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How Do You Choose Search Engine Marketing Keywords?: If you have budget to burn on search engine marketing (SEM), analyzing site log files for highly converting keywords is the most popular approach to research. It’s also favored by companies with thinner budgets. Sifting through the same log files for frequent keywords is a favorite, as well.

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Five Twitter Tips for IT Social Media Marketers: The dialogue on Twitter is fast-paced and has close to 60 million participants. So, it’s at once high-value and highly frustrating. How can you make your voice heard above so many others? Rather than delve into the “focused community” spiel that you’ve probably read hundreds of times on Mashable, here are five tips to help you with the basic blocking and tackling of marketing your IT product or service on Twitter.

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Five Signs You Are Leaving Marketing ROI on the Table: Are you getting the most out of your marketing budget? The only way to know for sure is to take a close look at how your marketing and sales teams are performing. Dig into the data in your CRM system, and you’ll find a wealth of information. Even if you’re satisfied with the fruits of your labor, you may learn that you’re actually leaving ROI on the table. Here are five ways to find out if your organization has more ROI just waiting to happen.

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Six Tips for Using Free Research on Your Corporate Blog: It’s relatively easy for companies on the Fortune 500 to get material for their blogs. These large enterprises have access to beefy research departments, paid primary research and other tools that smaller companies simply can’t afford. But, this doesn’t mean you’re stuck writing “soft” blog posts that lack the punch of big stats and pretty charts.

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It’s All About Content: We routinely field questions from our clients about social media. They ask if Facebook is better than LinkedIn, how to promote their services effectively on Twitter and what type of information should be used for a corporate blog. These are all important questions to ask before jumping into social media marketing — and they all share a specific problem: they revolve around platform. To use social media effectively, you need to think past platform and focus strictly on content.

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Most Popular Keyword: strategy

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Twitter Mastery Makes Money: Let’s not mess around with the thinking, here’s the data: companies with between 100 and 500 followers on Twitter generated 146 percent more median monthly leads than those with 21 to 100 followers. So, whip out your Blackberry and pump out those 140-character insights!

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It’s relatively easy for companies on the Fortune 500 to get material for their blogs. These large enterprises have access to beefy research departments, paid primary research and other tools that smaller companies simply can’t afford. But, this doesn’t mean you’re stuck writing “soft” blog posts that lack the punch of big stats and pretty charts.

To integrate data-driven blog posts into your editorial calendar, all you have to do is use the news. By working with the research of the major players and media outlets in your industry, you can add more texture to your blog without having to invest heavily.

Here are six ways to turn the public domain into your free “research department”:

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Let’s not mess around with the thinking, here’s the data: companies with between 100 and 500 followers on Twitter generated 146 percent more median monthly leads than those with 21 to 100 followers. So, whip out your Blackberry and pump out those 140-character insights!

Well, it’s not as simple as that, as I’m sure you know. But, the link between Twitter and lead generation is certainly worth a closer look.

The latest research from eMarketer reports that developing a rich Twitter following – in conjunction with a “regularly updated stream of content on a blog” – helps trigger engagement, leads to search engine optimization advantages and ultimately brings more opportunities in the door.

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If you have budget to burn on search engine marketing (SEM), analyzing site log files for highly converting keywords is the most popular approach to research. It’s also favored by companies with thinner budgets. Sifting through the same log files for frequent keywords is a favorite, as well.

The latest research from MarketingSherpa shows that 85 percent of companies with SEM budgets of above $25,000 a year look for highly converting keywords in their log files, with 54 percent of companies with SEM budgets of $10,000 and down using the same method. Fifty-four percent of both the big and small companies looked for frequent keywords in log files, and both chose internal site search analysis (46 percent and 30 percent, respectively) as the #3 technique.

Competitor site analysis and competitive tools were considerably less popular, particularly with companies that didn’t have large SEM budgets. And, social semantic mining is still in its infancy.

How do you do keyword research? Leave a comment, and let us know!

[Source: MarketingSherpa]

It’s All About Content: We routinely field questions from our clients about social media. They ask if Facebook is better than LinkedIn, how to promote their services effectively on Twitter and what type of information should be used for a corporate blog. These are all important questions to ask before jumping into social media marketing — and they all share a specific problem: they revolve around platform. To use social media effectively, you need to think past platform and focus strictly on content.

Read the article >>

Protect Yourself from Platform Risk: Facebook has attained incredible reach, and Twitter’s rise has been nothing short of meteoric. LinkedIn has demonstrated strong and steady growth. But, the history of the social media space is littered with the corpses of former flavors of the month, and the likes of MySpace and Friendster represent sunk costs for companies that believed these environments were around for the long haul. Choosing right platform, it would seem, is crucial.

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Optimizing Content for Multiple Platforms: Does having a Facebook fan page, a LinkedIn group and a blog mean you have to content — regularly — for three different platforms? It’s a scary thought, probably enough to turn even the most zealous social media advocate away from the space. Well, here’s the good news: write content correctly, and you can carve it up for use across your entire integrated social media environment. There is no bad news.

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You Need Hooks: The purpose of a corporate blog or other social media presence isn’t merely to add to the endless electrons that are produced every day. And, it isn’t merely to provide a free service to the world. You’re looking to advance your business. While this may entail providing a free service consisting of informative and useful content, the net result has to be a lead stream for you to exploit. To turn your social media communities and traffic into business opportunities, you need hooks.

