Letting Your Leads Choose Their Own Adventure With Dynamic CTAs

By employing a "Choose Your Own Adventure" technique with your calls to action, consumers will be able to feel that they made the choice to continue down the sales funnel on their own, instead of being forced into it.

Choose Your Own Adventure in Email Marketing

Email marketing is often used to help further a relationship with a prospect, as well as generate more leads. To best accomplish these goals, consider the following example: When crafting an email for lead nurturing, the Choose Your Own Adventure technique will help you:

• identify the stage of the prospect if you are using stage-based content 
• offer prospects opportunities for advancement 
• provide specific data for more relevant future communications

In your email there should only be a couple of calls to action when using this technique. If you are using links in your signature, I'd suggest removing them. You can check your email tool to see if these links are receiving clicks, but your click-through rates on links in your email signature are likely the lowest of all. If they are high, then your signature is more enticing than your content, which means you should reevaluate the message of your email.

There is a reason for only offering two CTAs (and therefore two options), and a goal. The goal is to drive engagement, and to help your prospects move themselves though your sales funnel. If you give more than two options, your email is not targeted to its goal, and will likely miss its target. The second reason for the two CTAs is because people will only engage with relevant content. So if you are offering two options, the odds are in your favor they will only engage with the more relevant of the two options. So if your content is crafted for each stage, they will tell you exactly which stage they are in, and if they are ready to move to the next stage of content they can do so.

Choose Your Own Adventure in Content Marketing

In content marketing, regardless of where your content is hosted, optimizing for engagement is always the goal. Let's focus, for a moment, on increasing the engagement after their first touch - so after the form has been completed, or after they arrive on a landing page from a keyword search. In the case of video marketing, consider giving your prospect different options as to what to do next after the video finishes playing. This will give them the option to stay engaged, and help you to identify where they are in the sales cycle. Using this technique with content marketing helps to:

• increase content engagement helping to further thought leadership 
• offer prospects opportunities for advancement 
• get more value out of the engagement you paid for/optimized for

For gated content, or content hidden behind a form, consider the following example. When your prospect fills out the form, they are saying, "Yes." This is a clear sign that they are willing to engage with you. Many people use forms that can automatically display messages, or what we call "thank you content," after they are completed. If you are using this technique, you can say "thank you," and offer two more choices of content. This will allow you to take advantage of the person's state of mind. They are in a place where they're hungry for content, so help feed them. Give them another option for more content in that stage, or the choice to a download a piece of content that will take them to the next stage.

Here is a great example of this being used by ATS. Notice the form changes after submission to offer more content. The offer is dynamic, so it can offer the most relevant content at the correct time.

Choose Your Own Adventure With Owned Media Channels

The Choose Your Own Adventure technique can also be used on your owned media channels. Let's take a look specifically at your website, and at a more advanced technique that can allow you to have dynamic content on your website. Many marketing automation tools and CRMs can provide this functionality to you. Using this technique with your owned media channels helps to:

• increase content engagement helping to further thought leadership 
• offer prospects opportunities for advancement
• increase on-site optimization 
• easily allow you to create a personalized experience

Marketing automation enables you to see where a prospect is in the sales cycle, and allows you to use dynamic content to serve up different content based on this information. So whether they're on your homepage, pricing page, or login page, you can serve up different content. I'd suggest using a few dynamic content blocks side by side, or one on top of the other. This will allow you to show a piece of content that's relevant to the stage a prospect is in, as well as give them a chance to move on to the next stage.

Here is a great example from Merchantry showing how they use targeted content options to help increase engagement rates by showing the correct content at the correct time. Notice how the orange block allows the prospect to request a demo, while the two blue blocks provide thought leadership content.

So if you're doing any type of content or email marketing, the Choose Your Own Adventure technique is a must for all modern marketers. I've taught this technique for years, and have seen companies double their content engagement simply by utilizing the Choose Your Own Adventure options. It also allows the consumer to choose, so they feel they made the choice, instead of being forced into it. Good luck with this technique, and please feel free to share examples of how you're using this technique in the comments below.

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Inbound Marketing Best Practices: Don't Forget the Basics in Email Marketing

Today’s plethora of online tools allow marketers to create beautiful emails while using inbound marketing best practices that their customers will be sure to enjoy. Services like MailChimp, Constant Contact, and HubSpot assist in creating HTML emails via simple drag-and-drop, allowing even computer novices to create gorgeous emails. But it’s easy to get lost in these tools. Creating a good email is about more than just its design. If you want to create a successful email that guides people to your website, it’s important to stay true to the basics of email marketing.

