Looking for additional insight? Check out our TREW Talks- SEO Slideshow

Unlocking the secret to keyword ranking success

Looking for additional insight? Check out our guide: Smart Marketing for Engineers

Last month, we gave insight on how to hire a technical marketing manager who can propel your marketing efforts forward and add value to your organization. In Part 1, we focused on prioritizing candidates’ talent, culture fit, and experience, and in Part 2, we gave the practicals for actually hiring your technical marketing manager, based on proven experience.

If you’ve now hired your technical marketing manager, pass along this information to help them understand the breadth and depth of technical marketing. Or, if you’ve just been hired as a new technical marketing manager, congratulations! These 10 keys – which focus on brand, positioning and website plans, content marketing strategy, and awareness and loyalty campaigns – will strengthen the skills and knowledge you need to be a successful technical marketing manager:

Technical Positioning, Brand, and Website Development

1. Create a Successful Marketing Plan

Having an effective marketing plan and following it will be critical to your success as a technical marketing manager. Without a plan, how do you know what you need to do, in priority order, to get there? In busy times, the tendency is to rush and complete any marketing tactic that looks promising at the moment, without taking into consideration your marketing strategy and goals. So, take the time to truly define your marketing goals and measureable objectives.

• Related Post: How to Create a B2B Marketing Plan that Drives Results
• For more about how to create your plan, read about 5 Critical Steps to Developing a Marketing Plan.

A well-defined marketing plan will set the course for your company’s marketing efforts.

2. Position and Brand Your Company Creatively and Carefully

Your brand is of utmost importance to your company, as it conveys who your company is and your unique value proposition. Positioning your brand well will be critical to the long-term success of the business. In marketing terms, your brand is personified both visually – through your company logo and branding style guide – and contextually – through words, such as your mission, vision, and positioning statements; core company and product-level messaging; and company and campaign taglines.

• Related Post: Understand the Components of Brand Messaging
• For more about positioning competitively, read about What Goes into the Decision to Market Against Your Competitors

3. Holistically Evaluate Your Website to Maximize Your Future Time and Spend

Your website will be at the core of your marketing efforts, so before you make any major changes to it, audit your web site so that you can prioritize how to go about making changes and additions to it in the future.

Evaluating your site holistically will help you create a better web experience for all visitors to your website no matter where they are in the buying cycle – those researching your business, learning more about your products and services, preparing to buy, or returning for another purchase.

• Related Post: A 15-Point Checklist to Evaluate Your B2B Technical Website
• For more detail on web systems, read about What to Ask Yourself Before You Buy a Web Content Management System

Content Marketing Strategy

4. Show Your Products or Services in Practice with Compelling Case Studies

Customer case studies are a great marketing and sales tool. By reading about how customers have benefitted from using your products and services, prospective clients know they are not the first to choose your company, and can hear from real customers to supplement what they’ve learned from reading your marketing brochure or website. To succeed as a technical marketer, you’ll need to know how to prioritize the most important applications for case studies, tell your customer’s story clearly, ask for permissions from the customer’s company and streamline and leverage your work.

• Related Post: 5 Tips for Developing Customer Case Studies
• For more, read about 8 Quick Tips to Create Great Case Studies

Learn all of the elements that make up a compelling case study.

5. Offer the Technical Data Your Customers Are Searching For

Because your company is trying to generate leads, create opportunities that engage customers, and ultimately close sales, it’s imperative that you offer the data, insight, and information that your prospects need and want. Offering quality content will cause your customers to see your company as an expert in the industry or technology area in which you work, and direct them to your products and services as solutions to their challenges. In addition to case studies, targeted presentations and white papers that cover relevant topics will build credibility, show your company’s experience, and convey a memorable message.

• Related Post: 4 Best Practices for Creating Effective Presentations
• For more on white papers, read about 5 Steps to Writing Effective White Papers

6. Engage with Your Prospects by Making an Investment in Video

Here’s a statistic that will make your head spin: according to Pingdom, a website monitoring firm, more than 800 million web visitors watch online videos per month. And, YouTube is now the second most popular search engine on the planet, just behind Google. Web visitors are drawn to video, so you should be creating videos as a technical marketing manager to add a dimension to the web that text and imagery alone cannot achieve.

• Related Post: Why You Need Video in Your B2B Marketing Mix
• For more about creating videos yourself, see DIY Marketing Videos on a Budget

7. Optimize your Content Marketing with Content Re-Use and SEO

One piece of well-written, well-placed content can have multiple uses. You can blog about it, amplify it as a call-to-action on social media sites, and repackage it in the form of a video, webinar, or white paper with tags and meta data that search engines will see. Just think about how that one piece of content used in multiple ways and channels can drive your search marketing efforts. And, search engine optimization (SEO) is all about tweaking your website to make it more search-engine friendly and earning inbound links through stellar content that others want to reference. Driving inbound marketing will help you widen the funnel of awareness, gain more leads, and convert leads to sales.

