My personal view is that content is an important ingredient to inbound marketing but content is not the whole story. You need to measure and analyze your marketing, you need to convert visitors into leads and customers using landing pages and lead nurturing. You need to promote your content using social media dn other methods.
I had the pleasure of presenting a session at Dreamforce this year, and I thought I would share it with you. My portion of the presentation is about 25 minutes, and there are a variety of formats below for your viewing pleasure.
We have an internal wiki that we use for almost all communication and collaboration at HubSpot. I talked about it in my Atlassian Starter Day Presentation (we use their wiki product, called Confluence). Recently, I got a question from someone who had seen my presentation that I thought was worth sharing here on the blog.
This is a guest post written by Barbara Govednik, a Chicago-based writer, writing coach and communication strategist. She is also the owner of 423 Communication, writes the blog Being Well Said and contributes to the communication skills blog on Communitelligence.
I use video a lot for creating marketing content, mostly because I hate to type and I think and speak a lot faster than I can type. So for video I do marketing webinars, a great marketing video podcast, this smaller marketing podcast and lots of other marketing video through and with the team at HubSpot.
To be honest, for most people the first steps are easy. I do all these "Marketing with Mike" videos just using a webcam and a PC and edit with either Windows Movie Maker (free!) or Camtasia (expensive). You can use Quicktime Pro ($30) to convert the video formats if you need to, because Windows Movie Maker does not do a good job of supporting the iTunes formats.
What is much more important than the equipment is the content. For all these videos, I have notes to guide me, and I try to take topics from videos that come directly from people I have met in person or online, so I know the videos will be on topics interesting to all of you (hopefully).
Remember, think content before production value.
One possible technique for online marketing is to take your articles and copy and paste them onto ezine websites around the web to get more links into your website. Does the increased inbound links to your website balance out the negative effects of having duplicate content?
Probably not. The links will not be that valuable because the search engines do not give a lot of authority to websites that consist of mostly duplicate content.
I've been doing a bunch of work this week to put onto (virtual) paper a lot of the best practices we use at HubSpot for using online video for marketing.
I wrote a blog article about SEO for YouTube, and today Karen Rubin and I are doing a webinar on How to Use Video for Online Marketing. It will be interesting to see how a webinar format is different for us than www.HubSpot.tv
Here are the slides from our webinar - download PPT slides. Enjoy!
I did a short interview with Matthew Mamet from Permission TV at the last WebInno event. We chatted about some of the things to think about when using video for marketing.
We use a lot of video in our marketing at HubSpot:
- Lots of marketing webinars
- A live weekly marketing video podcast
- An iTunes channelwith archived HubSpot TV and our webinars
- Viral videos on YouTube
- Our blog features video interviews
- We also have product demo videos on our website
In the video we talk a bit about how to think about using video in marketing.
UPDATE: For anyone having trouble with the video, here is a link to another version you can try.
We're launching a $50,000 Viral Marketing Contest at HubSpot.
If you think you can create some cool content, you should enter! Both blog articles and videos are eligible.
Please enter!!! I have a meeting this afternoon with one of our VC investors and I will need to explain why I'm just giving away $50,000 of their investment...
Any good sales person knows that you don't give the same sales pitch to every prospect. You customize your materials and presentation to what the prospect wants to hear based on a bunch of factors (industry, experience, business challenges, etc.). You can also get custom golf clubs made for you, and it costs about the same as a similar set of "normal" clubs. And Cafe Press has made a whole business out of making apparel and promotional merchandise one at a time. Finally, there are technologies to allow billboards to change content based on time of day and weather conditions. So, if the web is the new and best medium for marketing and sales, and software and web pages are just code that can be altered easily and automatically by computers... why do so few websites customize content based on who is using the website? The answer is because there are no good tools to allow most businesses to do this easily. For those of you who know me well, you know that I am joining a startup, and this is one of the problems we will be addressing. You can check out the HubSpot online marketing website to learn more.