Make The Subject Line Count

The most beautiful email is worthless if no one ever decides to read it. That’s why the email subject line remains the single most important tool in creating a successful marketing email. In fact, 69% of recipients report emails as spam based solely on the subject line, while 35% of recipients open email based on that same subject. The importance of an effective subject line cannot be overlooked. So how do you go about creating one? As a guideline, you should spend about as much time on coming up with the perfect subject as you should designing the rest of the email. If the service you use offers personalization, take advantage of it: Studies have found that personalized emails receive about 3% higher open rates. Once you think you have come up with a nice subject, run it past your coworkers. Would they open the email with that subject and if not, what would they change? Brainstorming remains a crucial tool.

Let Them Know Where To Click

Much like the subject line, the most beautiful emails will not benefit your business if the recipient has nowhere to go. Once they open the email, provide them with clear directions on where to click and what will await them at the link they’re about to click. Try linking the pictures you include to your page, or include a CTA in different spots, and see which location and method gets the most clicks. A-B Testing, offered by many of the services mentioned above, can come in very handy to check which link placement works the best for you.

Keep It Short And To The Point

Every email your company sends out should have a singular purpose. In most cases, that will be the link we mentioned in the previous paragraph, guiding recipients to your website. Do not include multiple links to separate spots; the links will cannibalize each other, and it will become more difficult for you to track which recipient chose which link. One easy way of keeping your email’s purpose singular: keep it short. Only 1-3 short paragraphs should be enough to explain what the link is about, and why the recipient should click on it. If you need to provide more information, try to include it on the page that the email links to – it provides more incentive for clicks. If your emails receive high open rates but low click-through rates, chances are the text is too long.

Inbound Marketing Best Practices: Don't Forget The Spam Laws

This last one is particularly important. None of the steps above matter at all if your beautifully designed piece lands in email hell AKA spam folders. To avoid it, make sure you comply with the CAN-SPAM Act provided by the Federal Trade Commission. Letting your recipients know where you are located and why they receive emails from you is not a guideline, but absolutely necessary. So is providing a clearly legible unsubscribe link. But the single most important tool in avoiding spam filters is keeping a clean email list. Purchasing lead lists may be tempting, but will lead to high unsubscribes and spam reports, which in turn poison your account for all customers. Instead, rely on lead lists from people that have actively subscribed to receive your emails, and be sure to regularly clean your lists. That way, you avoid sending pieces to users who have previously reported your emails as spam. If you follow the above steps, nothing should be in the way of getting your beautiful designed emails delivered, opened, and clicked through by customers.

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Are Digital Dead Ends Sabotaging Your Conversion Rates?

By conducting a site audit as if you were an outside user, you can identify the dead ends in your website, fix them, and improve your conversion rates.

Digital dead ends are conversion killers. They act as obstacles, making it more difficult for your customers to end up where they (and you) would like them to be - clicking the button. Whether you're measuring by number of downloads, email newsletter sign-ups, or units sold, eradicating the dead ends in your brand's digital universe is a major key in optimizing conversion rates.

Matt Walsh, founder and experience director for Green Stone, defines a dead end as "any touch point that doesn't intelligently encourage a consumer's journey down the funnel through personalization and/or immediate engagement opportunities."

Audit Your Marketing Universe

Why Your Social Strategy Is Not One Size Fits All

Marketers, we have a problem.

We’ve reached a true turning point in our social media marketing. We’re at the apex of the perfect storm: We’re strapped for time, with more content than ever to promote on more social networks than ever before. When faced with this challenge, we can easily forget the golden rule of social media marketing: One size doesn’t fit all.

Not all social networks are created equal.

It’s easy to lump our favorite social networks together. We bucket each platform under a social media umbrella when talking about, thinking about, and planning our social strategies. By routine we update Facebook, scan Twitter, and check Google+ everyday swaying us to view these platforms as a package, not individual tools. The underlying commonality is that they’re all great at connecting us directly with our target audience. But just because Google+ and Twitter can both put us in front of your prospects doesn’t mean they should be treated the same. By recognizing the respective value of each tool, we can connect with our audience in even more valuable ways.

