Where do I start?
I recently listened to Rick Burnes from HubSpot lead a seminar in Wisconsin and I was really impressed. He has inspired me to utilize inbound marketing techniques for my company; however, I am at a loss as to where to start.
I just started my first job as the Marketing and Public Relations Coordinator for a small technology firm in Carmel, Indiana. The company I work for, digitalKnowledge, is a hidden treasure. Unfortunately, no one knows about digitalKnowledge because it has virtually no web presence.
Below are a list of things I want to do, but I don't know where to start. Can someone help?
1. have each of the service line leaders write a blog once a week that is linked to the company's Web site
2. Get employees involved in twitter
3. encourage employees to respond to other industry blogs (listen and interact with industry thought leaders)
4. post video testimonials on the Web site
5. post videos of president and service line leaders explaining the services they provide
Any suggestions as to how to start or what software to use??
Thanks!
Laura Neufelder
Marketing & PR Coordinator
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First - determing your
Brian Rogers 2 years 30 weeks 6 days 11 hours ago
First - determine your overall keyword strategy and optimize your site, once this is done you wont need to spend a tone of time w/ optimization.
Second - determine your offers and calls to action as growing traffic to your site isn't any good unless your set up to convert.
Then I would start with determining your content creating plan and rolling out your blog. You need to get this resource up and running first for a few reasons:
1. It is very importat to create regular content and it can be difficult to get authors together and commited to a regular schedule of creating conent
2. When getting active on social sites, how will you drive traffic to your site? W/out interesting content to link to, you'll just be sharing other people's content on your network which is important for growing it, but it wont get you traffic
3. When getting engaged with other blogs, you should have a blog you can enter as the link when allowed while leaving a comment, don't just link back to your homepage. As with social media, you need to send the traffic to a useful resource (like the blog) and not just your business site.
Once you get the content plan in place, create a few blog articles (make sure to optimize them and keep them in line w/ your overall keyword strategy!!). Now you can work on growing your social networks and engaging blogs.
One more thing
RickBurnes 2 years 30 weeks 6 days 13 hours ago
You might check out this thread: http://www.inboundmarketing.com/node/692
More great advice!
Rick
You're on the right track.
RickBurnes 2 years 31 weeks 5 hours 42 min ago
Hi Laura,
Thanks for the nice post. It's great to hear you enjoyed my talk in Appleton.
I think you're on exactly the right track. I also think Alyce had a lot of good suggestions.
A few things I would add:
(1) Read (and comment on) the following blogs:
www.webinknow.com/
www.micropersuasion.com/
www.chrisbrogan.com/
blog.hubspot.com (ours!)
(There are a bunch of other that I read regullarly, but these should get you started.)
(2) Keep an eye out for great examples of other business and best their best practices.
We write about them every so often on the HubSpot blog -- places like the Roger Smith Hotel and Whole Foods.
(3) Focus on your buyer personas.
Who are your target customers? What sort of content are they searching for? What kind of content do they gravitate towards on social networks. This is the kind of content you need to be creating.
start with the basics, but just start!
Alyce Lindquist 2 years 31 weeks 6 hours 57 min ago
Hi Laura,
First of all, you're getting a great start just by posting your question to a reliable forum. (One caveat though, I'm not sure how much traffic this forum is getting right now since the University is in between sessions. You might have better interaction if you post your question to the Marketing Profs group on LinkedIn, for example.)
I've just recently started getting involved in social media marketing myself, so I'll share what I've done to self-educate:
-> read Ground Swell by Charlene Li.
Start here, you can read it in a weekend and start to develop your own plan of attack.
-> started to use Twitter regularly, building up a following and learning to follow the folks who I can help and/or learn from. And using as many other tools as I can.
I recommend learning by immersion! Just dive in and start. Start small, but just start.
-> attended the Inbound Marketing Summit 09 San Francisco.
Fantastic intro to using social media in business! Produced by Chris Brogan and the folks at New Marketing Labs - next one coming up in Boston, definitely register and get yourself to this conference if at all possible.
-> attended Marketing Profs B2B Forum in Boston.
Great conference materials, great content, great chance to meet folks and learn from them. This is an annual event, but the Marketing Profs site is full of great content (highly recommend the premiem membership, well worth the price for the content, webinars, reports, etc that you can learn from). They've got another conference coming up in Chicago in Oct (Digital Mixer), would be another very good opportunity to immerse yourself and meet folks you can learn from.
-> followed the twitter stream coming from TWTRCON and 140conf.
When you can't go to a conference or event in person, you can pick up a lot of content, ideas, tips & tricks from just following the stream coming from the event. Or reading the blogs. People in the social media community at large are pretty generous with their info, and twitter is a pretty fun and engaging way to share with others.
-> took the IMU online course.
Really great (free!) content from beginning level to advanced. Next one is in August I think? Definitely sign up for this course whenever it's offered again, you will learn a TON.
-> started my own blog. I'm a little stuck on this phase, but it's moving forward in the next couple of weeks.
And, in the words of Chris Brogan - just start! Repeat, repeat, repeat.
Give me a shout if you need more ideas on where to go / who to learn from. Much luck!
twitter: @alyce
email: alyce at mac dot com
Cheers,
Alyce Lindquist
Expanding Web Footprint
Dan Ronken 2 years 31 weeks 5 hours 30 min ago
Hi Laura,
You've come to the right place. Alyce provided you with some great information and tools to get started. I'll add to some of her ideas. One thing you can start is by watching www.HubSpot.tv tomorrow live at 4pm eastern time (if you can't it will be archieve to watch at a later date) I would recommend watching previous episodes too (archived on itunes). It's a short video podcast presented by Mike Volpe and Karen Rubin and it's a hoot to watch. You'll find they have some very intriguing guests as well (Biz Stone - Twitter Founder, Jeff Taylor - Monster.com Founder). Anyway, that's what I did and now I'm so excited about Inbound Marketing that I'm creating a business around it! Moving onto your questions:
1. have each of the service line leaders write a blog once a week that is linked to the company's Web site
Great idea as blogging is a very important way for people to find you on the internet. Consistent remarkable content is a them you will surely hear over and over as you investigate further
2. Get employees involved in twitter.
Yes, you'll probably want to set up accounts for employees for internal communication as well as a company account to promote into the twittersphere
3. encourage employees to respond to other industry blogs (listen and interact with industry thought leaders)
You could always start by requesting the employees to locate a blog and post a comment to it and share it with co-workers on a friday morning bagel and coffee meeting or something along those lines. There will certainly be some knowledge that will be gained from an event like this. Social media requres a paradigm shift and a lot of people don't understand the benefit of businesses getting involved yet. Another reason to engage in industry blogs is this is where you cutomers are spending their time.
4. post video testimonials on the Web site
Watch this video www.hubspot.com/marketing-webinars/online-video-archive/
5. post videos of president and service line leaders explaining the services they provide - See link above.
Any suggestions as to how to start or what software to use??
I know my post sounds like a HubSpot commercial but they are my 'go to' experts in this fascinating world of Inbound Marketing. I've recently become a customer. The software provides everything you need on a single interface! That's a big deal because trying to tie all of this stuff together can be disheartening without some sort of streamlined system. As Alyce mention already, Chris Brogan is master in social media. HubSpot has the software. And you can find a million twitter experts out there. :)
Hopefully you found this helpful. Feel free to contact me if you have more questions.
Best,
Dan Ronken
www.twitter.com/danronken
www.danronken.com