• Related Post: Content and SEO Fuel Inbound Marketing Results
• For more about SEO, read about how Killer Keywords are the Secret to Search Engine Success

Loyalty and Awareness Campaigns

8. Increase Customer Engagement Regularly with E-Newsletters

Staying top-of-mind with prospects and customers is a challenge you’ll probably always face. E-newsletters are a great way to maintain a conversation with your target audience, promote valuable content, and help nurture your lead base to increase customer loyalty and move prospects closer to the sale. A corporate e-newsletter, done right, can be one of the most effective and strategic marketing activities a company undertakes. You need to understand all aspects of e-newsletters, from design to content to mailing lists, in order to create ones that build your brand and bring new leads to your company.

• Related Post: Nurture your Leads: Harness the Power of E-Newsletters, Part I
• For more about e-newsletters, read about Nurture Your Leads: Harness the Power of E-Newsletters, Part 2

Use E-newsletter campaigns to stay top-of-mind with customers.

9. Get more Blog Traffic and Grow Your Potential Customer Base

Blogging is a great way to bring more visitors to your website, so you’ll want to constantly be seeking to get more blog traffic (and in turn, get more prospective customers to your site). It takes consistent investment of time, creativity, and ideas to develop a successful blog and reach an increasing percentage of your target audience, but the payoff can be worth it in the long run. Maximize that investment by understanding the potential of your blog, getting discovered, converting readers into subscribers, and finding advocates for your blog.

• Related Post: 4 Ways to Get More Blog Traffic
• For more, read about how you can Improve the ROI of Your Blog

Looking for additional insight? Check out our guide: Smart Marketing for Engineers

10. Grow Awareness and Traffic With Media Coverage

News coverage generates awareness about your company and its products and services, boosts organic search for your company, and drives traffic to your company web site. Quality news coverage starts with strong, longstanding relationships with journalists, so you’ll want to begin building those contacts. Overall, your interactions with the press should be productive if you’re willing to consistently contribute strong and relevant information that they can use to better inform their readers. They’ll come to appreciate your insight and value your relationship as an industry expert as much as you value their ability to widely publicize your company or product name.

• Related Post: 4 Steps to Building Meaningful Relationships with Journalists
• For about interacting with the media, read about Trade Show Media Relations Do’s and Don’ts

Want deeper insight?

Based on our decades of experience building hundreds of customized marketing programs targeted to engineers and scientists, we have written this guide to help you get started in your technical marketing career.

Download Smart Marketing for Engineers – an e-book that helps technical business leaders build and execute an efficient and effective marketing program where every dollar and every hour spent drives results.

Agency Chosen for Collaborative Approach in Marketing to Technical Audiences

AUSTIN, Texas – December 4, 2012 – Crank Software Inc. of Ottawa, Canada announced today it has selected Austin-based TREW Marketing to lead its company awareness and lead generation campaigns. Crank Software chose TREW Marketing for their experience in developing integrated marketing programs that target embedded design engineers. The partnership entails brand and product-level messaging and positioning, PR, content development, partner co-marketing management, search engine optimization and advertising, social media and email marketing.

Crank Software specializes in embedded user interface (UI) solutions that enable R&D teams to more quickly develop rich UIs for resource-constrained embedded devices like in in-car graphical displays and animated GPS systems. Their product, Crank Storyboard™ Suite, manages the entire UI lifecycle, bridging the gap between UI design and embedded systems by streamlining the development process from months to minutes, helping their customers get products to market faster, with higher return on investment (ROI), and lower total cost of ownership (TCO).

 “Crank Software has proven how collaboration during product development results in higher quality at a lower cost, and they sought to find similar advantages in their marketing efforts,” said Wendy Covey, Principal and Co-Founder of TREW Marketing. “The marketing programs TREW developed for Crank fully leverage both companies’ unique expertise, and will grow demand for Crank’s graphical user interface solutions.”

The new partnership includes the following marketing programs:

• Marketing communications strategy and integrated activity plans
• Marketing collateral and content development – case studies, webcasts
• Product launch media relations
• Search engine optimization and advertising programs
• Social media strategy and execution
• Database marketing with quarterly e-newsletters and email nurturing
• Partner co-marketing campaign and activity plan

 “TREW’s marketing expertise and knowledge of the embedded space make them a trusted advisor to help us drive awareness and demand, as we continue to grow our business and market share,” said Jason Clarke, Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Crank Software. “They have a proven track record developing and executing strategic marketing plans that focus on results and we’re excited to have them as an extension of our team.”

