to appeal to your target audience, your design will probably change to reflect that. This might sound like a relatively straight forward idea, you might even think this is a no-brainer, but you have no idea how many times we’ve seen companies come to us looking for some SEO consulting help, only for us to realize that they’ve built their entire website without once taking SEO into consideration. They have essentially built their website on a weak foundation. In addition, there is always the danger that if your website designer has no experience with SEO, then they won’t have designed or built your site in such a way that you can implement optimization tactics successfully without paying them for further development.

Part 2: Having your design firm do your SEO for you.

In an ever diversifying web design market there are many design firms that have marketing consultants or even designers with a strong SEO background on their teams who can successfully implement your SEO strategy. What I mean by this isn't that a design firm can't implement an SEO strategy for you, Marqui for instance designs and builds sites, but we also have a full consulting team to ensure that your website is SEO ready from the beginning, and we can even do your SEO continually for you if that’s what you want. What I'm saying is that since your SEO should be an ongoing process, it's important that it doesn't end with your site being launched. Whether your website design team has the experience or not, having them implement your SEO for you is only the beginning and it’s important that your internal web team knows that, which is one of the main reasons we suggest having marketing involved from the start of your redesign project.


Image by Freek Van Den Bergh on Flickr

Location-based social services are one of the hottest trends in social networking for the moment and have had a significant effect on how marketers use social media to reach their target audiences. Well, social network behemoth Facebook has finally joined in the fray with the recent launch of their newest feature, Facebook Places. The service, which is meant to be comparable with other location-based social networks like Foursquare and Gowalla, allows users to check in to offline locations to alert their friends to their location. The feature is currently available via iPhone as well as Facebook’s HTML5 mobile site.

How is Facebook Places different from other location-based services?

While Facebook Places sounds a lot like other services available today (Gowalla, Foursquare and Yelp to name a few) there are some fundamental differences that experts in the marketing field are predicting will have a significant impact on many businesses’ use of the service.

According to B.L Ochman, a popular social media blogger, one of the biggest differences is that Facebook users tend to provide far more personal details on their accounts including photos, relationships and employment (unlike other location-based services) and that this will cause some definite complications.

One of the largest of these complications will be that while other services of this nature allow you to check into offline locations, with Facebook Places your friends can check you in. This poses potential issues for every person who doesn’t want the entire Facebook user population (some 500 million people) to know their exact geographical location at any given time.  This, coupled with Facebook’s prior privacy issues, makes some experts question the service’s safety for users and business alike.

Why should you care?

For marketers this is a clear sign of the continuing (and growing) popularity of location-based services, which has already been indicated by the fact that Foursquare, one of the most popular services in the market today, had its number of users soar from 1 million at the end of March to 1.8 million as of mid-August (from BNET).

This is also proof of the increasing importance of understanding how your target audience uses social media and how you can use that information to grow your audience’s engagement with your brand. Location-based services are the “next big thing” and staying on top of current trends is one of the most essential aspects of social media strategy since social media success tends to be, by its own nature, driven by user preferences.

One of the biggest aspects of these services that help to make them popular, and will most likely give them significant staying power is the fact that they mesh social media functionality with gaming. Participating in check-ins is useful (people often receive free coupons on offers when the participate), but it also fun. This makes these kind of services ideal for event and last minutes campaigns for many businesses and helps companies to engage with their audience on a whole new level.

Lead nurturing email campaigns are a great way to front of mind with your leads, but only if they are implemented effectively. Lead nurturing is the process of building a relationship with your leads through multiple touches to move them down your sales funnel until they are ready to become a customer. So what are the essential elements of an effective lead nurturing email campaign?

