blog

Do you spend a lot of time knee-deep in Google Analytics, looking at the rise and fall of pageviews, unique visitors and referred traffic? While it pays to know your audience, focusing too much on the numbers isn’t the best use of your time. To gain more value from your marketing blog, think less about organic traffic growth and more about the impact of your blog on your pipeline.

A corporate blog’s success isn’t measured in pageviews or any other traffic metric. Why not? Well, your objectives are totally different. You aren’t trying to amass impressions to generate advertising views, which is the prevailing model used by most of the blogs you probably read. Rather, you want to attract attention that will translate to inquiries from prospects, who you then hope to advance through the sales cycle.

Read the rest of this entry »

Most companies could be much more aggressive with their e-mail marketing initiatives. A new report from MarketingSherpa shows that customer retention is by far the top priority, with objectives around new opportunities not gaining nearly as much attention. Listen to this message from the market, and you’ll hear the whisper: “It’s time to make your move.”

When I saw the latest chart published by MarketingSherpa, I was shocked. Eighty-eight percent of respondents called “retain[ing] existing customers” a very important objective for e-mail marketing. Only 78 percent ascribed this level of importance to “generat[ing] new sales leads,” and “increase web traffic,” “build brand and educate market” and “drive offline sales” each was considered “very important” by only 56 percent of respondents.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »