Facebook Explains How To Get More "Likes" and Clicks

Are you taking advantage of best practices when it comes to promoting news about your business on Facebook?  Now you can check with Facebook's new Facebook + Media page, which launched Monday.  The new page -- geared toward journalists but with implications for all businesses on Facebook -- includes best practices, tools to drive traffic and other insights for promoting news on Facebook.

To determine the best practices compiled on the page, Facebook analyzed 100 top media sites that use Facebook's social plugins.

Okay -- so you may not be a media company.  But if you publish news about your company on Facebook, Facebook's new page should be very applicable to you.  While the Media Page offers advice to journalists for driving traffic on Facebook, it also includes tips for driving engagement and interaction.  If you're a marketer, these tips can be especially helpful as you try to increase interaction on your business' Facebook page.

Social News Best Practices for Marketers

Check out our marketers' guide to Facebook social plugins if you're unfamiliar with them.  Then review some of the most applicable best practices for marketers we pulled from Facebook's new Media Page.  Here they are!

To drive audience and interaction:

• Implement the Like Button social plugin on your website.  Implement the version that includes thumbnails of friends, enables comments, and place it at the top and bottom of articles and near visual content like videos/graphics.  According to Facebook, websites that followed these best practices experienced 3-5x greater click-through rates on the Like Button.
• Publish to users through Pages and Like button connections. (Click here to find out how.)  Status updates asking simple questions or encouraging a user to Like the story have 2-3x the activity.  In addition, stories that are published in the early morning or just before bed have higher engagement.
• Run promotions on your Page using FBML tabs.

To increase engagement:

• Implement the Activity Feed and Recommendations social plugins. Place these plugins above the fold of your website and on multiple pages to generate more engagement. Sites that placed the Activity Feed on the front page as well as other content pages received 2-10x more clicks per user than sites with plugins only on the front page.
• Planning a live event, webinar or webcast? Use the Live Stream box to capture real-time engagement. 
• Keep your pages timely and regularly updated with fresh content to keep people engaged.  Update the status on your page often.

Don't forget Insights!

• Facebook offers basic insights into your Facebook page's growth, fans and interactivity via Facebook Insights.  Your page's Insights Dashboard will provide metrics to help you understand and analyze trends within user growth and demographics, consumption of content, and creation of content.  Keep track of your business page's performance to determine what works, what doesn't and learn how best to engage your fans.

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Guest Blogging: How to Approach It

When businesses give away something for free, they often get a lot in return from their fans or customers. One of the benefits of business blogging is that it establishes trust and thought-leadership. For example, even though HubSpot is an Internet Marketing software company, we share lots of free advice on our Internet Marketing Blog.

Contributing a post to a blog other than yours is another way of giving away something small for free, but getting more in return. In this post, I'll share some practical tips on how to approach guest blogging, and how to get the most out of it.

Benefits of Guest Blogging

Reach New Audiences

A post on your company blog will go out to all your subscribers. They might share it with their friends through social media, and you might gain some more interest or even subscribers. However, publishing on someone else's blog lets you reach out to a whole new audience. A guest post is an opportunity to let a new group of people find out about your expertise and blog.

Public Relations & Branding

Guest blogging should be a win-win situation. It should benefit both you and blog to which you are contributing. This is how public relations works, and guest blogging is yet another offering to help establish these connections. It also puts these connections on public display, which can build your brand's authority.

By giving to and connecting with your industry's blogging community, you can also get people to help fill your blog with content. The rule of reciprocity says that if you do something for someone, they are more likely to do something for you.

Gain Inbound Links

Gaining external links from relevant and authoritative websites is a powerful way to improve search engine rankings. With your guest posts, you should have your bio with a link back to your website or blog. If appropriate, you can also put links to other blog posts or resources your company offers in a guest blog post.

While inbound links are a benefit, don't look at this as the only benefit. Being a guest on someone else's blog is like being a guest at their home, and you should respect that they have their own goals, which are not to promote your company.

How to Guest Blog

Approaching a blog for a guest post is not difficult. Most blogs have a contact form, and some even have an 'invitation to blog for us' form. You can also join My Blog Guest, an online community that helps you find guest blogging opportunities.

Before approaching a blog for a guest post, make sure the blog satisfies the following criteria:

Relevance

If you're blogging already you should know your own audience. You can also get a feel for the audience of other blogs by reading a few of their articles. Your guest post should not compromise your own goals. Try to target blogs in which there is an overlap between your audience and theirs.