1. Create compelling thought Leadership Content. Creating compelling, educational content is an essential aspect of your campaign. When you’re sending emails on a regular basis, you need to make sure that you consistently have something of value to offer them, like educational, thought leadership content.
2. Be Personal. Make sure that each of your emails is personalized based on your recipients preferences and past content interactions. 
3. Keep emails targeted and relevant. Each email you send should be targeted to a specific topic and should feature a prominent call to action.
4. Be concise and to the point. Your lead nurturing emails are just meant to keep you front of mind. Keeping your emails short and focused on one topic stops your recipients from getting frustrated and allows the purpose of your email to become clear as quickly as possible. 
5. Ensure your touches are well-timed.  Using a marketing automation tool allows you to segments your database according to buying roles and behaviors and to send out automated emails based on behavior or action triggers when a prospect enters a new stage in the buying process. This is an essential aspect because since you’re sending out a consistent flow of emails, you need to make sure they aren’t coming too often or inappropriately or recipients will become frustrated. 
6. Develop your campaign to have a natural progression. When creating your lead nurturing campaign it’s important that you carefully plan the flow of your emails to ensure that your overall campaign progresses smoothly to unobtrusively pull your leads through the sales funnel. 
7. Monitor lead activity to measure your campaign. The purpose of a lead nurturing campaign is to ultimately deliver qualified leads to sales. As with any other marketing campaign, to reach your goals (in this case, nurturing leads until they turn into sales) you need to measure the results of your campaigns and the effects that your campaigns have on your recipients.

Image by Dux_Carvajal on Flickr

Today's presentation has an interesting animated video on what really motivates us, an infographic on search engine optimization (SEO) and presentation on marketing measurement targeted towards higher education.

This presentation from Karine Joly discusses marketing measurement in the higher education space and is a great resource for all your higher ed marketers out there!

Have you ever wondered what the most frequently asked SEO questions are? Well this infographic gives a visual representation of them.

Here at Marqui, we often wonder what really motivates us and other people in our industry. Well, this fabulous animation featured on the Content Wrangler blog walks through some of the things that really motivate us and is definitely worth a look.



Image by redstamp.com on Flickr

Well, today's webinar didn't go as smoothly as usual, (for those of you who couldn't attend, we had a few technical difficulties early on with our webinar service provider). However, we hope you all found the information in today's webinar useful and as usual, here are some of the most frequently asked questions from today's webinar:

How can I get access to Google Website Optimizer and how much does it cost?

Google Website Optimizer is a free tool provided by Google and, in our opinion is the best free tool for performing A/B split and multivariate tests on landing pages. You can get access with your Google Account information.

What is the best tool to track landing page conversions?

We like to use Google Analytics to track our landing page conversions. This, in conjunction with Google Website Optimizer tests can help you improve your conversion rates and get more sales.

Do you think text or button links are more effective as calls-to-action?

This is going to depend on your target audience, but in general, we find buttons (especially big, colorful ones) to be more effective as calls-to-action because they tend to draw and engage visitors' attention more readily than regular text hyperlinks.

What is the most basic information we should have on a lead capture form?

In general it is a good practice to ask for as little information as possible on an initial lead capture form, because you don't want to scare your visitors away. First and last names and email address are often enough information for this kind of a form. However, if you're look for more targeted leads, this will change for you. It really depends on your business and your target audience.

We hope you all found today's webinar helpful. You can view the recorded webinar here. Make sure you register for our next webinar, "How to Turn Your Website into a Demand Generation Machine."

As promise here is the second half of our list of landing page mistakes that can cost you sales:

1. No privacy policy. Including a link to your company's privacy policy on a landing page is an important way to create trust. Your visitors are a lot less likely to give their contact information if they don't trust you to use it ethically.
2. Not communicating who you are. When a visitor arrives at a landing page they want to know immediately what company it belongs to. Make sure that you have your logo somewhere (and if necessary) some company information. Sometimes including information about what your company does can add credibility to your offer.
3. Not communicating your value proposition. If your visitors don't understand why  they should take action on your landing page, or provide you with their information, they probably won't.
4. Too much text.When it comes to landing pages, the best practice is to communicate your offer and value proposition as quickly and simply as possible. A text heavy landing page requires too much of a time commitment from casual visitors, and keeping the content skimmable is a good way to increase the number of people who take the time to read your message.
5. Not testing (or understanding which tests to use). We've said it before and we'll say it again, testing is the only way you can improve. If you're not testing your landing pages, then you won't know what you need to improve. Using tools like Google Website Optimizer and doing A/B split and multivariate tests is a crucial aspect of your landing page optimization process. If you want to learn more about the different landing page improvement tests, you can read our post on our, "Top 5 Tests to Raise Your Landing Page Conversions."
6. Not tracking conversions. If you're not tracking your landing page conversions then you can't be sure how effective your landing pages actually are, or where you need to focus your efforts. You can track your conversions with tools like Google Analytics.

