It happened friends. After years of Rand exposing me to the many benefits of inbound marketing I am ready to admit it...{big gulp}...today's marketer needs to be doing more than paid marketing. In fact, I'd go as far as to say, if you are only doing paid marketing you are failing yourself and your company. THERE I SAID IT. I feel better. Way better actually.
Because it's true. Things have changed. There is no longer two main players in the game (SEO and PPC). Search marketing itself has evolved. We've covered a great deal of this here on the blog so I won't go into it too much. If you need a reminder, I urge you to go check out Rand's posts where he outlines The New Era of Inbound Marketing, and outlines how quickly it is growing. As marketers, we saw the shift coming, and now we are feeling it in our every day gigs. Our roles are expanding as traditional SEO itself expands. There is so much happening all around us. Who is freaking out? Yeah me too.
The real question you may be asking yourself is, "why is this paid marketing lady talking about inbound marketing?" Good question. The other day I was running through my to-do list and I couldn't help but notice how not-focused it was on paid marketing. In fact, most of my day was spent brainstorming with others on how to better share data, repurpose existing assets, and collaborate. While Justin and I manage paid marketing here at Moz, more and more of our time is spent on learning and leveraging our inbound efforts more effectively.
I thought I'd run through some ways that I'm leaning on our inbound marketing efforts to both reduce Moz's costs and capture more leads. Did you all know you could get leads for free? Yeah, crazypants I know. Anyway, here are the top ten ways I've leveraged inbound as a paid marketer here at Moz;
#10: Share Persona Outlines
You know who is really good at researching a target audience? Content writers. Recently, Michael King actually did a killer webinar on understanding your target audience and using social media tools to help define your best audience. It covers this concept really well. The idea is there are so many excellent demographic tools available to us now that these social networks want us to buy ads on them. We can look at audience sizes, location, categories, etc. All of this information has been helping organic marketers write targeted content for years. Paid marketers should be leaning on this data. What have they discovered that could help me better target high-value leads? Outline your target audience and extracting personas can be really challenging, but the more teams connect on this the better all our marketing efforts are targeted.
#9: Leverage Landing Pages
Design resources are hard to come by. Here at Moz we have Derric and Ramil basically sleeping in the office and we still have a backlog of projects that need their creative brains. Ask any paid marketer what is the bottleneck and often you will hear design resources pop up. So what can we do? Use landing pages that our inbound marketers have already queued up for us! Brilliant! Often times these pages are beautifully designed, and laced with excellent engagement opportunities. These are mandatory in a solid inbound marketing page and they are requirements of a successful paid search lander...coincidence? I think not.
#8: Exchange Conversion Reports
Oh conversion data, how sweet you are. I think most paid marketers are looking at the SEO data at their company. At least I hope they are! Beyond that though, there is more data you should be looking at. Here at Moz, we are a little data crazy. Jen, our Community Wrangler, puts together amazing metrics on our social activities every week. I have found that by mining her weekly data summaries I can see what content has gone hot and where. I can see where we are increasing brand awareness and what type of people are taking to the Moz brand. From there I can better allocate our budget to supplement these efforts.
#7: Collaborate on Keyword Research
So this one is one of those things we keep saying we are going to do, but rarely does it actually happen. I am always amazed by the keyword research process. First off, it's really time consuming. Secondly, it's not effective as a one-time step, it really needs to be done in an ongoing basis. Yet despite all this, both paid teams and organic teams have been doing separate keyword research for years. Ick. Yuck.
An awesome benefit to doing inbound marketing is the speed in which we can detect if something resonates. Where as before I might have used paid search budget to test an adjective or product description, I can now push out a targeted piece of content and see how the audience responds. It's immediate data collection and its statistically valid. I can't get over the power of the social graph when it comes to crowdsourcing reactions to certain keywords. This is the new keyword research in my opinion. We must combine our traditional keyword tools with audience response across these inbound channels.
#6: Repurpose Content
This one is pretty obvious, yet, so easy to skip over. I am guilty of this too often myself. Paid marketers need to be driving traffic to past inbound marketing wins. For example, about a year and a half ago we updated the Beginners Guide to SEO. This has gone on to be downloaded close to a million times, translated into other languages, and continues to be an excellent traffic driver. Guess how much of my paid marketing budget goes to driving traffic to this excellent piece of content? Yup you guessed it...none.
In the past, my argument was "it didn't drive enough free trial signups to show ROI." What I've realized over the past few months is I need to go deeper into what "conversion" means. What does acquisition mean? What does growth mean? My paid marketing efforts should be wrapped around these already successful content pieces. Repurposing hot viral content through paid marketing channels is a great example of how we can accomplish cross-channel marketing. Isn't it pretty when we all get along? Who wants to hug? Bueller?
