Marketing with Mike Volpe

Without calls to action, you won't get any leads.

As a marketer, you should be placing calls to action all over the place - in your emails, on your website, in your blog articles, in your ebooks, in your presentations, in your videos... anyplace you can think of.

Here is a fun example from the bathroom at a nonprofit where the HubSpot marketing team did a volunteer project.  You are presented with a call to action while you releive yourself.  Crazy?  Maybe.  Effective?  Probably.

 

What's the most remarkable place you have seen a call to action?

Earlier this week at Woot Con, in addition to the keynote presentation, I gave a presentation about Lead generation, Lead Conversion and ROI.

I streamed the presentation live, so you can watch the video or view the slides below.

 

Presentation on Lead Generation, Conversion, Measurement and Marketing ROI by Mike Volpe, VP Marketing at HubSpot. Covers how to convert more traffic into visitors using landing pages, offers, calls to action, analysis, and how to measure ROI and marketing.

Social media and the social web can be used to drive leads and sales for your business, if you use it in the right way.

• Start by growing your following and publishing interesting and useful content
• Then, next to the content you are promoting in social media, include calls to action and offers next to that content - the second and more detailed content piece or free trial is what drives the leads
• Make sure you have content both at the top of the funnel and at the middle of the funnel

Download file for iPod and iPhone.

I had the opportunity to speak today at The BIG Conference about how to generate leads and sales through inbound marketing.

You have fans - so NOW what? Conversion, Landing Pages, Offers

The offer and landing page are important parts of any lead generation marketing campaign. This is where the conversion takes place to fill the top of the sales funnel. You work really hard on all your blogging and social media efforts, but without attractive offers and optimized landing pages, all that effort goes to waste. There is a lot that goes into a successful landing page from the offer to the call-to-action, to the landing page layout. This session will cover all the basics of how to convert more of your traffic into leads and sales and actually make something worthwhile out of all your inbound marketing effort.

Yes, it is ok to sell things through social media.

Yes, it is ok to evaluate your blog as a source of leads and customers.

See the presentation to learn more!

I had the great opportunity to speak to a bunch of my marketing peers at the Marketing Sherpa B2B Demand Generation Summit in Boston today (#sherpaB2B09).  It was part of a panel discussion, and there were no slides, but my notes are below  Enjoy and share!

Background on Social Media for Lead Generation

• Why is social media marketing important?
• We have built a bubble around us to block out these outbound marketing messages
• Only through more inbound marketing approaches can you attract people who have built this bubble around them
• Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter are all 100% controlled by the user who decides if they want to start communicating with you - unlike email, phone and direct mail where anyone can contact you, and then you have to tell them to stop 2. What is a social media marketing campaign?
• At HubSpot, we have no social media marketing campaigns
• Using social media and inbound marketing is a way of life. We are always trying to have an ongoing dialog with our market

Example: Social Media Marketing for Lead Generation Case Study

At HubSpot, we did a webinar on "How to Use Twitter for Marketing and PR" in March 2008 (this was way before Twitter had achieved mainstream popularity).

Step 1: Start by building assets

• Blog - 5,000 subscribers at the time (we have over 20,000 RSS and email subscribers today)
• LinkedIn Group - about 5,000 members at the time (there are over 40,000 members today)
• Twitter Company Account - About 1,000 followers of @HubSpot at the time (we have over 20,000 today)
• Facebook Fan Page - About 500 fans at the time (we have over 6,000 fans today)
  

Step 2: Use your marketing assets to promote your offer

• Wrote a blog article about Twitter marketing tips that also mentioned the webinar
• Emailed an appropriate segment of our opt-in house list about the webinar
• Posted the webinar as an event on Facebook and LinkedIn
• Added links on the webinar registration page to share with your friends on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook

Lead Generation Results for this Case Study

• Landing page conversion rate over 50%
• Over 4,000 people registered for the webinar (4,000 leads!)
• Triple the size of our largest previous webinar (we have since grown to as many as 8,000 people registering for a HubSpot webinar)
• Over 30% of the webinar registrants were not on our email list
• 1,200 completely new leads!
• Hundreds of qualified leads for the sales team, generating hundreds of opportunities representing over $500,000 in pipeline created
• SEO: The blog article and the archived webinar rank extremely well, even today - 18 months later
• First page of Google organic search for phrases like "Twitter Marketing" and "Twitter PR"
• #1 Google ranking for "Twitter for Marketing and PR", "Twitter for Marketing", "Twitter Webinar"
• Blog: One of top 10 most popular blog articles ever
• Over 20,000 people have read the article, leaving over 100 comments
• Over 1,500 people found that blog article about the webinar during last month, over 18 months later
• The archived webinar has been viewed over 16,000 times, over 1,000 of those in the last 30 days
• Total cost $3,000 - About $1,000 for webinar software, plus our time to create the content (probably a total of 40 hours at an estimated cost of $2000 at $50/hour)