Landing pages are one of the essential elements of any marketing campaign but only if they’re done correctly. If you’re guilty of making any of the mistakes on this list your landing pages may not only be detrimental to your campaign, but they may actually be costing your company sales.

1. Not keeping important information above the fold. If information is “above the fold” it means that it can be viewed by a visitor without the need for them to scroll down your page. This seems like a simple concept  but your visitors need to be able to see the value of your offer and other important information immediately upon arriving at your landing page. If you force them to look for that information by scrolling the often they will just click away, decreasing your conversion rates.
2. Being too general.  Every landing page you create should be specific to an individual marketing campaign.  Your landing pages have a much greater chance of converting the more targeted they are. Generic landing pages used for multiple campaigns aren't very appealing to a visitor who probably found the page by acting on a specific campaign.
3. Not ensuring you marketing campaign and your landing page are consistent. This is one of the biggest mistakes you can make when designing a marketing campaign. To convert successfully (and hopefully generate sales) a landing page needs to have a message that is consistent from your advertisement, straight through your conversion funnel. If one of your visitors clicks on an ad, and then arrives at a landing page that doesn’t at all relate to the campaign they followed, your visitors may feel ripped off or may even come to view your landing page itself (and consequently your company) as untrustworthy. 
4. Hidden or missing calls-to-action. The last thing you ever want when a visitor comes to your landing page is for them to wonder, “What am I supposed to do now that I’m here?” You want to make it immediately obvious to your visitor exactly  what action you want them to take (usually in the form of a big call-to-action button) and how they can take that action. Hint: this is precisely the kind of information that needs to remain above the fold. 
5. Too many calls-to-action. While we’re not saying you need to have only one call-to-action on a landing page, there is a difference between having one or two effective calls-to-action, and littering your landing page with so many that your visitors don’t know what to do and lose sight of the original reason why they clicked-through on your campaign in the first place. Make sure that you don't forget the goal of your landing page (you should only have one primary objective per page; this goes back to keep your pages targeted).

Stay tuned for the next 6 items on our list!

Invoke Solutions, a market research firm, recently performed a study on frequent social media users to determine which factors they feel makes social media trustworthy. The main results, which were discussed in a recent blog post on eMarketer, narrow down several main social media trust characteristics.

The main concern for social media users was that for a site to be deemed “trustworthy” it needs to be open to both positive and negative comments, the content provided needs to be high quality and needs to offer value to the audience, and the content author or contributor needs to be readily available and responsive.  As eMarketer goes on to discuss, all of these concerns point directly towards the best practices associated with social media including being engaged and authentic.

So how can you address these concerns by using best practices?

1. Be open to positive and negative Comments. One of the biggest mistakes that marketers often make when they begin using social media is that they are unprepared for the negative comments that come their way.  It’s important to fully understand that social media is an open communication platform and that by taking part you are opening your company up to both the good and the bad that open conversation is capable of. Now, before you get scared away, the other essential thing to remember is that being open to the negative is often an fabulous opportunity to create trust with your audience. By allowing your customers to see that you’re not perfect, but that you are willing to deal with the complaints that come your way quickly, openly, and honestly, you can help develop a strong brand reputation and increase brand reputation through trust.
2. Create quality content. One of the keys to doing this is to make sure that your content is valuable for your target audience. Try to ensure that your content is always educational and focuses on building and nurturing relationships rather than selling your product or services. 
3. Be open, responsive and authentic. At the end of the day, people like to buy from people. Being available and responsive to customer comments, questions or complaints is a an essential element for creating a relevant, authentic online presence, one of the key factors affecting whether or not your social media followers trust you and your brand or not.

If you want to read more on being authentic and transparent in your social media usage you can read our blog post, “Being Authentic and Transparent in Social Media: Getting it Right.”

Image from eMarketer

B2B companies need to work hard to gain visibility in a crowded market and one of the main ways they can do this is to help their company and it's employees to be seen as thought leaders in your industry.  As a B2B marketer, thought leadership is one of the most important aspects of your marketing strategy  that you can cultivate and provide for your brand.

