It's a shame how many people aren't constantly learning new skills, letting their competitive advantage slip away. It's also unfortunate how many companies don't have a system in place for helping their employees learn new skills.

I was reading some old articles of mine and ran into this old story:

I received a call from a gentleman the other day whose first words were, "I received a Website Grader report from my client that you sent him and instead of reading your site for an hour to try to figure it out, I figured I'd just call and talk to a human. Can you tell me what you do?" He also told me he was an SEO consultant, so I suggested he just go to Website Grader to read the report. He then insisted on me telling him what we did. So, I explained how our software helped people attract more traffic, convert more traffic into leads and leads into sales, and then measure and analyze each step of the process to enable continuous improvement.  After I asked him a few questions about what software he used, which turned out to be nothing besides some SEO tools, I told him how our software helped agencies more efficiently deliver value by providing an integrated suite of tools that talked to each other. Then, at his prompting, I explained what the different tools did. He cut me off in the middle of that and said, "I guess I'm just going to have to read your site. I'm sick of all of you companies making me read your sites to figure out what you do."

It was fairly obvious to me after this conversation, that this guy was mad that a) his client was questioning whether he was doing a good enough job, b) that other companies have different (and possibly better) ways of doing things and c) that he had to learn something new.

What are you doing to prevent your agency from getting this far behind? Do you require that your employees continuously learn and experiment?  Are you pulling your clients into the state of the art of marketing -- or are they pushing you to do basic research?

This guy obviously missed the memo that learning doesn't stop after formal education.

This past Friday as part of my weekly webinar for marketing agencies, I invited Mark Kilens (HubSpot's Manager of Customer Training) to come and get some feedback about some top-secret new stuff he's working on.

We also reviewed all of the training available to our customers and partners. Mark formed his team in the not too distant past and has made some amazing strides in training a big swath of our customer base. Mark's team delivers every one of the small group classes below every week, usually more than once.

We've also invested a lot in our agency training. Kate Walsh, HubSpot Services Director, and her team run agency classes every week.

Both the customer and partner training are live classes. There's tons more training available that is recorded and written.

At HubSpot, we're committed to creating software AND training that helps marketers transform their marketing. This wouldn't be possible unless our employees were constantly learning. We are able to provide so much training because our team is constantly experimenting and learning. We have a culture where we reward employees who take the initiative to learn something new on their own. We encourage people to experiment and report results, whether the experiment succeeded or failed, so that we're all learning. We also hold employees accountable to learning skills that they need to master their job; even our top employees are required to continously be learning and improving skills.

Our best agency partners share this cultural trait in common with us. At PR 20/20, I know that the employees spend 3 hours per week taking some class, writing up what they've learned and sharing it with the team on their internal social network. I met a new IMPACT employee this week that told me, "Pete Caputa is required reading at IMPACT."

What does your company do to ensure that your team is constantly learning?

Business Insider just published a brilliant deck titled, The Future of Digital. A lot of "experts" talk in theory about the future of the internet or digital marketing. This one has data to back up the theories.

(You need to click on the link to see the deck. It looks like BI doesn't allow someone to embed a powerpoint presentation. It's worth the click over to their site.)

HubSpot's marketing team had a record performance last month. See the screengrab below.

I don't know many B2B marketing teams that generate 60k+ leads per month. Do you? Does yours?

Impact Branding & Design just published an excellent infographic about how to more effectively leverage the HubSpot software to generate more traffic, leads and sales. I've embedded it below. 

There aren't many companies who leverage the HubSpot software as effectively as IMPACT does. I've written about their results previously in an article titled, "How an Agency Acquired 5 New Clients from Inbound Marketing". If you want to learn more from them on this subject, I'd recommend downloading their "Essential Guide for Mastering HubSpot Software".

I recently finished reading a 2-part blog post by Mary Planding, owner of Inbound Marketing Squad (@inboundsquad) and my editor for this blog. I think you'll find the articles useful as you try to determine which marketing strategies you should implement in your business.