Click to Tweet: New from @TrewMarketing: @Cranksoftware Selects TREW Marketing for Embedded Industry Outreach http://ow.ly/feA6c

About Crank Software

Crank Software is an innovator in embedded user interface (UI) solutions that bridges the gap between UI design and embedded systems to deliver a competitive advantage by streamlining the development lifecycle so their customers can get their products to market faster, with higher ROI, and lower total cost of ownership. Today, time is wasted in the development lifecycle because the design goes back and forth between UI designers, user experience designers, and embedded systems engineers. The Crank Storyboard Suite enables stakeholders to work in parallel. Storyboard manages the entire UI lifecycle—from UI design to simulation to being optimized for the device.

About TREW Marketing

TREW Marketing, headquartered in Austin, Texas, is a full-service B2B marketing firm uniquely serving leading engineering and scientific companies that target technical markets. TREW uses decades of specialized experience to create custom marketing programs that help customers efficiently and effectively achieve their business and sales goals. With goals and objectives defined, TREW then takes an integrated approach using a wide array of marketing services, including brand identity, positioning and messaging; website strategy and design; content development and publishing; search marketing; public relations and social media strategy and execution.

Related blog posts

ERP Integrator Selects TREW Marketing for Brand and Marketing Communications

TREW News: National Defense Solutions Provider Selects TREW Marketing

Each of us at TREW Marketing brings professional experience, specific areas of expertise, and plenty of character. As the newest member of the TREW Crew, I’d like to share a little bit about myself, my background, passions, and marketing knowledge. I’m proud to be part of the growing, collaborative, and talented group of marketing professionals here at TREW.

Patrick Wicker, Marketing Account Manager

Where are you from originally?

I’m a preacher’s kid and grew up in a number of small towns around Dallas, TX. Roanoke and Coppell had less than 1,500 people during the late 70s and early 80s and are almost unrecognizable today because of the growth of the Dallas/Fort Worth area.

What university did you go to?

I went to Southwestern University in Georgetown, TX, which was founded in 1840 and is the oldest university in Texas. Go Bucs!

What are your passions?

Professionally, I love the process of learning about the products and services of clients in industries that use esoteric terminology and can be difficult to understand. I love learning what they do, how they differentiate themselves from their competitors, and how their solutions meet the needs of their customers.

Outside of work, my wife and I spend a great deal of time with our extremely cute and increasingly rambunctious three year old daughter. I am also heavily involved with my church and serve in a variety of roles, from retreat planning to A/V. I’ve also done some preaching, and have enjoyed the preparation process that’s involved with this as much as the delivery. I feel my creative brain is fully engaged when I am taking complex ideas and organizing them so they can be communicated in public effectively.

What is your proudest accomplishment thus far?

Winning the heart of my wife – though she denies it, I believe that it was a battle of wills and I won! I am also proud of finishing my Master of Divinity degree at Regent College in Vancouver.

What strengths do you bring to TREW Marketing?

My years working in search marketing gave me a passion for doing good research to understand what potential customers are searching for and how they search. I also have over eight years of sales experience at Dell in the U.S. and the UK, which helps me to view marketing strategy from a sales perspective. My four years in the UK also bestowed me with the ability to wield ironic humor, which is surprisingly difficult for many Americans.

In your opinion, what was the most successful marketing campaign you have worked on and why?

Community TechKnowledge is a software company for nonprofits, and I worked with them to refresh their website and build a search marketing strategy to attract more online leads. Since nonprofit software is very broad and encompasses financial and fundraising software, we created search-optimized pages around what they do (database, case management…) and who they serve (human services, social services…). Within a few months after the website and AdWords campaign refresh, they were receiving three times the number of online leads per month.

What advice do you have for future marketers?

As this Forbes article points out, Steve Jobs was brilliant and had an unparalleled creative team working with him, so he could afford to ignore market research and assume that customers don’t know what they want. While trusting your instincts and empirical knowledge is key, it is vitally important to do your research and not rely solely on your own assumptions about your market and potential customers. A balanced approach of instinct and due diligence is ideal.

Describe yourself in three words…

Learner, Focused… What was the question?

If your target audience is in engineering or technology, they will often be very specific when conducting searches in Google. Unless your site content includes specific keyword phrases that your audience uses, you may be “invisible” to them.