Due to the enormous range of information that is widely available on the internet today,  marketers in the B2B industry now need to establish their brand as a trusted resource early in the buying cycle, to help leads come to them, rather than going out and finding leads themselves. How do you do this? Become a thought leader in your industry.

What are some of the benefits of becoming a thought leader?

1. It can help you increase your website's conversion rates
2. It increases brand trust and credibility 
3. From a search engine optimization standpoint, it helps you increase your number of inbound links and your quality traffic

What are some characteristics of a thought leader?

• They develop and maintain relationships with industry professionals in their niche
• They are a willing go-to resource for insight, opinion and interpretation of industry trends and best practices
• They are a recognized authority or expert in their field
• They have earned a respected place in consumers' opinions 

How can you work towards becoming a thought leader in your industry?

1. Create content that offers value. When you develop content that offers value to your consumers it is more likely to get read, and, can help you get your name out in your industry as a provider of quality, valuable content and resources.
2. Write a blog to provide your opinions. Blogs tend to be a less formal content setting than a piece of collateral like a whitepaper. A platform where you are more able to offer your opinions on certain topics is a great place for you to establish yourself as a forward thinker in your industry.
3. Become a speaker. Speaking at different industry events is essential for getting both your name and face recognized in your industry and is also a good way to meet other industry professionals.
4. Spread your content and make it easily accessible. Posting your content on free sites like slideshare and offering free pieces of content on other social media sites is a good way to spread your content and opinions around the web.
5. Know what's going on in your industry. If you want to establish yourself as a relevant resource it's essential that you know what is going on in your industry. Keeping up with news, emerging trends and best practices is an important way to make sure you are a trusted, reliable resource.
6. Practice and repeat. Being a thought leader is an ongoing process of creating, developing and updating content, as well as keeping up on industry news and participating in conversations.

This week's post has an infographic on improving your landing pages, a video on tweeting and a presentation on "Micro Marketing."

This infographic from Unbounce shows the 12 steps they suggest for putting your landing pages through "conversion rehab." If you want to learn first-hand how to improve your own landing pages, attend our upcoming webinar, "Live Landing Page Assessment" on Thursday August 19th at 10:30 am Pacific.

This video from Good.is, a collaborative magazine put together by, "individuals, businesses and non-profits that are pushing the world forward," discusses the most popular types of tweets and the sources of different tweets.

Micro Marketing is a theory that's growing in popularity in the marketing world and this presentation by Greg Verdino for Marketing Profs called, "Get Big Results by Thinking and Acting Small," discusses how marketing has changed from being about one big initiative to being about many small interactions.

Have a great weekend!

Image by Matt Hamm on Flickr.

In the past, before the internet and websites were such important selling tools the only way that information was available to prospects was by contacting sales. Now more and more information is available and buyers tend to avoid “marketing speak” and instead take to platforms like social media to get word of mouth recommendations about brands and products. Prospects are less likely to register for early stage content or sales interactions and are more likely to contact companies later in the buying cycle after doing their own research through online channels. Because of this, the process of effective lead nurturing has been forced to evolve and absorb social media into its process to help build relationships with prospects before they even become leads.

Social media can be a great platform for nurturing prospects but it’s important to remember that it isn’t the same process as nurturing leads that come in through your website. With social media, you’re often nurturing prospects before they have registered or given you their information and you’re doing it in real-time, rather than through activity-triggered or timed responses.

So how does social media help you effectively nurture prospects?

