Pinterest is a next generation social network tool that drives traffic to your website using images. 

Powerpoint is an older software tool that communicates important business concepts through images. 

Hmm…

It occurred to us that these technologies should be two great tastes that taste great together.  

And as good inbound marketing consultants, we figured out a way to put them together to help you drive traffic and generate leads. 

Step 1: Plan Your Social Media Marketing Campaign

Any good marketing campaign starts by defining the goals, strategy and tools & tactics to get the job done.  

What’s The Business Goal?

To drive visitors to your website from Pinterest and convert them to leads by getting them to download your informative Powerpoint presentation. 

What’s The Strategy to Achieve The Goal?

Create a Presentation Board on your Pinterest account where people can click on the Powerpoint slide image and go to the landing page where they download the presentation and generate a lead.

What Tools Do We Need to Execute the Strategy?

• A Pinterest account
• An Image of the Presentation
• A Landing Page for the Presentation
• The Actual Presentation

Step 2: Put Your Best Image Forward

Identify the best image you have in your Powerpoint presentation. This might be a colorful chart or a great image you pulled off of iStockphoto. Whatever it is, you’ll want to use the most visually appealing, informative and representative slide in the whole deck and make an image out of it. 

In Powerpoint, follow these steps to make an image out of a slide:

• Make sure everything on the slide is “grouped” into one image in Powerpoint. Do this by selecting all the images and any text boxes and then clicking on Format –> Group. 
• Now just right click (Control Click on Macs) on the entire grouped set and select “Save as Picture”
• Save it on your hard drive; name the file something meaningful like “Presentation X Pinterest Image”

Step 3: Create a Landing Page

A landing page is a single web page whose entire purpose in life is to convert a visitor into a lead. This is often done through well written copy and the promise of downloading an in-depth article or presentation in exchange for the visitor giving up their name and email address.

For our example here, you should “gate” the Powerpoint presentation behind a small form that asks the visitor to input their name and email address to get be able to download it. This will represent your lead. 

For continuity’s sake, we suggest you use the same image in the landing page as the image you created for Pinterest in Step 2.

When you’re done, keep the URL of the landing page handy, because you’re going to need it later.  

For more information on landing pages, read this Hubspot E-book: An Introductory Guide to Building Landing Pages. If you need help creating landing pages, we heard this landing page design company is pretty good. 

Step 4: Upload Image to Pinterest

• Go to Pinterest and log in  to your account. If you don’t have one and need an invite, contact us and we’ll send you one. 
• Click on Add in the upper right corner
• Select the “Upload a Pin” option
• Click on Choose a File and upload the image you created in Step 1, Presentation X Pinterest Image. 
• [IMPORTANT] Write a 500 character description of the presentation and its benefits to the end user. Make sure it’s

  

  keyword rich! This is how people will find the image on Google and Pinterest

• Click on the Pin It button
• Click the Edit button you see above the image
• [IMPORTANT]  Copy and paste the URL of the landing page you created in the Link field
• Click Save Pin

Have a Board of Different Presentations Pointing to Different Landing Pages

You can create different boards for different types of content you may have – Charts, Infographics, Quotes to Live By and of course, Presentations.

You may even want to have several different Presentations Boards based on your different product lines for example.

But remember to point each presentation to a different landing page targeted to a different segment of your target market.  This makes it easier later to analyze which landing pages are converting and which one aren’t. 

We’d love to hear if you tried this technique and how it went. Did you generate traffic and leads? Let us know! Happy Pinning!

If you’re interested, check out some of our other interesting stuff like this pretty cool infographic to find out why you should work with an inbound marketing agency.

And if you want to dig in a little deeper, check out one of our latest guides – The Essential Guide to Internet Marketing as well.

Some key points:

• It’s important to create an entertaining experience for people on social. Engaging people is fundamental to the campaign’s success
• Social has improved product awareness and consideration of Ford’s products tremendously 
• Ford has seen massive savings as they’ve shifted away from traditional advertising budgets and started using PR and internet marketing agencies.
• The skills Ford needs to run their marketing has shifted along with their shift to social.  