That’s not to say one network is better than the other. There’s value in all social media channels...when used the right way. Consider the mindset of your target audience when creating content for each channel. Twitter, for example, sees about 9,000 tweets a second. To stay relevant on Twitter then, you may want to tweet more often than you update your LinkedIn Company Page because readers on LinkedIn aren’t being overwhelmed with content at lightning speed.

Not every post you write is 100% optimized for every network you want to share it on.

This wasn’t as big of a problem five years ago as it is today. When social networks became an integral part of the larger marketing strategy, these networks adapted to add features for social media marketers to make the most out of the content they were sharing, like the major visual updates we’ve seen recently from Google+. Thats why, when marketers go into “broadcast mode” -- using one message to spam every platform -- we miss out on the valuable nuances of each network. For example, if I’m sharing the same article to Twitter and LinkedIn.

Not every network is best for your company.

It’s tempting to jump in with both feet when you’re getting started with your social media marketing. But it’s worth spending time to research which networks your prospects actually spend time on. Did you know that B2C prospects spend more time engaging with Facebook while B2B prospects prefer LinkedIn? Consider where you can best tap into your community, as well as optimize your content. For example, your business may be a good match for channels like Pinterest or Instagram, especially if you’re selling a tangible product. Or, you could be an SEO agency, and then you’d probably want to focus on Google+. Pay attention to where your audience is consuming information and dig into which platform is the best vehicle for your content.

Approaching each platform with customized tactics can be intimidating; it’s already overwhelming enough to stay on top of all our social channels with just one approach. Take time to carve out a few ways you’ll start to differentiate your content so its optimized for each network. Keep in mind that as long as you follow the guiding principles of an effective social media strategy, everything else will fall into place. At HubSpot, we’re known for being dedicated to solving for the customer, we use the acronym “SFTC” daily. It’s why we developed Social Inbox, and it’s why we talk a lot about “delighting” our customers - not our prospects, but our customers. You can’t go wrong by addressing your customer’s wants and needs first. Here are two key ways we try to stay true to that principle.

• Be authentic: As someone who lives and breathes social media, authenticity stands out from a mile away. So does fakeness.  Keep the “social” in social media by staying true to what your brand promotes, and also remembering that there are humans on the other end of that tweet. 

• Stay active: If you tweet once a month when your target audience is sleeping, will that tweet make an impact? Probably not. But if you take the time to nurture each network, strategically approach each network based on the audience and function, and engage with your followers then your chances for a retweet, or a Like, or sparking up a conversation are much higher. If you’re going to take the time to invest in a network and set up a profile, make it matter and make it valuable.

So, when you start planning your social media calendar for the next week, keep in mind that not all social media networks are created equal. There are ways to optimize and customize your updates based on the platform; one size won’t fit all. But as you would approach any area of your marketing, you need to come to the table with a universal strategy to make sure you’re staying on brand, staying consistent, and always solving for the customer.

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How Your Company Should Use Vine

Here are some fun ways to utilize vine:

Office Tour – People enjoy seeing the office of their favorite brands. It gives a sort of sneak peak, behind the scenes feel, where customers and fans get the opportunity to see where the “magic” happens. 

Here is HubSpot showing a new addition to the office - https://vine.co/v/brqehHIu3EQ

Product Demo/Creation – Show your product being used or being created. Domino’s did a wonderful job using webcams to let you see their pizza making process, this could easily be made into a six second vine.

Domino’s Webcam

Show the Team ­- Use your vine to introduce your team. Each team member gets six seconds. Have fun with this; maybe everyone has their own catch-phrase.

Promotional ­– Promote a service! 

Contests – There is nothing that impacts social media than contests. Create a vine promoting the contest and have users create their own vine to enter.

These are just a few ways your business could and should be using Vine. It is quick, easy and best of all free. Remember to get creative!

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Questions for SEO Service Providers That Pitch For Your Business

Content marketing is required in order to succeed in today’s competitive business world.  Business blogging is the foundation for strategic content marketing, which can trigger significant new business generation and help you maintain 

your current client base.  According to HubSpot, business blogging reduces lead generation costs by an average of 62%; companies that post blog content at least 20 times per month generate four times more leads than companies without blogs.  Without a relevant, high-quality blog, you will not be able beat your competition in the current marketplace.  The average company with a blog attracts 55% more website visitors and 97% more inbound links and has an impressive 434% more indexed web pages than companies without blogs.  Publishing a top-notch blog makes it much easier for prospects to find you through an Internet search.  Each new lead has the potential to become a loyal blog subscriber and ultimately convert to a client.

1.  Identify Your Big-Hit Content

Analyze your blogging data, and identify the content that generated the most page views and inbound links.  These blog posts can be classified as your big-hit content, since they attracted more attention than usual.  Your next step is finding the similarities between these blog posts, which could be seen in the topic, tone or even formatting.  This sort of analysis should be done on a regular basis so that you collect more and more data on your successful content—helping you publish more big-hit content in the future.  Consider using surveys and polls to gain further insight about reader preferences, while also increasing engagement and giving your readers a voice.

2.  Create Big-Hit Content Consistently

Others will create links to content that they find to valuable; big-hit content is great for optimizing your website’s off-page SEO.  Enhance lead conversion with CTAs for your top marketing offers on each blog post and on your blog’s header or sidebars.  Big-hit content generally ranks highly in search results and attracts views long after being published, making it a continual traffic generator.  HubSpot enjoys the benefits of big-hit content with 70% of its new monthly leads coming from old posts—those published a number of months or years in the past.

3.  Leverage Content from Industry Thought Leaders

Connect with industry thought leaders; invite them to contribute guest posts for your blog.  This will add clout to your blog, enhance your company’s credibility and strengthen your professional network.  The content of thought leaders is educational and information-rich, so it has a much higher likelihood of achieving high rates of social content curation.

4.  Use Strategic Content Titles and Strong Visuals

Use compelling and attractive titles, and be sure to back them up with equally strong content.  If you fail to do so, you risk damaging your credibility.  Identify trending topics for your industry, and present them with a fresh perspective.  Feel free to challenge industry findings.  Further enhance your content with visuals, such as infographics, SlideShare presentations and video content.

5.  Attract More Blog Subscribers

Create a landing page for your new blog readers, and embed CTA buttons throughout your website that will drive prospects to your blog subscription page.  If you are a HubSpot customer, use HubSpot’s Call-to-Action Manager.  If not, PowerPoint is another option.  Place CTAs within each of your blog posts.  Give your readers incentives—such as discounts, free trials or entry into a lottery—to join your blog subscriber list. 

6.  Encourage Email Subscriptions

Readers may sign up and choose RSS or email subscriptions.  According to Hubspot, 13% of its own monthly blog traffic arrives via email sent to blog subscribers.  RSS is not as effective in generating leads, because subscribers have to manually use an RSS reader.  With email, they click a link for your blog and land on your website—boosting both website traffic and lead generation.

7.  Make Your Content Highly Visible to Prospects

Ensure that your content can be easily found by prospects who are conducting searches, actively researching and ready to buy your products or services.  Here are a number of ways to make this happen:

• Social Media Marketing:  Advertise on social networks, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+.  Tailor your ads based on information that prospects provide in their social profiles.
• SEO:  Conduct keyword research, and produce content using the same language as prospects in order to accurately frame a problem that they are attempting to solve.
• Content Syndication:  Share your content on syndication sites, such as Social Media Today and Business 2 Community.

Aim to create high-impact, information-rich blog content, which resonates with your audience, to compel social content curation—boosting website traffic and increasing lead generation and conversion.  Your content must attain high rates of social content curation—social sharing—in order to enhance SEO and boost website traffic.  Highly shareable content creation is the key to increasing lead generation through content marketing.

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Are We, Social Media Professionals, Destroying Social Media?

If you are hanging out at Social Media Today, you most likely have a vested interest in social media, often in a paid capacity working for brands or advising them in some sort of agency situation. Maybe you just are striving to learn more and build a career path involving social media. 

We are often advising brands to develop their content strategy and they 'must' do these things such as engage and be part of social media or they will be destroyed (or something similar). .

The reality is brands are becoming the trolls, or spammers (at least in the way they do it today), which over time will hurt these social networks causing people to find alternative places to track and participate in conversations. This is nothing new, since the same thing happened to email marketing. At first it was cool, but then when too many brands started bombarding us with messages we sought ways to simply block them out.  

In my view we have to do our part to ensure success of these social networks, including helping the networks create the right user experience. 

As social media leaders we have to help our brands better understand what it is like to be a member of a community and how to add to it as opposed to detracting from it.  This is often a fine line, and difficult to decipher. As an example Oreo during the Super Bowl was unique and unexpected, but during the Oscars they were one of many doing similar content. At best the Oscars content was just noise, but I bet some felt they were being spammed.

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