Her first article declares that marketing strategies are a dime a dozen—finding lots of choices isn't hard. But picking the right strategy for your business can be very difficult. Mary's point of view is that a marketing strategy should help you filter out the thousands of distracting (yet enticing) ideas that can keep you from reaching your goal. And she uses a really cool analogy about racing in the America's Cup to explain marketing strategies and making choices. It's a great analogy because in both situations - your marketing and the America's Cup racers - there are limited resources and unpredictable conditions that make it hard to 'cross the finish line'.

Here are some excerpts:

• The world will always be filled with endless possibilities. But in the end, you want to focus on the most effective marketing strategies that help you achieve your desired goal.

• Sometimes Mother Nature can surprise you and then you're scrambling to improvise, drawing upon your experience, knowledge, the conditions and your resources to help you win the race.

• Whenever you try to sail directly into the wind, you're not only dead in the water, you can even be pushed backwards. 

• Regardless of which leg of the course you're on, the more often you tack, the more time and distance you have to make up. And you can't change that dynamic. Physics, after all, is physics.

In her second article, which I found even more useful, Mary and her guest experts, share 5 tips for how to sort through and then choose the marketing strategies that are right for your business.

Here are some highlights:

• Understanding why you're marketing is the key to defining a successful path to your goals. (Jeff Mason, Hero Design Studio)

• You can't pick a strategy if you aren't specific about what the strategy is supposed to help you achieve. (Mary Planding, Inbound Marketing Squad)

• You want to pick a marketing strategy that allows you to acquire new customers and still remain profitable. (Dan Swanson, Exit Rich) 

• Think about "no" as a personal lifejacket. Taking on certain projects can be like taking on water as you sail. (Ilene Rosenthal, White Space Marketing Group)

• Often people choose a strategy that's cool, neat, hot, but instead of playing to their strengths, it draws unwanted attention to their weaknesses. The result is their efforts negate any potential gains they've made. (Mary Planding, Inbound Marketing Squad)

Go read the articles. It should help you create a stronger marketing plan for 2013.

What do golf legend Jack Nicklaus, basketball great Michael Jordan and decorated Olympian Michael Phelps all have in common? They have all embraced creative visualization to become better athletes.

In fact, visualization is widely embraced by athletes in nearly every sport. Terry Orlick, a noted sports psychologist and high-performance coach to thousands of Olympic and professional athletes in more than 30 sports, states in his book, In Pursuit of Excellence, that most Olympic athletes and world champions practice at least 15 minutes of visualization daily. 

Don’t mistake visualization for hokey, self-help speak. It is one of the most widely accepted methods in sports psychology and is supported by significant scientific evidence. And it isn’t only applicable to sports--visualization is a practice used by successful people across a broad range of professions.   

We use visualization technique to drive our strategic planning and the planning of inbound campaigns for clients and ourselves. Why? We’re all busy. And many of us get sucked into tactics all too frequently – sacrificing the planning team that can bring our marketing to the next level.

What is Visualization?

Most simply put, visualization is a technique for creating a mental image of a future event. It involves focusing your mind to visualize yourself in a certain situation and succeeding in that particular situation. Through the practice of visualization, we train our brain to believe that attaining a desired goal is possible. For instance, a golfer may visualize the perfect stroke over and over again to mentally train muscle memory.

According to David Yukelson, Ph.D, sports psychologist for Penn State University, “when you vividly imagine yourself getting ready for competition, your central nervous system becomes programmed for success. It's as if the activity you visualized has already happened.”

Apply this to inbound marketing planning and it means visualizing the metrics that will yield a successful campaign – literally seeing those results in Hubspot or whatever analytics tools you use.

How Does Visualization Work?

Research done using brain imagery suggests that visualization works because the neurons in our brains interpret imagery as the equivalent to taking a real-life action. When a person visualizes an act, the brain generates an impulse that tells their neurons to “perform” the movement. So when an athlete imagines him or herself performing their sport to perfection, he or she is physiologically training their mind and thus teaching their muscles to perform exactly how he or she wants them to.