#5: Share Customer Feedback
Customer feedback is gold, pure gold. Inbound marketing is about being found online through a variety of activities -- content publishing, social engagement, etc. A huge benefit of these conversations and interactions is the wealth of feedback you can receive from the community you have created. Often here at Moz, we will ask our community team to help us understand what our customers really love about our PRO service. We can hear right from them what keeps them happy, and what we can do better. This helps drive our marketing messages and our product roadmaps. Sharing the customer feedback and voice is so important, and the value found in sharing that across multiple teams in the organization is huge.
#4: Planning for Resources
Over the past few years we have seen the expectations of an online marketer change. We have more on our plates, more tools to log into, more reports to pull, more content to write, and so on and so forth. Inevitably these demands require more resources and more talent on any given project. I have found that by asking the organic marketers and community marketers here at the company what they are working on, I can better plan for my paid projects. If we are contracting a copyeditor for a content piece, I can slip in a request to revisit some ad copy headlines in the same contract. I can also repurpose design resources for banners, and landers. By knowing what your inbound team is working on, all of us can push out more faster. This is a huge benefit to connecting the to teams in both goals and resource planning.
#3: Fuel the Fire
I am a big fan of the halo effect as it applies to marketing. The halo effect, for those that might not know, is when customers show a bias to a product or brand based on some favorable or pleasant experience they have had previously. The beauty of it as it applies to today's marketing efforts is there are so many opportunities for a brand impression, and most of which are free.
A positive conversation a brand representative has with a user on a Facebook page may be enough to persuade a user to click a retargeting banner when faced with the brand's logo. Those two combined may build enough trust to persuade them to take a free trial. I call this "fueling the fire." While paid marketing may be measured on a CPA basis, there is a lot that happens prior to an action that influences the likelihood of a conversion. Inbound marketing offers mutiple opportunities to positively bias a potential customer. The goodwill a customer has in a brand often has very little to do with push marketing efforts, but has everything to do with these more organic experiences.
#2: Prequalify a Message
At the heart of it, marketers are story tellers. We love to persuade. As a paid marketer I spend most of my time coming up with ways to message my audience. Sometimes it's a new audience and sometimes it's my current audience, but either way I need to constantly be testing new ways to capture their attention. Prequalifying a message can be time consuming and can cost a lot of money depending on how I test it.
In the past I may have run a banner campaign on a relevant blog post and looked at metrics like CTR and CR. I may have also thrown money at a focus group (and whoa those can cost a lot) to see how people responded to a story we had crafted. These days I can use the power of social to test messages in record time. I can put together a presentation or a white paper and see how many times it gets shared, viewed, and downloaded. By counting these "social votes" I go beyond just clicks as a means of pre-qualification. It's a really great way for me to collect good data fast.
#1: Strengthen the Brand's Story
While the other nine ideas are great, this is my favorite. Nothing is more powerful than a consistent marketing message. Over the years I've worked to connect retargeting banners, paid search ads, landers, affiliate banners, and social advertising to send a strong and cohesive message. You know what stinks about that? All of those cost me money...which is no fun. Keeping money is fun. Spending all your money...not fun.
For promotions or time sensitive messages, if I really wanted to see an impact, I had to have serious budgets. There has to be a better way. Aligning some of these paid efforts with some inbound efforts makes for an even more compelling story for half the cost. As you push out new things and try to create buzz, you need to be asking yourself, "Is this the best use of my time and money?" I think as a paid marketer we can often forget to take that pause. We rest on the channels we know well but we need to push for more.
In Conclusion
Rand was right. In fact, all of my SEO friends were right. While paid marketing has a role to play in all of this, the direction the web has taken demands more from us marketers. While I am not sold that inbound marketing is all any marketer needs, I do believe there is a synergy between the two that can be very powerful. If we share resources, connect data, and collaborate rather than compete I think both teams win. I'm super excited about what this means for the future of paid search marketing. If you do paid and you aren't connecting with your organic marketing and social teams, you really are making your job harder than it needs to be.
I'd love to hear from you guys if there are other ways you have seen the teams connect and work more effectively together. Where do you see this all going as social marketing and content marketing continue to take more of our time as marketers? Where does paid fit into this?
Solid list Joanna. It's gonnna be really interesting to see what role content curation plays as well. I've seen a lot of smart people trying to apply curation to their blogs but I rarely find value in it from the reader's perspecrtive.