Source: http://www.mackcollier.com/ford-cmo-jim-farley-social-media-leading-to-massive-cost-savings-for-ford/

Transcription of Ford CMO Jim Farley Interview

What new insights has Ford learned from interacting in social channels, and how has that impacted Ford’s view of the customer experience?

We’re really excited because one of the things we’ve learned at Ford as we’ve launched more and more vehicles using social media is the importance of the actual experience of being involved in the launch. We’ve always thought of the customer experience as when you buy or service the car but in the case of the Fiesta Movement or the Focus Global Test Drive or even the Explorer launch, when we ask people to get involved in the launch of the product, we have to really think carefully about what we’re asking them to do and how much we give back to them in their life as they are involved in the launch. And that’s a new element that we never thought about. Going into social media launching, we were a little selfish at the beginning in the sense that we wanted the exposure. And now what we’re learning is the more entertaining we make it for the participants, the better it is for us as a company. And that’s probably the biggest linkage between customer experience and social media and launching new vehicles

Have you found social media most useful for loyalty, consideration or customer service?

We’ve really seen social media have the biggest impact in consideration because it’s allowed us to grow the awareness before the vehicles’ launch. Like the Ford Fiesta Movement did and grab attention from people who normally wouldn’t look at Ford. So social media has allowed us to connect with people authentically about our new vehicles and most of them wouldn’t had been considering Ford at all. In fact, we saw the Focus’ sales spike after we launched Fiesta because so many new customers came in looking at the Fiesta and discovered the Focus for the first time. At Ford, we knew we had the Focus but we were surprised at how many people didn’t know we had another small car.

Are there any areas that Ford can point to where social media has either lowered business costs, or improved existing process?

One of the real benefits of our benefits of social media is the dramatic efficiency we’ve seen. And it’s kinda in a unexpected way. By launching the vehicle early and getting people to talk about the new Global Focus and the new Fiesta in the US before it goes on sale, we can lower the amount of traditional advertising we can do after the vehicle goes on sale. That’s where really the massive cost savings have been. I’ll give you an example, in the Fiesta Movement, we have higher unaided nameplate awareness than Fit or Yaris and we spent 10 cents on the dollar compared to a traditional TV ad campaign. So by starting earlier and using social media to spread the word about the new product, we’re really reducing the amount of traditional advertising we have to spend.

How has your marketing team evolved in the past 24 months given your investment in social media?

The cool thing about the complexion of our marketing team at Ford has been over the last 24 months, especially as we’ve gotten into social media….well first, we’ve been growing. We’ve had 22 out of 23 months of market share growth, so we have added people to our team, especially in areas like Lincoln. The biggest change we’ve seen is in the kind of skills we need. What we’ve found is that the traditional lines between PR and the advertising team are gone. You know, the ideas have to be paid and earned and they have to be sorted out seamlessly. And so we need different kinds of people than we’ve ever had before and not only here at the company at Ford but also at the advertising industry and the kind of PR agencies we need to help us. More than the number of people, it’s really required us to have different kinds of skills and we’re still evolving. We need more people who can think creatively who can come up with ideas for a Facebook application; we can’t just delegate it to the agency. We have to, as a client, come up with these ideas. And then as we execute it, there can’t be any boundaries between the PR team and the traditional advertising team.

Ford made one of the most aggressive shifts into social media, while slashing advertising budgets. Were there any points at which Ford questioned this strategy?

Frankly, the biggest surprise to us is how mainstream this media has become for us. The Fiesta Movement is so popular, it really changed our thinking about the Explorer launch. That’s why we decided this summer to launch the Explorer on Facebook and have that one day where we celebrate Explorer around the world. And now we’re taking those ideas and going global with the Focus Test Drive that we’re announcing today. Have we been surprised? Absolutely. One of them is, “how do you execute something globally, how do you really get a global audience on Facebook activated around the new Focus?” It takes a lot of new thinking. Are there things that we would do differently? Probably. We probably should have moved a little faster and we probably should have done this a long time ago.

Your LinkedIn Company Page is a great central hub for keeping people up-to-date on your company news, job openings as well as product and service offerings. If you don’t have your company on LinkedIn yet, don’t wait another minute.