Using Visualization to Become a Better Marketer

In today’s fast-paced business environment, so many marketers are guilty of getting wrapped up in the day-to-day minutia that it becomes difficult to focus on long-term planning and strategy development that will ultimately lead to our success. Visualization techniques could help you achieve your ultimate goals by improving your planning skills.

We’re all short on time but we can easily incorporate visualization into our marketing daily routines. It's something you’ll need to do outside of the office, where you can be alone and get deep into your thoughts. Try doing it on your morning run, in your yoga or spin class, when you take the dog on a walk or even on your daily commute. If you’re in California like we are, some time at the beach for lunch is a great way to isolate your mind and your thinking.

So once you have your alone time, how do you get started?

1. Pick a specific goal: That can be anything from increasing sales by 30% to becoming the leading blogger in your field to improving your lead conversion rate.

2. Choose your mental image: Really visualize your campaigns and their specific outcomes. Imagine writing your strategy; envision the steps you took to achieve this successful marketing campaign. See the words, the content and the metrics that drove your success. Hear the call where you share your success with your team, your boss or clients. Imagine yourself celebrating your success with your colleagues and imagine how it will feel to have reached your goal.

3. Visualize daily: See that image of success you painted in your mind and make that feeling very real.

4. Write it down: When you’re done, write down the key success factors you see and build them into your daily routine. Make them part of your planning.

Once you visualize all of the steps that it took to achieve your success, and the specific outcomes of each of those steps, you have a clear plan for your activities and how to create a successful campaign. Think of each of those steps and work backwards to what has to happen and it will help you develop your marketing goals, strategy and objectives, so that you can create a plan that will help you to become incredibly successful.             

Keep in mind that just visualizing your success isn’t going to get you to your final goal, but what it will do is give you an effective way to begin planning. And planning is something that a lot of us don’t do well. But if we can improve planning skills, we can stop wasting time on the little things and start spending time on the specific actions we know will help us reach success.

What ways could you use creative visualization to improve your marketing planning? Leave your comments below.

About the author: Ryan Malone is the founder of SmartBug Media, a California inbound marketing agency and Silver Hubspot Partner that help companies increase revenue and marketing ROI.

The Paradox of Content Marketing Success

Content marketing is gaining traction.  

In practice that is unalloyed great news for B2B marketers. Those who embrace best practices and diligently craft a fabric woven on a warp of amazing content will generate really remarkable results.

But as a buzzword it has potentially disastrous potential. Well meaning but ignorant interpretations abound and self-anointed experts are being birthed at an alarming rate.

Each "expert" who fails to effectively structure an inbound marketing program jeopardizes the future viability of a company which will move forward to compete in increasingly competitive markets at a distinct disadvantage. And in each case that will be tragic because the desire was there, but opportunity will have been squandered through poor execution.

Collectively the risk is even greater. A small number of companies that have realized the potential of well crafted inbound marketing will proselytize regarding the benefits of inbound marketing. But a much larger group that casually implemented a poorly conceived or incomplete program, and received commensurate returns, will join in a chorus of frustration - discounting the potential for B2B marketing success.

"We're already doing that"

If you sell to businesses you've certainly heard this before. And you've probably thought to yourself. "No way. You don't even have a clue what I'm talking about."

Now there are two possibilities in that situation. The prospect may be right. Perhaps they're doing something that is similar to what you propose, in a way that is good enough for them. Alternatively, you could be right. They may be just blowing you off, or perhaps they think they are leveraging a similar solution to good effect without really understanding the nuance or even the foundational principles of the concept.  

So assuming you have at least adequate sales skills, and still can't overcome the myopic intransigence of the prospect, what's at play?

If you're selling to huge companies you could simply be bumping into junior execs or administrators who validate the "Peter Principle" or are protecting their turf. But if you're speaking to senior executives in SMBs, you're probably caught in a sensitivity trap!

Extroverts, sensitivity and recognition of threats

What we're really talking about here is a threat. In the case of a company adopting a comprehensive, strategically sound inbound marketing program the threat to which they would respond would be one of diminished marketing effectiveness, stagnating sales and enterprise decay.