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Most Popular Keyword: Social Media Marketing

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Follow @entermarketing on Twitter >>

The purpose of a corporate blog or other social media presence isn’t merely to add to the endless electrons that are produced every day. And, it isn’t merely to provide a free service to the world. You’re looking to advance your business. While this may entail providing a free service consisting of informative and useful content, the net result has to be a lead stream for you to exploit. To turn your social media communities and traffic into business opportunities, you need hooks.

It’s easy to go overboard. In pursuit of leads, many companies tend to use their social media environments as advertisements, promoting at the expense of informing. Do this, and you run this risk of losing your audience — as well as your investment in the social media marketing initiative. When you create content and interact with your community, play it straight: deliver information that your readers can use — but don’t be afraid to make it easy for them to enter the sales cycle. This is where your “hooks” become useful.

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Does having a Facebook fan page, a LinkedIn group and a blog mean you have to content — regularly — for three different platforms? It’s a scary thought, probably enough to turn even the most zealous social media advocate away from the space. Well, here’s the good news: write content correctly, and you can carve it up for use across your entire integrated social media environment. There is no bad news.

Start with the blog post — it’s going to be your anchor. The material you publish on your blog will tend to be longer and more complex than what you put on Facebook, LinkedIn or certainly Twitter. Everything else you write and post should be pulled from this source. Not only do you only write once, with the exception of small modifications, but you ensure consistency across your entire social media environment.

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Facebook has attained incredible reach, and Twitter’s rise has been nothing short of meteoric. LinkedIn has demonstrated strong and steady growth. But, the history of the social media space is littered with the corpses of former flavors of the month, and the likes of MySpace and Friendster represent sunk costs for companies that believed these environments were around for the long haul. Choosing right platform, it would seem, is crucial.

To think that, however, would be to miss the point entirely.

Instead of working diligently to select the most appropriate social media platform, it’s better to realize that you’ll assume a certain amount of obsolescence risk with any platform you choose. Under these conditions, protecting your social media marketing investment is actually much easier than you’d expect. All you need to do is ensure that your content is easily portable.

Specific social media tools may come in and out of fashion, but well-planned content will stick around for a while.

Bookmark this link to see the rest of the posts in this series >>

Click here to receive enter:marketing blog updates by e-mail >>

Follow @entermarketing on Twitter >>

We routinely field questions from our clients about social media. They ask if Facebook is better than LinkedIn, how to promote their services effectively on Twitter and what type of information should be used for a corporate blog. These are all important questions to ask before jumping into social media marketing — and they all share a specific problem: they revolve around platform. To use social media effectively, you need to think past platform and focus strictly on content.

The social media platform you use is really nothing more than a mechanism for pushing content and managing your community. You can keep track of friends, fans and followers and receive some great features for pushing information, receiving feedback and tracking interactions. On its own, however, platform provides no real advantage. Everyone has access to the major social media platforms, and the major decision involves whether or not to create an account and get started.

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Five Signs You Are Leaving Marketing ROI on the Table: Are you getting the most out of your marketing budget? The only way to know for sure is to take a close look at how your marketing and sales teams are performing. Dig into the data in your CRM system, and you’ll find a wealth of information. Even if you’re satisfied with the fruits of your labor, you may learn that you’re actually leaving ROI on the table. Here are five ways to find out if your organization has more ROI just waiting to happen:

Read the article >>

Five tips for marketing and selling disaster recovery and business continuity solutions: Disaster recovery and business continuity solutions should be easy to sell. Everybody needs them, and some businesses are required by regulatory bodies to meet specific and demanding standards. They also represent a place where IT solution providers and manufacturers can distinguish themselves because DR/BC is not only a cost, but one that will show a benefit only rarely. So, a company that can shorten backup and recovery times, consume less storage space and lessen demand on datacenter staff is likely to find a willing audience.

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Three Questions to Ask Before a Sales Call: By the time you’re knotting your tie for a sales appointment, the cards should be stacked in your favor. The best indicator, of course, is that the prospect agreed to the meeting, so he must perceive some value. And, you’ve been able to review all the information that came out of the lead qualification process. You know the pain points, at least at a high level, and you have a sense of the status quo within your prospect’s datacenter. You have a willing audience and all the information you need to make a sale.

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Corporate Blogging Insight: The Content Funnel: One of the biggest social media marketing mistakes I’ve seen companies make is to emulate the wrong blogs. Whether it’s The VAR Guy or Engadget, corporate bloggers look to popular independent blogs for ideas. To a certain extent, this is smart: the top blogs can have some great features and styles that are worth adopting. But, much of what they do can be unwise (or simply impossible) for you to implement. The reason for this is that different blog types carry their own objectives and constraints.

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IT Sales Call: Best Time Is Tuesday at 9 AM: At enter:marketing, we schedule a lot of appointments for our clients. Through the demand generation and lead cultivation programs we run, we’ve learned a considerable amount about how IT buyers prefer to be engaged, the best survey questions for triggering interest and even when they want to talk. What we’re about to show you isn’t the result of some survey: it’s live data. Real. These insights are based on the actions of IT buyers.

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And, you may have missed …

Five Twitter Tips for IT Social Media Marketers: The dialogue on Twitter is fast-paced and has close to 60 million participants. So, it’s at once high-value and highly frustrating. How can you make your voice heard above so many others? Rather than delve into the “focused community” spiel that you’ve probably read hundreds of times on Mashable, here are five tips to help you with the basic blocking and tackling of marketing your IT product or service on Twitter:

Read the article >>