Here’s how to set up your company’s LinkedIn page in 5 steps. 

1. Log in to Your LinkedIn Account

To start a company page on LinkedIn, you have to have a personal account first. LinkedIn is like Facebook in this way. So log into your account and click on Companies up at the top of the screen. 

Once you’re on the Companies page, you will see a link up in the top right that says “Add a Company”, click it. 

2. Add a Company

 After clicking the link, you’ll see the Add a Company page and be asked to fill in three important fields

Company Name

Put in the official name of your company. Later, LinkedIn will  try to verify that that company exists and if someone is already the official representative of that company already (see below)

Company Email Address

Next you’ll need to put in a real company email address. This will be used to send you a verification email to confirm that you are in fact the owner of that address. You will obviously need access to this email to verify. Also, No Yahoo, Gmail or Hotmail addresses allowed please. Must be a corporate domain. 

Verify That You’re a Real Employee of Company

This is a check the box that says you’re the “official” representative of your company and have the right to act on behalf of the company in creation of the LinkedIn Company Page. Not exactly sure what will happen if you don’t check it.  Just check it and click Continue.  

3. Verify Yourself in Your Email

Linkedin will now send you an account verification email to the email address you specified. Go to your email and click the link. It should direct you to the LinkedIn login page.  Log back into LinkedIn using your personal LinkedIn user name and password. 

After this, you should be redirected to your new company page template. Now you’re ready to roll. 

4. Fill Out Your Company Overview

There are 4 pages to your Company’s LinkedIn prescence – Overview, Careers, Products & Services and Analytics. This post is going to concentrate on the Overview and the Products and Services pages. Careers is a great place to list your job openings but requires a paid account.

Ok, on to the Overview Page.  

1. Company Page Admins (required) -  LinkedIn gives you the choice about how you manage admins for this page. You can allow anyone with a company email address to be an admin or only people you designate.  We recommend the latter but it really depends on the size of your company.  If  you choose Designated users only, LinkedIn allows you to choose directly from LinkedIn personal profiles. And remember, you can only them if you’re already connected to them on LinkedIn. 

2. Logos (optional) - You can upload a Standard Logo and a Square Logo of your company. The Standard Logo requires dimensions of 100 x 60 pixels and the Square Logo needs to be 50×50 pixels.  When you create the square version of your logo, make sure to crop a nice part of your logo out that will work well as a 50 by 50 image. Just resizing your standard logo to a square doesn’t work.

3. Company Description (required) - Type in a well written description of your company. You must type a minimum of 200 characters and a max of 2000 characters.  Keep the description concise and with a minimum of jargon or industry buzzwords. Make sure it’s keyword-rich. This is important for getting found by others who are searching for your type of company. 

4. Company Specialties (optional) – Here is another great keyword opportunity. Add several keywords here to maximize your findability. LinkedIn allows you to add more than the default 4 fields you see in the image. Just click Add More Specialties
5. Twitter and Company RSS Feed URLs (optional) - Fill in you company’s Twitter ID here if you have one as well as your blog’s RSS feed URL. This will allow those feeds to show up on your company page 
6. Company Type, Size and URL (required) – From the pulldown menu, choose the type of company, its  size and the company website address (URL) 
7. Company Industry (required) – From the pulldown menu, choose the Company Industry
8. Company Operating Status (required) – Is your company in operations already, a start up or somewhere in-between? Indicate here from the pulldown menu.  You have the option of adding the year your company was founded as well
9. Company Locations - If your company has more than one branch or office location, you can add them here

If you need a little more guidance, here’s a link to a LinkedIn video on Setting up your Company Overview page. 

5. Fill Out Products and Services Page

The Linkedin Products & Services page is extremely useful and frankly pretty cool. This is where you can really put in a lot of detail and all of your products and services. Even though this whole page is optional, we recommend you spend some serious time here to make the most out of what LinkedIn has to offer. 

1. Product or Service (required) -  Here simply choose if you wish to add a product or service. Don’t worry you can add more if you have both. 