1. Social media offers a wealth of prospect data. Traditionally lead nurturing begins once a prospect gives you their information (by registering for a demo, or filling in a form on your website etc).  This is a very different situation than with social media. Social media profiles often contain a plethora of prospect information including name, company, title, geographical location, employment history, likes and preferences as well as their history of social media interactions with your competitors and opinions about brands and products. Listening to your prospects via social media can help to give you insight into the best ways to interact with them and can help you segment your social media campaigns long before your prospects even become leads, allowing you to create buyer personas with minimal investment.
2. Establishing online personality can help to build trust. Social media allows your employees’ and company’s personality to shine through in a way that regular lead nurturing doesn’t. By showing that your company is made of real people, with real personalities it can help you develop relationships more easily and help to build trust in your brand. 
3. Connect with your prospects in real-time. Social media is one of the best tools for interacting with your prospects in real-time. With social media there is no time lag between when a prospect contacts you and you are able to respond. If you’re monitoring your social media accounts properly, you can interact with a prospect within seconds of them connecting with you, and let’s face it, most of the time, when a prospect contacts you they are feeling a sense of urgency. They want your attention NOW and forcing them to turn themselves into a lead before you can begin nurturing them can waste valuable time. 
4. Creating a social media brand presence keeps you “front of mind.” If you’re using social media right, you’re updating it frequently, you’re being authentic and transparent, your initiating conversations and listening to your prospects then you’re probably doing a good job of staying at the front of your prospects’ minds. With traditional lead nurturing campaigns, your touches or interactions are often based on activity-triggered or timed responses, with social media you’re able to consistently remind your prospects of your brand’s presence in an ongoing nurturing process 

A content management system (CMS) allows regular business owners with little or no technical experience to update and manage their websites quickly and easily. An effective CMS can also be a powerful tool for supporting your business' search engine optimization (SEO) strategy since it provides a powerful base from which you can develop and maintain your website's content, and, consequently, support your overall SEO goals.

Choosing the right CMS for your business is a complicated task and there are many different elements which need to be addressed, however, the one thing it is essential for you to remember when making your decision is that the CMS you choose needs to have the capability of helping your overall web marketing strategy which should include SEO.

So what can you do to make sure you’re choosing a CMS that will help your overall SEO strategy?

1. Widen your focus beyond the technology.  As we’ve mentioned before, one of the problems that many organizations have when attempting to choose a CMS is that they focus too much on the myriad technological aspects of a CMS rather than looking at its capabilities from the perspective of your overall marketing strategy. One of the most important aspects of a CMS is its ability to help non-technical users carry-out their marketing goals (like SEO). Ensure when you’re choosing your CMS that it has the ability to support creation and updates of your key on-page SEO elements. Often if the control of this type of decision is left in the hands of IT you end up with a technologically solution that doesn’t support other aspects of your marketing strategy.
2. Make sure all key stakeholders are involved.  This relates to our previous point about widening your focus. If one of the goals implanting your CMS is to support your SEO strategy then it’s crucial to have your team’s SEO expert as an active part of the decision making process because they will have insight into the necessary aspects of a CMS that other team members may not and they’ll ensure that your CMS solution is capable of allowing updates and creation of custom URLs, HTML coding, Title Tags, Alt Tags, and all the other essential SEO elements. 
3. Keep your assets intact. As recommended by Marketing Sherpa in a recent article, it’s important to make sure when you’re choosing a new CMS that it doesn’t discard your current digital assets. Over time a website will collect a large amount of assets including inbound links, pages, and content that rank highly in search engines. Losing these, even if you’re gaining a new CMS platform, can actually be detrimental to your overall SEO strategy. 
4. Know exactly what you're looking for. It is important when you are evaluating vendors that you are looking at solutions which have the core functionality that you actually need and want with regards to SEO.  Many CMS vendors offer products that are much more complex, or too simple for the SEO goals that you want to accomplish. Before looking at possible solution, it is a good idea to do a comprehensive analysis of what your needs are as an organization. Choosing a solution that has the correct functionality to meet your website’s SEO targets can ensure that you end up with a product which effectively meets all of your needs.

Image by MichaelGoodin on Flickr.

When a small bakery in Salt Lake City, Utah received a cease and desist from Pillsbury for trademark infringement, there was significant shock from the bakery, and its fans. After all, despite the fact that the bakery is named, "My Dough Girl" , its menu which is characterized by 1950's style pin-up characters rather than any kind of doughy cartoon character or mascot. In fact, when we first heard about the situation, it took us a while to make the connection between My Dough Girl's name and Pillsbury at all since Pillsbury's Dough Boy character is almost always associated directly with the Pillsbury name.

Unfortunately for Pillsbury, whether they have a legitimate reason for legal action or not (trademark law is meant to eliminate consumer confusion between established brands and new products) the public has turned against them in another case of social media activism.