Final Advice on Social Media Marketing for Lead Generation

• Think about social media marketing as part of a holistic inbound marketing strategy
• Social media marketing is not a campaign, it is a marketing lifestyle
• Blogging and publishing content is essential to social media success
• Archive your social content and optimize it for search engines to make it perform for months into the future
• Focus on building long term marketing assets

Webinar: Twitter for Marketing and PR

Want to learn more about using Twitter for Marketing and PR? Download the free webinar for tips and tricks to drive inbound marketing using Twitter.

I am listening in at the Marketing Sherpa B2B Lead Generation Summit #sherpab2b09.  (HubSpot TV is live streaming the event if you want to tune in.)  Here are some notes from the landing page session run by Flint McGlaughlin from MarketingExperiments.

Top Landing Page Mistakes to Avoid

1. Lack of Clarity - Do people visiting your landing page know (a) Where am I? (b) What can I do here? (c) Why should I do it? 
2. Undisciplined Eye-Path - Make sure you lead people's eyes in a single direction towards the action you want - try a page with a single column or at least one big column in the middle.
3. Insufficient Value Promise - Make sure the message on the button and headline talk about the benefit of completing the form.
4. Excessive Friction - Do your best to eliminate steps, questions and friction- try to balance quality and quantity.
   

850%.  Really.  I didn't believe it either.  But I have talked to him and seen the numbers.

Chalk this one up as another example of a business that you would never think could blog or use social media... proving that it can work for almost any business.

If the video dioes not work for you, use this link.

 

A new question: What are the marketing goals of blogging?  I think some of the goals for launching a blog are:

• Improve SEO performance - blog articles help with SEO a lot by increasing your presence on the web and attracting more links into your website
• Build thought leadership and bradn - if your blog has interesting content, it can build your brand as a thought leader in the market
• Increase social media performance - you are a lot more interesting in social media if you are writing and then promoting interesting blog articles (instead of telling people what you had for lunch)
• Get more leads and sales - by adding calls to action to your blog, you can get blog visitors to convert into leads and customers for your business

Download video for iPhone and iPod

As a B2B marketer looking to generate leads through your website, you need to think about a few of the key factors driving your conversion rates.  If you understand these key factors, you can try to implement ways to improve each of them, and therefore increase your overall conversion rate, driving more leads.

1. Traffic Quality- If you are selling business software, traffic from MySpace is just not going to convert for you at a high rate.  But, traffic from the Wall Street Journal, TechCrunch or CNet might convert really well.  Look at all the sources of traffic to your website and the conversion rates of each source.  Try to drive more traffic like the sources that convert well for you.  Don't waste your time working on sources like the ones that don't convert.
2. Calls to Action - A landing page with a conversion form should be no more than one click away from every page of your website.  Make sure you have a great call to action on each page of your website.
3. Landing Page Quality - Once your visitors are directed to a landing page with a conversion form, make sure that page is performing well.  Do some testing and optimization to improve the conversion rate of all of your landing pages.
4. Industry- Certain industries just experience higher conversion rates.  If you are selling to IT people, they are usually really sensitive to spam and often know a bunch of tricks to avoid giving you their contact info.  Your conversion rate will just be lower than companies in other industries.  There is not much you can do about this (besides change jobs) so don't worry about it.
5. Brand - As you become more well know, people will trust you more and typically your conversion rate will increase as your brand grows over time.  This is a long term effect, so there is not much you can do about this in the short term so don't worry about it.

Want more info? Read this article about how to draw attention to your calls to action.

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I am always surprised when B2B marketers worry so much about "bounce rates" (the % of people who leave your website after the first page view).

• You don't care if someone views 1 page or 10 pages on your site - if they didn't convert into a lead, it was not that valuable to you.  In fact, fewer page views might indicate a visitor who is ready to purchase and just trying to contact you - lots of page views might be someone just in the research phase.
• You should measure the overall website conversion rate - how many leads you get for each 100 visitors to your website.  This is a core metric to focus on and try to improve.  Look for my next article on how to think about improving your conversion rates.

 

Now... if you have banner ads on your website and monetize through advertising, or if you are an ecommerce website, you should worry about bounce rates, time spent on site and page views per visit - engagement metrics.  Your goals are different from a B2B lead generation marketer.

Download video for iPod.