2. Select a Category (required) – Choose a category of the product or service

3. Name of Your Product or Service (required) - Free form field to enter the name of your product or service

 4. Image of Product or Service (optional) -  Here you have the option of adding a product or service image. The image must be 100 x 80 pixels and in PNG, JPG or GIF format.

5. Describe Your Product or Service (required) – Here input a description of your product or service. Like your company description on the Overview page, make sure it’s concise, descriptive and keyword rich. 

6. URL of Your Product or Service (optional) – Use this option to point people to different landing pages on your own site for each product or service! Very useful. 

6. Contact From Your Company (optional) - You may have different departments handling different products. Here you can add different contact info. Nice. 

6. Add a Promotion (optional) - Here you can even add a promo you might have going, complete with a Title, its own URL and a description. Another excuse for a landing page!

Create Audience Segments 

If you really want to get fancy, LinkedIn allows you to customize how you present your products and services to different market segments. 

This is a very powerful feature as it allows you to create content that’s relevant to different target markets. You can segment markets by Company Size, Job Function, Industry, Seniority and Geography and then create entirely different Products and Services pages for each segment. When people come to your company page, LinkedIn will serve up the appropriate page version based on the users’ LinkedIn profile.  Wow!

This feature deserves its own blog post, but for now you can learn more details from this Hubspot post on LinkedIn Targeted Company Pages and this LinkedIn video as well. 

YouTube Video Embed

And last but not least, LinkedIn allows you to embed a YouTub video on your Products and Services page as well. 

 So there ya go. Setting up you LinkedIn Company page in 5 ‘simple’ steps.

No problem! Let us know if you have any questions or need help some of the more technical stuff, Spark’s social media services team will be glad to help you.

If this post is not enough for you, check out our latest inbound marketing infographic to find out why you should work with an inbound marketing agency.

While you’re at it, don’t forget to check out one of our latest latest whitepapers – The Essential Guide to Internet Marketing as well.

Getting your website found is a constant struggle for many companies. 

And employing search engine optimization (SEO) practices was traditionally the answer.  

But these days traditional SEO is not enough.

Today, having a substantial amount of quality content under your domain is just as important.  

Quite simply, when it comes to driving traffic to your website, content volume matters

Mo’ Bloggin’, Mo’ Traffic

Hubspot (and others) have been advocating the benefits of frequent content creation for a while now.

In 2011, they conducted a survey of 4,000 businesses and discovered some very interesting correlations between the amount of content and the amount of traffic of a website.  

With over 2,000 indexed web pages and 13,000 subscribers, Hubspot’s own success certainly supports their survey results. 

But they’re not the only ones. 

Marketing Tech Blog Data

Another popular blog, Marketing Tech Blog, with almost 11,000 indexed web pages and over 1,000 subscribers, recently did a keyword study of their own Google Webmaster data to determine exactly where their organic search traffic was coming from. 

Detailed in the post, Does Your Organic Rank Matter?, the blog revealed that 72% of their organic search traffic came from keywords they didn’t even rank for on the first page of the Google SERPs. 

According to Douglas Karr at Marketing Tech Blog, this data is from their Google Webmasters account.  In other words, all the data in the analysis had social media and other SERP personalization filtered out. If this is the case, it can ONLY mean that when people search, they are going to the 2nd, 3rd, 4th page of the Google search results page to find Doug’s blog.

In a comments exchange on the post, Douglas  said, 

“This is people that ARE clicking past page 1 looking for a RELEVANT result….My point isn’t that ranking is NOT important…. my point is that RELEVANCE is much more important THAN ranking. If you focus your content and write great content, people will find you. Regardless of rank.“

This research was also highlighted in a webinar by Kuno Creative, Inbound Marketing is the New SEO. 

Spark’s Own Data Supports Same Conclusions

Not to be outdone, Spark  decided to do the same study of  own keyword and visitor data. 

The results were very similar.

From March 8 2011 – March 8 2012, we saw over 50% of our organic search traffic coming from keywords we don’t rank for on the first page of Google SERPs. 