Blog Quality

You will gain more in terms of all the factors mentioned above if you do a guest post on a more influential blog. This can be a mainstream blog, or a prominant niche blog in your industry. Either way, you can run a blog through Blog Grader and better understand its influence.

Make Guest Blogging a Part of Your Marketing Strategy

Guest blogging is an opportunity that many bloggers neglect. Of course, you should not lose your focus on regularly producing great content on your own blog. At the same time, if you follow the guidelines above, you can make guest blogging an effective way to improve your brand, search engine optimization, and audience.

Photo Credit: alamodestuff

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3 Strategies to Run an Effective Google AdWords Campaign

Paid search is a complement to organic search, not a replacement.

At HubSpot, we always stress the importance of creating valuable content to strengthen presence on search engines and generate high-quality website traffic. The importance of organic search, however, does not imply that paid search is entirely valueless. Paid search may target audiences different from those drawn from organic search and thus maximize your reach to potential customers. In addition, paid search can serve as testing stone for keywords to optimize for organic search. If your website is new to search engine optimization and you don’t know which keywords will draw higher conversion rates, you can quickly test the popularity of different keyword phrases using Google AdWords campaign and later specialize in more popular ones for organic search.

Paid search can be expensive, but with careful design, you can maximize the effectiveness of your Google AdWords campaign. Integrating expert insights from the Service Marketplace providers, here are 3 strategies to increase conversion rates from your paid search advertisements:

1. Consistent keyword focus both lowers cost and increases quality site traffic.

When the keywords you stress in a Google AdWords closely match the content on the subsequent landing page, Google will view your site as providing quality search result and assign your website a higher Quality Score. As a website that makes money from optimizing high-quality, relevant content, Google is incentivized to award quality search results, which it does by charging you less money. Another major advantage of focusing on the same sets of keywords on Ad copy and a landing page is that it tends to generate quality website traffic—for the same reason. Prospects interested in the keywords you bid for will likely stay engaged if they find similar content on the landing page and have a higher likelihood to convert to leads.

2. Change default settings because what Google perceives as a successful ad does not necessarily match your business objectives.

For your convenience, Google sets default for many fields. Default settings, however, don’t necessarily work best for your business objectives. For example, geographical area is set to United States and Canada, automatic bidding is on, ad rotation (which allows you to alter the frequency of showing different ad campaigns) is set to “show better performing ad more often.” If you target only customers from specific geographic areas, covering the entire United States is a waste of money. Even if you intend to attract customers from all over the world, it is still a good idea to test in which states your ad generates the higher lead conversion rate and thus performs most cost-effectively.

The latter two—automatic bidding and ad rotation—are how Google makes extra money to your detriment. Automatic bidding saves you some work, but the price of convenience is your loss of knowledge of how your bidding price changes. The algorithm Google uses is behind the screen, and you can be spending more money than you need to achieve the same results. Another thing to keep in mind is that Google’s definition of a successful ad can be different from yours. Better performance means more clicks to Google, while your standard might be higher conversion rate.  If you set ad automation to “show better performing ad more often,” it’s possible that you eliminate a campaign that generates 5 clicks with a 100% conversion rate in exchange for one that generates 100 clicks that generate only 2 leads. Know your objectives and stay in control. The screenshot below shows what NOT to do.

3. Test your ad from multiple dimensions to find the combination that maximizes its effectiveness.

As mentioned, paid search can become a heavy ongoing expense. Maximizing the return of each dollar you spend is therefore a smart way to reduce marketing cost. One of the strengths of Google Ads Dashboard is that you can create multiple ad campaigns in a matter of seconds. Using different campaigns, you can test the exact same keyword phrases targeted at different locations to determine which areas are your products or services “hotter”; alternatively, you can try different keyword phrases in the same regions.

Time of the day and day of the week may also matter to your ad’s success. Some people set a time range on when the ad can be displayed, but that invariably leaves the rest of the day or the week out of your experiment, and you will never get to know if your ad might achieve better results with these untested time ranges. As a result, we encourage you to let your ad run uninterrupted during the experimental stage and then target criteria that yield high lead conversion rate or other business goals.

What other suggestions do you have for kick-starting your Google Adwords campaign?