I just discovered @contently and it seems to be going down the right path of combining curation with high quality content.
Rick you bring up an excellent point. I has started to tackle content curation in a post but it was leading me into a very lengthy post. :) We talk a lot about it internally though. We are hiring for a Content Oracle ourselves who would be in charge of just that -- curating the content. Its at the intersection of so much -- organic, social, paid landers, etc. It needs to be more than created, and managed, it needs to be monitored, tweaked, evagelized, guided, reacted to, etc. I am definitely interested to see how that plays out.
Exactly! I think a lot of the people who have tried content curation up to this point have done it wrong. It's appealing to a lot of internet marketers because it makes it seem like they can grow an audience "passively".
However like any other form of marketing, building an audience through content curation will be a huge challenge. The curator has to be seen as a thought leader for the topic they are curating and they have to keep the pulse on their audience.
Good luck with your content challenges in 2012! It's a fun time to be a content marketer :)
Moz team is full with professional marketers and creative minds. They can easily come up with content ideas and start working on them!
Can you see latest change in blog post by Moz team members! This is another big game and helps them to grow further as a brand. I think you got my Point!
Hi Joanna and Rick: actually I am preparing a post for SEOmoz about Content Curation (what is, what tools/sites are out there, curating in-site out-site and social content curation, why to use it (Seo, branding and reputation) and examples. As you say, and as I advised a couple of days ago on twitter, it's necessarily huge as I'm thinking to it as a sort of guide and reference source.
By the way, how you, Joanna, are using Pinterest (which is a social content curation tool), is a great example of curating content.
Looking forward to read it.
Is Pinterest obviously has some well thiught through funnels and has been dedicated for a couple of years.
Although it is content curation I do not believe it's example can be relevant or used as a case study for others to follow through with any sustainable actions for the longer term.
Do not get me wrong 'pictures paint a thousand words' and the visual impact in Pinterest and the few steps to pin your own makes it easy for people to 'get it'. But what value does it haev for a marketer?
I look forward to reading your post on curation and hopefully my questions will be answered in this.
Joanna.. that's a good detailed description about the Inbound marketing and it's significance. Earlier I used to consider it as a supplementary part of the online promotional activities but now the things have changed, the people's way of using and organizing the data in online world is also changed. The socialism is getting more and more strength and hence it's necessary to take the Inbound marketing as one of the fundamental steps for the online promotion. Infact, in today's Era.. I feel like we SEO folks should cover everything as a part of Inbound marketing. The traditional way of search engine optimization is not just an enough to do , but its more evolved into Inbound Marketing. Thanks Joanna! That was the great read for me!
Hey! I'm really interested in the conversation around "search engine optimization" as it has evolved.
Do you think its right to say "Inbound Marketing" or do you think that is just the next phase of SEO?
Should we be calling it SEO and just describing how its changed?
I know it is just semantics a little bit, but we talk about it internally a little, I'd love to hear what the community thinks...
That is a question others are actually having. It is clear that Search Marketing in general is evolving, so that SEO meant essentially as technical optimization and link building is becoming "obsolate".
Danny Sullivan discussed it on Google+ and then on MarketingLand (I recommend you to read the thread and comments).
Personally, I think that SEO will remain SEO, but it will be integrated into Inbound Marketing, meaning with Inbound Marketing a necessary bigger and holistic vision of the Internet Marketing, which disciplines until now had no problem evolving all on their own and without really having a significant integration one eachother. This something you remind with this post about Paid Marketing and SEO and Tom Chritchlow in his wonderful post about Content Marketing published today in the Distilled blog.
That means that all the specializations of SEO will remain also as professional figures, but on a higher level, those who are now Senior SEO, Consultants and/or SEO strategists will need to evolve in an Inbound Strategist figure, because they will need to coordinate SEO, Social and Content. But, on the other hand, it would be also possible and justify to have as Inbound Strategist someone coming from Content Marketing or Social Marketing, if they had evolved too and learnt and have their hands dirty doing SEO/Content/Social.
Thanks Gianluca! We talked through that SEL post the other day. I think you bring up some good points around position titles and what that will look like moving forward. Funny enough we all feel here that we are inbound marketers at this point. Nothing we do doesn't touch content, or start a conversation, or help us reach more of those on the Web, yet none of us call ourselves inbound marketers.
I'm not sure I support someone calling themselves an Inbound Strategist to be honest, it sort of takes away from what the rest of us are doing. Most advanced marketers at this point are thinking holistically and looking for points of overlap for increased reach and effectiveness.
Hmmm you've got me thinking. Thanks Gianluca!