Traffic from Lots of Long Tail, Low Volume Keywords

Moreover, of all the queries that were used to get to Spark’s website during that timeframe, Spark did not rank on the first page of Google SERPs for 71% of them. 

Diving down into that 71% a little bit further, most of the queries only yielded one or two visits each. But they were very numerous.

People were using a lot of long tail multi-word queries to find Spark’s website such as:

• new revenue sources for tradeshow companies
• b2b buying decision infographic
• business requirements for lead tracking

Getting Found in a Long Tail World

So the lesson from the data is straightforward: 

When it comes to driving pure traffic volume, keywords you rank for are still important but you should not ignore the wide and varied set of  diverse long-tail queries that you don’t rank for. 

And the only way to really attract that wide & varied set of queries is to create a wide and varied set of content. If you have a big enough “content footprint” and you’re relevant to what people are searching on, people will find you, regardless of your ranking. 

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not advocating content farms or encouraging you to go out and create a bunch of low quality articles. Google Panda has taken care of that problem. But I am an advocate of stepping up your content game. Today, companies that can create large quantities of quality content are the winners.

It’s becoming a competitive advantage.  

Now go write something. 

Next time you’re reading a blog or watching a video, I want you to be conscious of a little voice in the back of your head that’s saying: 

 ”How is this website going to solve my problem or answer my question right now“. 

And this is obvious as a web surfer, right? Of course you want to find content that’s relevant to your immediate needs.  

But for some reason, this point gets lost on many producers of content. Many business blogs choose to write about about the company Christmas party or even describe the new features of their product.

And sometimes this is OK but usually, this is not what your prospects are looking for. Let’s face it, we’re selfish creatures. And we’re busy. I’m sure your Christmas party was amazing but that’s not relevant to my immediate needs. 

If The Customer is Thinking It, You Should Be Writing It

Is your company spending valuable time and resources on business blogging? Are you creating content for the express purpose of marketing your products?

If you are, you need to watch the video below.  

At  Blogworld LA in November, Marcus Sheridan’s key theme was that answering your customers’ questions is one of the best ways to get on the map with your business blog.

How Do You Know What Questions Your Customers Are Asking?

Your company is full of great sources of customer questions. Here are a few:

• Your customer support department is a treasure trove of customer questions, complaints and issues. Talk to them and tap into the customer support database
• The sales department probably has a list of common questions that come from leads and opportunities in the pipeline. Brainstorm with your sales reps. 
• Search your Facebook and Twitter accounts for questions
• Monitor the Internet by setting up Google Alerts around questions and complaints tied to your brand

Create a Positive Feedback Loop in Your Marketing Program

When you create content that answers people’s questions, a whole bunch of great things start happening for your marketing:

• Your search engine rankings improve because you get links from other sites
• Your community grows and brand awareness increases because you get social media shares from your followers
• Your content can go “viral” because it will resonate with a lot of people, introducing your brand to new markets. 
• You will demonstrate to people that you care about them and not just selling your products. Good will shouldn’t be overrated. 

What Do You Think?

Are we right on the money here? Are we missing something? Has anyone else seen Marcus’ talks? What did you think of them? We’d love to hear from you. 

And if you want to dig in a little deeper, check out one of our latest guides – The Essential Guide to Internet Marketing and our newest infographic, Why You Need an Inbound Marketing Agency

Facebook’s new advertising products look like they may be a game changer for B2B marketers. 

You will now have the ability to use your own Facebook Page content to make your own ads.

Here’s why should you care.

Facebook has never been an optimal place for b2b marketers.  It’s always been a network for people to communicate, share and bond with other friends – not to research the best b2b products and services. 

But B2B buyers are on Facebook, just like the rest of us. And they’re always looking for strong content to educate themselves before making a buying decision. If there is a way to help them discover relevant content to help them through their buying process…you just might have something very interesting. 

Here’s how it will work:

Promote Your Content With Facebook Premium Ads

Say you are a B2B software company that’s created a brilliant new e-book that informs and educates your target audience – CIOs and CTOs for medium sized companies in the Northeast.  