Photo: The Budget Fashionista

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Act Fast! 3 Reasons to Nurture Leads Immediately

The early bird gets the worm.  He who hesitates is lost.  Strike while the iron is hot.  These clichés may be just that, clichés, but it turns out that they also apply in the world of sales and marketing.  In fact, a recent review of HubSpot customers’ lead nurturing statistics shows that open rates for nurturing emails drops off drastically over the course of three weeks.

A quick analysis of all customers using HubSpot’s lead nurturing shows a few outliers who have amazing late stage offers, but across the board, nearly 7% open rates on Day 1, which are higher than industry averages, were almost triple that of an email sent three weeks after a lead converted on a customers’ website.

Why do later email sends have lower open rates?

1. Urgency – right after a lead downloads something from your site or signs up for some sort of offer, your brand, product or service is not only top of mind, but they wanted something from you.  Tapping into their personal sense of urgency is critical.  So at this point, don’t waste that first day email with just a thank you.  Welcome them to an ongoing program and offer them an immediate offer of additional value that keeps the urgency high.
2. Recall – It only stands to reason that with so much on our minds, humans forget why we wanted something from you in the first place.  Once your brand is no longer top of mind, we are less likely to open a note from you.  So while staying in touch is still very relevant, your chances of converting further out are lower.  Those that do re-convert further out may, however, be better qualified leads because they are persistently interested.
3. Offer Relevance – Depending on how well targeted your campaign is, your offer relevance may decrease over time.  The Day 1 offer in your nurturing campaign should be very closely tied to the first call to action to which your prospect responded.  By the time you’ve gotten three weeks out, your prospect has consumed more data, learned new information or maybe even changed their perspective on the opportunity at hand.  The challenge to you then, is to create the most targeted possible campaign which is likely to meet their interests at a later date and bring them further down the conversion path with your products and services.

Many B2B companies have a much longer sales cycle than this, but even with a long cycle, you do want to stay in touch immediately after the offer since your lead may be a reconversion or be further down their decision path.  Lead nurturing can help your sales team evaluate the quality of a lead, understand their interests based on their clicks and other actions and ultimately let them be more efficient and effective in selling.  So, start now, offer something great early in the cycle and try to be laser focused in later offers so you don’t lose your audience.

Why aren’t you nurturing your leads today?

 

Free Webinar: Lead Nurturing, Drip Marketing, Trigger Marketing – what, why, how? 

Webinar: Lead Nurturing, Drip Marketing, Trigger Marketing – what, why, how? Hear from Conni Eversull, Director of Sales & Marketing at ProofreadNow during this free one hour webinar moderated by HubSpot Director of Product Evangelism, Kirsten Knipp

A quick analysis of all customers using HubSpot’s lead nurturing shows a few outliers who have amazing late stage offers, but across the board, open rates on Day 1 were almost triple that of an email sent three weeks after a lead converted on a customers’ website.

Why do later email sends have lower open rates?

Urgency – right after a lead downloads something from your site or signs up for some sort of offer, your brand, product or service is not only top of mind, but they wanted something from you.  Tapping into their personal sense of urgency is critical.  So at this point, don’t waste that first day email with just a thank you.  Welcome them to an ongoing program and offer them an immediate offer of additional value that keeps the urgency high.

Recall – It only stands to reason that with so much on our minds, humans forget why we wanted something from you in the first place.  Once your brand is no longer top of mind, we are less likely to open a note from you.  So while staying in touch is still very relevant, your chances of converting further out are lower.  Those that do re-convert further out may, however, be better qualified leads because they are persistently interested.

Offer Relevance – Depending on how well targeted your campaign is, your offer relevance may decrease over time.  The Day 1 offer in your nurturing campaign is probably very closely tied to the first call to action to which your prospect responded.  By the time you’ve gotten three weeks out, your prospect has consumed more data, learned new information or maybe even changed their perspective on the opportunity at hand.  The challenge to you then, is to create the most targeted possible campaign which is likely to meet their interests at a later date and bring them further down the conversion path with your products and services.

Many B2B companies have a much longer sales cycle than this, but even with a long cycle, you do want to stay in touch immediately after the offer since your lead may be a reconversion or be further down their decision path.  Lead nurturing can help your sales team evaluate the quality of a lead, understand their interests based on their clicks and other actions and ultimately let them be more efficient and effective in selling.  So, start now, offer something great early in the cycle and try to be laser focused in later offers so you don’t lose your audience.

Why aren’t you nurturing your leads today?

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