But what if......the sort of person most likely to boldly start, grow and manage a business is the sort least likely to intuit or even account for subtle and uncertain threats? That's precisely one of the hypothesis of Susan Cain's (@susancain) book Quiet. Controversial? Certainly. Conclusive? Perhaps not. Make sense based on personal experience? Probably. The hard charging business founder who has launched despite the horrific odds and persevered through situations which would have brought others to their knees simply can't afford to worry about ghosts behind trees. And therefore they overlook potential legitimate threats too, and discount seemingly insignificant differences in approaches to problems.

Inbound marketing's "Achiles' Heel"

Therein lies the biggest risk to inbound marketing success. When executed properly the payoff in B2B marketing success is huge. But if it's not done right, the payoff is negligible. And too many extroverted, 'insensitive' (don't get pissed off, read the book instead to understand) types can point to a couple activities (maybe occasional press releases published on a website under the title of 'blog', or a company LinkedIn page or Twitter handle) and dismissively assert "We already do that."

But you can be different! Seriously! Don't let your hard charging business blinders obscure the seemingly minor details that are critically important. In inbound marketing "the Devil (really) is in the details." 

And a good place to start is with an easy to digest overview of how your business sales and marketing environment is evolving. Understanding where we came from, where we are and where we're going is critical to mapping the route to success. And a step by step strategy goes a long way toward demystifying something that is far more complicated than you imagined.

So change your tune! Instead of "We already do that" try responding with "We have to do that!" and embrace the potential of B2B marketing success.



About the Author: Ed Marsh is co-founder of Consilium Global Business Advisors, an international marketing consulting agency focused on developing strategic global business development and channel programs.

Let's be honest. Using HubSpot and practicing inbound marketing isn't the easy solution. It takes practice, it takes training and it takes hard work. It's alot easier to buy some ads, cross our fingers and hope the phone rings. But we know that's not the right advice for our clients.

There is one step you can take to make inbound marketing a little simpler, a little more organized, and a little more planned out. That one step includes creating a comprehensive marketing strategy before you start implementing any of the inbound marketing tactics.

By thinking out your client's marketing startegy before you start implementing the tactics you help them with some of the heavy lifting.

Here are some of the advantages of a strategy before tactics approach.

When you take the time to help them create the personas for their target market, you can identify all the places the people in their target market hang out; the websites they visit, blogs they read, emails they subscribe to. This makes sourcing content out to these properties much easier and much more efficient when it's time to do this task.

Next, you help them create more effective messaging that emotionally connects with the client's target prospects. Landing pages are great. But if you improve their overall marketing messages, they'll see the impact across all aspects of their business.

You help them differentiate their business. This is usually undervalued but if you don't have anything interesting or remarkable to say...why say anything? Why invest any money in marketing?

You know the “whys” behind your client's business.  Not the “whats” or “hows” associated with their delivery but the emotional back story as to why they are even in business to begin with.  That is what people are buying and you need to be able to help your clients articulate it.

You help them create an editorial calendar for all their content for the life of your retainer— further demonstrating your partnership and long term commitment to their business. Blog titles, email subject lines, "free report" titles, topics for videos, ebooks, webinars, infographics, you name it. Planning these out over time makes deciding which ones to create and when to publish them much easier. We introduce all our clients to the Trio of Offers. No Risk, Low Risk, and Offer to Do Business. These have to be planned out, approved, and implemented over time. For more info on the Trio of Offers, click here.

You help to benchmark marketing performance and track improvements weekly, monthly and quarterly. Setting performance expectations helps you establish you and your team as the authority on inbound marketing. While you might not hit the targets every time, you will know when you need to make a change, select new tactics, or double down on tactics that are outperforming your expectations.

Honestly, the marketing planning part of the engagement isn't the easiest or the fastest work you can do, but if you are interested in long-term, retainer-based, strategic partnerships with your clients, this is work you have to strongly consider as a core offering. 