You don’t have to guess when selecting keywords. The Google AdWords Keyword Tool will show you how people search for your products and services, and how much monthly search there is for each keyword. Here are some basic steps to follow when using the tool:

• Deselect “Broad” and select “Phrase” at the left of the page
• Tick the “Only show ideas closely related to my search terms” box.
• Include 10-20 keywords in the “Word or phrase” box and press “Search”
• The Global Monthly Searches column shows the approximate number of Google searches on that exact phrase, either by itself or within a longer keyword

Let’s say your company offers storage tank testing services for the petroleum industry. Here are some of the different ways that searchers can look for these products and services:

What You Are

How do your target customers describe what your products are, or the nature of your services? “Tank Testing” has plenty of search, but it is too broad because it includes fish tanks, air tanks, scuba tanks, etc. It is much more effective to optimize your site on specific terms such as “Oil Tank Testing,” “Gas Tank Testing” and “Underground Storage Tank Testing.” Note that searchers also use common acronyms like “UST Testing.”

What You Do

How do your target customers describe what your products do, or what services you provide? Your company may provide leak detection services, but you need to be specific and optimize for terms like “UST Leak Detection” since you don’t need to attract search for roof or swimming pool leaks.

Who You Serve

How do your target customers describe themselves and their needs? Many searchers want to know that your company has experience serving their industry, and it is important to know how they self-identify. “Gas Station Inspection” is likely a relevant term, encompassing services like tank testing and leak detection.

Pain Points

How do your target customers describe the problems they are trying to solve? If searchers are dealing with tanks experiencing “Pressure Decay,” it is important that the site includes content describing solutions for this problem.

Purchase Intent

How do your target customers give clues that they intend to purchase? Searchers looking for “Underground Tank Testing” could be looking for a Wikipedia entry, but those searching for “UST Testing Companies” are much more likely to be future paying customers. For the services you provide, look for terms ending with service(s), solution(s), consultant(s), and consulting. If you are selling a product like software, look for terms ending in software, management, reporting, analysis, analytics, and metrics.

The Importance of an SEO Strategy

If you have a short list of keywords that you think are appropriate for your business, and the AdWords Keyword Tool shows that there is search volume for these terms, conduct some Google searches to see if your website shows up on the first page of Google. If not, waiting and hoping for the best won’t produce the results you desire. You need an SEO strategy to attract these terms, and TREW Marketing is here to help.

Read more about our SEO services.

Contact us to get started.

Did you know that 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual, and visuals are processed 60,000X faster in the brain than text? (HubSpot, 2012)

You can’t deny it – we love pictures. Visual content is revolutionizing social media and how web content is consumed. Facebook recently reported that their users upload an average of 300 millions photos everyday, and the rise of photo sharing social media sites like Pinterest – now the third largest social networking site, behind Facebook and Twitter, and Instagram – bought by Facebook for $1 billion this year, tell us that there’s real power behind pictures.

So what does this mean for B2B marketing? It means that pictures are a viable content opportunity for your marketing mix of web pages, white papers, videos, webinars, case studies, and blog posts.

Read on to learn 4 quick ways to optimize and effectively integrate photos and visuals in your B2B marketing activities.

1. Name the file appropriately. Pick a related keyword for your web content and use this in your file name. Many users will name their image as “image1” or “logo.png” or “screen-shot 2012-10-22.” Is this you? Search engines, like Google, rely on textual cues to understand what the image is about. So if you leave your image file name like the examples above, Google will not know what to do with them.

2. Add alt text. Use keywords in the “alt tag” text box when you upload an image to your blog or website. By adding descriptive alt tag text, search engines can better identify what the image is about and how it relates to your content.

The image below shows how a blog, dynamometermanufacturers.com, found an image of TREW client, Wineman Technology’s dynamometer system via Google search and used it for a blog post. The blog attributed the image to Wineman Technology by linking to winemantech.com, which generated web traffic that spent more than 11½ minutes on-site and viewed an average of 6 pages per session. This cyclical effect of posting and tagging images helps increase your backlinks, gain third-party credibility, and generate highly engaged web visitors.

3. Add context for the image in the page text. In addition to naming the file correctly and adding keyword rich alt text, Google also recommends you add text on the page where the image is located. Referencing the image in the page text ensures that Google understood your alt text correctly. See tip #2 above for an example of referencing an image in your page text.

4. Use rich visual snippets for Facebook posts. Using visual content for Facebook helps increase fan engagement with your page. The more engagement you receive on your page, the more positively Facebook’s EdgeRank Algorithm will favor your posts, thus expanding your reach.