:-),,,, mine is simply an "what if" based of what I'm seeing along these last two years. We are assisting to the changing while it is taking its way. Those "advanced marketer", even though they are not calling themselves "inbound strategists" actually they or they are going to be one of them. Take as an example what Blueglass is doing with its latest acquisition, or Distilled with its growing interest about Content, or SEOGadget on smaller scale with its increasing leading toward CRO and content generation. In my personal vision the next step will be when holistic will mean really a strategically complemented integration of all the disciplines, as actually - using your word - it seems to me that is more overlapping. In this vision, all the disciplines of Internet marketing will still have their own independent goals to achieve, but they will necessarily need to act under the direction of a coordinator. Somehow it is an ambitious vision, which aims to see real web marketers leading the Marketing department of any business company :)
I work for a very large UK retailer and it is amazing how they measure everything and although not perfect latched on to 'Conversion and optimisation' late last year and now want to ensure that all their offline activity is tracked using web metrics i.e. defined urls per press release.
I was bought in as a role of SEO and Social Media Manager but this quickly evolved.
We created a presence on trustpilot.com gathering 1,000 of reviews and for one of the site become the top in the category within a few months with over 3,000 reviews.
Product reviews have been integrate in to site.
Customer review [10,000's] integrated in to the site
blog, press releases, guest blogging, social media, etc, integrated
A very holistic approach is being taken which is happening from observation, testing, monitoring and also connecting with the community.
Although not a title of 'inbound strategist' it is heading in that direction. I am up for appriaisal in Juen should I request a job title to 'ecommerce manager' or 'inbound strategist' ? lol
Great post, Joanna!
Far too often, I hear people discussing headlines, copy, landing pages, etc. as if they exist in two completely separate worlds: paid marketing and inbound marketing. But fundamentally, if something truly resonates with your audience, that will manifest itself in both domains. The same tweet that generated a wave of RTs can be repurposed to serve as a PPC headline that can generate a wave of clicks. The same landing page that generated a flurry of organic conversions has the potential to generate similar results with paid traffic. Obviously, there are still unique characteristics of both forms of marketing, but the faster we embrace and exploit their commonalities, the more efficient and successful we will be as marketers. Your post does a great job of emphasizing this point, and I'm glad you're finally on the bandwagon ;-)
I really like the concept of "embracing their commonalities." I might snag that sentence in the future :) Happy to finally be on the bandwagon!
great thread of discussion with useful link to relevant articles on social content and SEO, thanks gfiorelli1 for your contributions and JoannaLord for the post.
Nice Post Joanna!
Rightly said we should always have paid marketing for already successful content. As you mentioned it will be tried and tested with customer’s comments and views on it.
So it becomes good and easy way to gain confidence of new visitors and might give them a feel that they were missing something popular.
Hi Joanna,
Amazing article, and must have been written specifically (right what i needed ATM) for me I think lol.
But the most interesting part, which consolidates my statement above is the quality testing of content via social channels. While it is quite glaringly obvious once stated I have never looked at that angle before. I suppose we are all programmed to test and measure for conversion in either paid or organic but I have never thought about bringing in a third metric, using social as the steering devices for creative roll outs.
Would love to get a part 2 of this article that digs deeper into #2 Prequalify a Message Via Social.
There is a bit of social feedback that might inspire another amazing piece, what does everyone else think???
Thanks again!!!
Wow I really like your post. very intersting keep the good work and the positive attitude.
I think in today's society of "instant gratification", inbound marketing doesn't sound so exciting as it takes months if not years to obtain meaningful results. However, the renting versus owning analogy really applies...those who commit to inbound marketing and have success will be rewarded handsomely and those who build a business on top of PPC will constantly be at the mercy of having to pay for their traffic.
Thanks for the great list. I love the idea of repurposing content. Expanding and improving content is one of my favorite things to do. I also love the customer-based ideas - customer feedback and sharing persona outlines.
Great post. Just wanted to comment on a few of the points mentioned above.
#9: Landing Pages – You can deliver a customized landing page experience without having to manage a number of landing pages. Our technology (Get Smart Content) enables sites the ability to easily do this after seeing that landing page creation/maintenance can be draining.
#3: Fuel the Fire – How are brands engaging with individuals who click through on their ads/inbound marketing activities? If a user has previously been to the site, customize the initial landing page to customize their experience from previous actions.
#1: Strengthen The Brand's Story – By continuing to provide relevant messaging based upon what they have already consumed on the site, brands have the ability to continue to spread their message and story.
Really enjoyed your post and thinking about the way additional technology could be used to further add to the user experience while increasing conversions.