To learn more about how an inbound marketing strategy helps the implementation of an inbound marketing program, click here to download an e-book titled Strategy Before Tactics--How Marketing Strategy Improves The Performance of Inbound Marketing--An Agency’s Guide. 

About the Author: Mike Lieberman is co-founder and president of Square 2 Marketing, an inbound marketing agency, HubSpot partner and creators of Reality Marketing™ that helps entrepreneurial-oriented business owners change the way they think about marketing.

To hell with unicorns and rainbows

Are you as sick as I am of hearing that we need to "participate and engage" in social media? I want to get some concrete tips and specific actions to take, not some feel-good social media theories.

If you're an old school, press-the-flesh kind of guy or gal, you don't want to waste a lot of time with ten different social media platforms hoping for leads to land in your lap. You want to take some positive actions that you know will bring you new prospects.

If it feels good, do it

You need online tools that help to supplement your already successful relationship networking efforts. I like to steer relationship networkers towards LinkedIn because it's based on the professional relationships that they have been cultivating for years.

And I have a specific tactic that I like for them to use with LinkedIn. It's worked so well for me as a member of my BNI chapter that I made a video for all my chapter members: How to Use LinkedIn to Get More Referrals in BNI

The premise is simple. On LinkedIn, connect to the people that you know, and then ask them to introduce you to their connections as a way of getting an easy foot in the door with potential prospects. The trick is knowing who to ask your LinkedIn connections to introduce you to.

I see a lot of people who will go to each of their connections' profile pages on LinkedIn to look through their list of connections and pick out the ones who are a good prospect. This is effective, but a big time waster. Instead, I use LinkedIn's search feature to quickly find just the prospects who are a good fit for me.

Concrete tips and specific actions

[Watch the video walk through of this LinkedIn tactic "How to Get Leads with LinkedIn" below]

In my example, I want introductions to local CPA firms here in Las Vegas. So I go to the LinkedIn home page and in the search box (upper right area of the page) I type "CPA" and click the magnifying glass button to run the search.

This generates over 400,000 CPAs in the results. So next I use the filters in the left hand side of the page to narrow down my search results.

The most important filter option to select is "2nd Connections" in the Relationship filter group. The 2nd tier connections are people who are directly connected to one of my direct connections on LinkedIn. A friend of a friend, so to speak. These 2nd tier connections are all people that one of my connections can introduce me to. This cuts my search results down to 1101 CPAs.

Next I'll use some of the other filters to find the 2nd tier connection CPAs who are the best fit as a prospect. So I choose a physical location. I mentioned earlier that I want to find CPA firms in Las Vegas. Because Las Vegas is not one of the choices with a check box in the Locations filter, I'll manually type it into the Locations text field. I now have 180 CPAs in the search results.

Since I want to find CPAs working in accounting firms, rather than CPAs in big companies like the Las Vegas gaming corporations, I check the box for "Accounting" in the Industries filter. That brings me down to 96 CPAs in the search results.

For me to sell my consulting services to a CPA firm, I'm looking for firms with at least 10 employees, but I don't want to pitch very large companies. From the Company Size filter, I check both 11-50 and 51-200 employees. Now I see 30 CPAs in my search results.

Finally, I use the Seniority Level filter to find only owners, directors, CxOs, and partners. That way I'll get the decision makers. In the search results, I see 15 very promising prospects who my LinkedIn connections can introduce me to!

Now this is networking!

We have our short list of ideal prospects, so I look at the first one and see a link that says we have "9 shared connections". That means that I have nine different LinkedIn connections who I can ask to introduce me to this prospect. I click on this link and instantly see the first three of our shared connections.

Below those, I click on the link "View all 9 shared" and a new browser tab opens that shows me a list of all nine of my connections who are also directly connected to this prospect. I can start reaching out to my connections and asking for introductions to this prospect. And I have 14 more CPA prospects to whom I will ask my connections to introduce me!

So old school relationship networkers can use LinkedIn as a tool to help them do their networking more efficiently! The lesson here is that when you're starting out with online marketing, stay within your comfort zone. There's plenty of time for broadening horizons and spreading

 

 

About the Author: High Mobley is the founder of 13 Pages Internet Marketing, an online marketing firm and HubSpot partner that helps business owners increase their profitability.

Manufacturing is getting a lot of attention in this political season. One of the few things both sides of the aisle can agree on is that everyone wants to see the number of manufacturing jobs increase, either new jobs or returning jobs from overseas. But with all of this focus on manufacturing, very few people seem to be talking about inbound marketing for manufacturing.

This baffles me. Inbound marketing offers a new way to think about publicizing new technologies and engaging potential beneficiaries of those technologies in productive conversations.

Inbound marketing can be used to market emerging technologies and increase awareness and adoption of those new technologies. Most of our clients are in the manufacturing industry and we've noticed a few key areas we consistently address to start these companies on the road to successful inbound marketing campaigns.

Thinking like a marketer and not just a manufacturer

Thinking like a marketer puts you in the shoes of your ideal customer. The mindset is much like an engineer designing a feature in a product that solves a particular problem. The key is in translating that technical, product, problem-solving thinking into content for your marketing efforts. The benefits the customer receives are the fuel for your marketing. Manufacturers tend to think in terms of features and specifications and not in terms of the results the customer receives from the benefits.

For example, producing a top notch product may be what you think seals the deal on sales, but it isn't usually enough in and of itself. You need to be able to attract leads first before you can dazzle them with an amazing product. If your competition is offering a lesser product but are highly visible in the market, they are going to keep getting sales that your superior product could have landed. When you market the benefits of your product using stories, case studies, testimonials, and industry information you give your company and sales team a much better chance of being heard.

Website – not a catalog but a community

When a manufacturer has built a "catalog website", it usually means they are thinking like a  manufacturer and not a marketer. Listing products and descriptions, maybe throwing in a picture or two, speaks to the manufacturing side of the business but leaves the marketing side lacking. If you want your website to attract leads you need to have more on it than your catalog.

Your website should help you start the sales process by attracting prospects and showing them that your product or service is targeted to them, helps them solve their problems, and delivers the proof that you should be taken seriously.

A good website is a community with forums for interaction between you and your prospects and customers, and offers interesting and relevant information they want to download. Manufacturing is full of highly intelligent people with specialized knowledge and your goal should be to build a website that showcases that knowledge.

Social Media – create interest and ongoing engagement

Social media might not seem like it's designed for manufacturing, but there is a place for it in your marketing mix. Manufacturers should not expect millions of followers, but for those people who are interested in manufacturing and technology, social media outlets provide fertile ground for researching new companies, products, and processes. Social media is a great way to easily share industry news and articles and to open up a dialogue with potential leads.

Cool stuff like the 3D printing in this video are ripe for sharing and driving traffic to your site and in generating interest in your company.

Reaching just a few influential prospects or industry experts will make your social media efforts worth the effort.

Email – outreach and information

Email is another great marketing tool for keeping interest and engagement up. With all of the tools that are available now, it's very easy to create multiple versions of an email specifically targeted at different segments of your email list. This gives companies a great opportunity for introducing new products, technologies, and offers in the best way possible to the people that want to consume information targeted to their stated needs.

Manufacturing companies tend to have long buying cycles so using timed and automated lead nurturing campaigns to stay in touch with prospects throughout the buying cycle helps keep your company top of mind and gives the prospect a chance to stay engaged when they may have tuned your sales people and overt sales pitches out. Many manufacturing sales have a dead space in the buying process between initial and option research and final specification determination. Lead nurturing using email can keep you in front of prospects when they will not take your salespeople’s calls.

Inbound marketing isn't going to magically fix the economy, but the more sales manufacturers can land the more people they can hire and that's good news for everyone.

  

 

About the Author: Todd Hockenberry is the founder of Top Line Results, an inbound marketing agency that specializes in leading top line revenue growth at small and medium-sized companies with a focus on manufacturing, technology and capital equipment.