Normally, you promote your content by posting it on Twitter and your LinkedIn Groups. You write a  guest post on another blog and you might even do a press release. All valid content marketing techniques. 

But with the new Facebook ad platform that’s debuting at the end of this February, you will now have an opportunity to buy ads that promote your e-book post directly on Facebook. 

You will still be able to target your audience by going through the normal Facebook ad buying process by choosing the demographics, geography and interests of your target market. But then you will be able to associate a post you have made previously, with that targeted ad.  

Social Context Advertising Works

If  one of your friends has “Liked” the e-book content, you’ll see that they Liked it in the ad. This is basically Facebook’s  ”Sponsored Stories” product and is a key part of Facebook’s advertising strategy. Facebook claims that ads that include this “social context” are  40% more likely to be clicked on and 80% more likely to be remembered.  

According to documents originally posted to Scribd this week, ”When people hear about you from friends, they listen”. 

The new ads will also allow people to respond to the content inside the ad, just as if they’d seen the content in their regular News Feed. 

Content Marketing Goes Mainstream

First of all, let’s chalk one up to content marketing movement, shall we? Folks like Joe Pulizzi, Robert Rose, Ardath Albee, Mike Volpe  and Seth Godin, have been talking for years about the power of content marketing.

And now with this new ad platform,  we may see a great way for companies to get their content found by tapping into Facebook’s new advertising platform. 

It’s still very early. And it will be interesting to see how companies react. But from where we stand here at Spark, it looks very interesting.

Content combined with the network effects of Facebook will give b2b marketers a powerful tool to promote their content, enhance their brand and ultimately sell more stuff. 

What do you think?

Facebook Premium Ads Overview

If you already have a good understanding about the inbound marketing basics, I would you suggest you skip through the first half. If you don’t it’s worth sitting through the entire presentation.

Don’t Spam’em To Death

One part I thought was interesting was when he talked about how many people still think about B2B Marketing.

He broke it down into a two step process: 

Step 1: Give away a valuable piece of content in exchange for someone’s email address

Step 2: Spam them until either they buy something from you, you die or they die.

B2B Marketing is a Mutual Learning Relationship

Instead, Dharmesh suggests that, yes you have go through Step 1. But then B2B marketers should look at this as the start of a mutual learning relationship between the two parties. Every time the person comes back to the marketer’s site or Facebook page or wherever, it’s a chance to welcome them back and give them something more of value. 

“Ah, welcome back Dharmesh, we saw you downloaded this whitepaper last time, we thought you might be interested in this other similar whitepaper”

This part is at the 44 minute mark. 

If this post is not enough for you, check out our latest inbound marketing infographic to find out why you should work with an inbound marketing agency.

While you’re at it, don’t forget to check out one of our latest latest whitepapers – The Essential Guide to Internet Marketing as well. We promise we won’t spam you to death!

You may have heard of the latest social media phenomenon Pinterest.

Started in March 2010, Pinterest allows its users to create and share theme-based image collections.

According to the site, Pinterest’s mission is to “connect everyone in the world through the ‘things’ they find interesting.”

Pinterest’s Hockey Stick Moment

Pinterest has grown to over 7.21 million registered users as of December 2011.  This is phenomenal growth considering it had only 190,000 registered users as of June.  And more importantly, it’s 11 million weekly visits drove greater traffic to websites than LinkedIn, Google Plus, Reddit, and Youtube — combined. 

Right now, Pinterest is popular among women who share images of fashion, home decor, recipes and food.  Many claim a serious addiction to it. 

But Pinterest is about much more than women’s apparel. It’s popularity represents a watershed moment in how we discover new products and services.

Call it social discovery. 

The Shift From Search to Social

When we search for a product on Google, we have to know what we’re searching for. We have to signal our intent to the search engine. Put your query in, get instant results (and ads). 

And since we already know what we’re looking for, we’re well on our way to buying the product already. 

In marketing parlance, these people are known as bottom of the funnel buyers. 

But sites like Pinterest and Svpply, operate at the top of the funnel. This is where people learn about new products that others like enough to share with the world.  

It’s social product discovery and it may just replace advertising someday. 

Will Mad Men Hate Pinterest?