When the fans of the bakery found out about the cease and desist, they rallied around the bakery’s cause creating a Facebook page titled, “My Dough Girl vs. Pillsbury Corporation” (below) which already has almost 2,000 fans willing to stand up for the small bakery and cut Pillsbury (an consequently General Mills, the conglomerate their owned by) down to size.



At the end of the day, the reason that this story has received attention is isn’t because the bakery is fighting back at all (the owner of the bakery isn’t responsible for the Facebook page) but because the bakery’s fans took to an outlet available to them, namely social media, and are willing to use the platform to fight back against what they see as the bullying of a small business by a large brand.

While no lawsuit has actually been filed against the bakery the threat in itself is dangerous enough to a small business (Pillsbury’s market capitalization is $23 billion), which probably accounts for the outpouring of support it’s receiving from its loyal fans. Ironically, a story published by Salt Lake City Weekly states that as part of the cease and desist, Pillsbury’s lawyer instructed the bakery’s owner that she couldn’t speak to the press in an attempt to keep the situation under wraps. Unfortunately for General Mills (who obviously doesn’t really understand the way that social media works), all that the situation has done is proven that even loyal fans of Pillsbury's brand are disgusted by their actions (see screenshot below), and that fans of My Dough Girl, are willing to fight for a brand they respect.

As one fan claiming to be a lifetime Pillsbury purchaser says, "I grew up on Pillsbury stuff. I'm disgusted about this whole thing with My Dough Girl. Sad. I will not be buying any pillsbury products again."



So the real question becomes, despite the supposed trademark infringement claimed by Pillsbury and General Mills, is the issue really worth the brand damage they seem to be facing? While the issue is still relatively small, when it comes to social media the chance than an issue will go viral is always just waiting to happen, and the more publicity an issue gets, the more likely it is that something like that will happen.

As of yet, neither Pillsbury or General Mills have deigned to respond to any of the comments that have been made on their Facebook pages (screenshot below), a huge mistake in our opinion. Pillsbury opened themselves up to this criticism (although it is likely they had no idea what turn the situation would take) and without using social media as a platform to address the issue and their disgruntled fans, they aren’t helping their brand reputation.

As one commenter on the General Mills Facebook Page says, "I wish General Mills wasn't so bent on running a mom-run business into the ground. They're
worried about icon branding confusion (My Dough Girl – 40s pin ups, Pillsbury Dough Boy… not a 40s pin up), well actions speak louder than words, and we’re
getting an up front view of just what their “Icon” stands for. Nothing but ...a bully. "



You can read other opinions on this situation at TechDirt, KSL.com and The Future Buzz.

If you're interested, you can read more about our opinion on managing your brand with social media or some tips on being authentic and transparent in your social media use.

This is a guest post written by Randa Codron, a Marketing and Communications Specialist for WaterTrax, one of Marqui's SaaS partner companies.

First of all, congratulations! Getting a business blog up and running is a notable achievement. Working at it consistently to get a core group of readers is something 95% blogs out there will never have. If you’re running a blog as a marketing program for your company though, you’re likely still short of your overall objective, which is to get sales leads. If that’s the case, you’re probably nailing some of the leading indicators, like unique visitors, reader interaction, subscriptions, and maybe even trackbacks or tweets.

But for most people in your organization they want to know how many leads you’re generating. It’s at this point that we want to be very clear about two things:

1. You have built a successful blog. Anything that happens now is separate from what you’ve already done.
2. The challenge now is to convert your readers into leads

Depending on a number of different factors, converting these readers to actual leads may not be important to you at all. Maybe that’s not what your blog is for. Or maybe leads matter, but you’ve decided to embrace the new thinking that your readers will become leads through osmosis rather than conversion. For a number of reasons, I happen to think that’s the most efficient way to operate. But for some of you, that won’t matter.

Many people who start a corporate blog have to sell it internally. One of the easiest ways to do that is to promise leads! If that’s the case for you, waiting for these unique visitors to qualify themselves and send you an email when they’re ready to buy is just too slow of a process. Your company will expect people to register themselves as a lead whether they’re ready to buy or not. This means that having a successful blog gets you only halfway there. You now need to successfully convert.

Challenges like this a result of a “happiness problem”; like having tons of customers come into your store at once.

Stay tuned for the second part of this blog post about converting your readers to leads.

Image by Inju on Flickr.