Taylor Schaeffer | Get Smart Content
It's a kinda approach to leverage inbound marketing ! I ll always like to go through a paid marketing campaign to raise traffic and reputation for a brand.
I admit that until today I did not really understand what inbound marketing was, but I do now, so thank you!
Luckily I seem to have been doing most of it already without realising. Phew!
Great post, Joanna!
This statement is so very true: "While I am not sold that inbound marketing is all any marketer needs, I do believe there is a synergy between the two that can be very powerful."
We have tried inbound marketing only for 3-4 years. Last year we added PPC and paid stumbles to the marketing effort. The synergi has been really positive. PPC is a great way to introduce new users to the product. And when the product is sufficiently good, people will be coming back through organic channels.
PPC and other paid channels can help create search demand, share content, link to content and, of course, convert.
Great read Jonna! The point that make me agree you like anything is the when you said that Inbound marketing is not all marketer needs but synergy of both Inbound marketing and paid marketing build a unique platform where people can convert easily.
Up till now I used the paid data to use for search like what keywords are performing well for conversions then use the similar data for SEO but I am super excited to hear the other way around and that is using the SEO data for paid search... now when I am thinking about this multiple ideas are popping up in my brain!
Super Interesting...
Using both inbound marketing (SEO) and Paid marketing will surely affect to increase brand awareness and increase ROI. Paid ad always works if and only if we know our targeted audience this will help a simple user to remember brand but the main problem is its very expensive. So the best possible choice is to use both ways to cover each other weaknesses. So I can say if we want to survive as a brand like Moz then we should do apply both techniques!
I always thought that paid marketing is a boss as far as promotion is concerned. We started doing paid marketing around 6 months back and the results were awsome. however, now I realized that most of the paid marketing results were influenced by our inbound marketing team efforts. And now we are working together with our inbound arketing team and you would not believe that our ROI has gone to 600% now. Thanks Joanna for sharing this post, this would certainly help me further. Thanks again.
If your company has allocated a marketing budget of any substantial size, I think another great marketing resource that is quite often over looked these days and still affordable and effective when used correctly is terrestrial radio. Terrestrial Radio offer many different demographical stats these days and if your message is clear and concise enough it will be easy to remember. So for example, say FreeCreditReport.com. Well that would be a fairly easy name to remember when driving down the street. And think about this, you have the audience’s undivided attention on their drive and generally after they are done driving they have access to a computer. So if your message was clear and easy to remember and compelling enough, you can really take full advantage of radio and their large cumes. It also in many cases will cost the same or less than many online marketing campaigns. And you can find voiceover talent surprisingly inexpensive and good. You just have to decide if your product or service is a good fit for the audience you are reaching.
Didn't I read last week that P&G was planning to lay off some 1,600 people in their Marketing Dept. after the CEO got wind that they could advertise on G+ and FB for free so some variation therein? Now that G+SYW and the personal results are the default SERP's and knowing that social shares are evolving as a key SEO | SEM element, it seems to me that BOTH camps must be as you say "in sync" for the over all strategy to be effective.
Yup you remember correctly! I remember reading through that post. There definitely seems to be a wave of "waking up" in which many marketing departments are taking a second look at current structures and asking themselves what should be moved, reallocated, or dropped altogether.
Great, great post. Thanks! Love how you bring it back to essentials like story telling, language and how we work together. Thinking this way takes some quiet, time and reflection- that's the challenge so we end up spinning back into our isolated parts. Basically we have to learn to connect and integrate everything... and btw, welcome to the club:) Inbound marketing is getting really so much more exciting!
Insightful tips here, Joanna. (#1) There's a difference between writing toward an audience and getting an audience to come to you- targeting helps make good traction out of the gates.
Also, I like the notion of #6 - if your brand released a good 'evergreen' piece (or even an old time-sensitive piece that was extraordinary) it could attract 'new' attention to the brand and 'enforce' current intrigue.
The branding sentiments in #3 and #1 I especially champion. I think a brand can't go wrong in making further connections with customers and strengthening current ones. In a time when there is so much competition in all verticals, branding helps consumers view your brand as unique, distinguishable from the competition. Talk about savings on marketing costs...'optimize' branding efforts, get browsers to come to you through brand-name searches and 'favorite bar' clicks, those are the kind of 'rankings' branding can get. Great post.
I couldn't agree more. Great Article.
Paid methods may be more easily measurable and provide faster results but thinking in terms a little bit longer, let's say just a few years, some solid investing in relevant content will pay off even more. Also it will continue to do so even if one decided to do almost nothing for a while.