Advertising’s primary purpose in life is to raise awareness of new products in the consumer’s mind.  The 30-second television commercial has been the ultimate top-of-the-funnel demand generation machine for decades. And I guess you could call the  Google Display network and Facebook Advertising the modern day equivalent. 

But let’s face it. We hate the intrusive nature of advertising. We tolerate it, but we ignore it as much as we can. 

Enter Pinterest, the first real player in the social discovery movement. 

 Just login and and start discovering. You can follow the whole person or just just one of their boards. You can repin other people’s stuff on your board and you can get email notifications when others do the same for you.  

It’s much more visual than Google + or Facebook. You can easily view and interact with all the items on someones’s board.  You don’t have to worry about missing something because it’s already scrolled past your NewsFeed. 

Bottom line, Pinterest makes it easy and fun to discover new products.  And that might be the key to replacing the tired old 30 second commercial. 

Let us know if you need an invite to Pinterest.  Just put your email into the comments below and we’ll send you one ASAP! 

Many companies need to justify their usage of social media by trying to determine an ROI. 

We understand that. 

And there’s nothing like a quick video to pack in some great examples and stats on how social media is changing the b2b marketing landscape across various industries. 

Social Media ROI Video from Erik Qualman

Erik Qualman, author of Socialnomics and Digital Leader,  has been putting out great videos on the incredible rise in social media for years. 

A few key stats that stood out:

• Lenovo saw a 20% drop in call center activity as customers went to the community website instead
• Blendtec quintupled their sales with their series of YouTube videos
• Dell sold $3 million worth of computers on Twitter
• Only 18% of TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
• 25% of Ford Motor’s marketing budget is allocated to digital and social media

B2B Social Media Statistics

Another great source of data that addresses social media ROI is SocialMediaB2B. 

According to one of their blog posts on B2B social media statistics:

• 60% of B2B Marketers have implemented a social media strategy, or will in the next year
• 47% of B2B Companies actively participate on LinkedIn
• 53% of B2B Companies actively participate on Twitter
• 63% of B2B Marketers are either vaguely aware or not aware what is being said about their companies online

If you’re interested, check out some of our other interesting stuff like this pretty cool infographic to find out why you should work with an inbound marketing agency.

And if you want to dig in a little deeper, check out one of our latest guides – The Essential Guide to Internet Marketing as well.

These days, when someone reads your blog post, it’s like a having a first meeting with your company. People find you on search or social and read your post. You, of course, make a great first impression with an informative and professional article.

They’re impressed and feel good about receiving something of value for free.

The Principle of Reciprocity Kicks In

In the book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini, the author talks about the principle of reciprocity and it goes something like this:

When someone receives something of value for free, they feel a powerful inclination to give something back in return. This is human nature. 

And it works the same way on your blog as well.

After reading your post, people will feel inclined to give something back….and then BOOM….they see your offer. 

Make an Offer They Can’t Refuse

Do you have a promotion going on right now? Or how about a related whitepaper or an old presentation that would give the reader more insight? 

If you do, make an attractive graphic that links to the offer and put it at the end of your blog post.  

Link Your Offer to a Landing Page with a Form

When they click on your offer they should go to an exclusive landing page.  The landing page should be brief and to the point and should have a small unobtrusive form that innocently asks for two simple things – their name and email address.

They get the offer and your get their information. Win-Win.

And because you warmed them up with a great blog post, you should be able to convert more people to a lead than ever before.

Convert More Blog Readers to Leads in 3 Steps 

To review, you need to remember 3 steps to converting more blog readers to leads:

Step 1: Create interesting, informative, educational blog posts that solve your customers’ problems or answers one of their questions

Step 2: Create an attractive graphic at the end of the blog post that links to your offer

Step 3: Create a landing page for the offer with a short explanation of benefits and short simple form.  

That’s it. Try it, you’ll like it!

If this post is not enough for you, check out our latest inbound marketing infographic to find out why you should work with an inbound marketing agency.

While you’re at it, don’t forget to check out one of our latest latest whitepapers – The Essential Guide to Internet Marketing as well.