TREW Marketing tracked our Facebook page content metrics to learn what content generates the most engagement. The results are very telling of engaging visual content on Facebook. Updates with photos receive 2X more total impressions versus posts with just a link. Additionally, our photos receive 12X more engaged users (people who like or comment on the image) over the link posts.

So here’s what you can do. By snapping a quick shot of a chart or image used in a blog post, you can upload it as an individual image and link to the blog post. This makes your Facebook post stand out more in the newsfeed and in the timeline. Below is an example of this, from Rand Fishkin’s presentation at Inbound 2012.

Contact us today to learn more about TREW Marketing social media and search engine optimization programs.

Related blog posts

3 Free & Easy-to-Use Social Media Tools

Content and SEO Fuel Inbound Marketing Results

Lasting SEO Results, Part 1: How PR Affects SEO

Reinforcing branding and corporate messaging through web design and navigation

KTC website home before/after

TREW Marketing client, Kline Technical Consulting (KTC), a national defense solutions provider, needed a new website to highlight their expertise in defense solutions, directing users to their three main services – Physical Security Systems, Electronic Warfare, and IT Consultation — and to better communicate their branding and messaging visually throughout the site.

Site features:

• New home page that highlights the three services with feature banner images. It also features content, such as press coverage, blog posts, and footer items that direct users to lower level pages about KTC’s team of experts.
• Strategic usage of KTC’s yellow branded color, paired with modern black & white images to emphasize their visual branding across the web and in printed materials.
• A solution “quick find” feature so the user can quickly learn about past solutions KTC has deployed.
• A user-friendly, secure web content management system (CMS) so the client can easily make web updates to the solution quick find, content, images, and add new landing pages.
• Tabs for seamless navigation through service overview, solutions, resources, and technical blog posts that feed into the service pages.

Updating a website to modernize design and reflect new business and marketing direction

Wineman Technology home and product page after

TREW Marketing client, Wineman Technology, had recently launched three new products, and was in need of a web update to reflect their growing product portfolio and content, such as case studies, example solutions, white papers, and videos.

Site features:

• The new home page showcases their products with the rotating banner images and product feature bullets, with a prominent call-to-action button directing visitors to the product page.
• Two new product page templates designed for tier 1-flagship products, such as INERTIA™ test automation software and tier 2 products, such as RAPID test cell controller and Dynacar vehicle model simulator.
• Tier 1 template features a “learn, try, buy” experience, where visitors can familiarize themselves using the “get started” box at the top. Other features of the site, including the tier 2 product pages, and services pages showcase Wineman Technolgy’s content with lots of space for interchangeable promotional boxes and sidebar features.

Enhancing web user experience with accessible content features and quicker downloads

Hepregen services page before/after

Hepregen, a biotech company, partnered with TREW Marketing to redesign their website with a goal to improve the site’s overall marketing effectiveness. Their site needed service pages to accurately reflect their core capabilities, as well as the ability to offer lead generating content for their focused target audience of researchers.

Site features:

• New service pages that use a tabular approach to display highly technical content that users can easily access.
• A session-based cookie so that site visitors only have to fill out a lead form once for the many different technical resources and articles offered on the site.
• Updated site look and feel with modern and technical imagery specific to Hepregen’s core competencies.

Differentiating with new branding and communicating their open source ERP difference

Trek Global new site launch

Trek Global is a team of ERP integrators and developers, who use open source ERP to install ERP systems for high-volume distribution companies, and hired TREW to help launch their U.S. business. During the process of creating their U.S. “branding brain,” the company and with the help of TREW, crafted a new company name, Trek Global. The website redesign was an opportunity to launch the new name and brand to build corporate awareness in the U.S.

Site features:

• Developed the site navigation and web strategy to generate more web leads and communicate  corporate and product-level messaging and positioning.
• Page templates that clearly communicates Trek’s educational value to prospects, as well as the open source difference for ERP, using infographics and clear call-to-action buttons/sidebars.

Your new website is live, now what?

With a new website, you now have the foundations to generate web leads. The next step is to begin promoting content. Learn the five things lead generating websites have in common in our free, downloadable white paper, “Inbound Marketing: 5 Keys to Generating Leads on Your Website.”

>>Download now.

Related Blog Posts:

Need Leads? Tips for a Winning Landing Page

Microsites: Effective Marketing or Bad Idea?

Website Success: Web Traffic Grows 300%

Inbound marketing strategies are fueling growth in conversions and leads for the savvy companies who adopt and implement them as part of their integrated marketing plan. However, there are holdouts in B2B marketing who still aren’t convinced that inbound marketing tactics are worth the effort. So let’s look at how two key inbound marketing activities, content and SEO, make a big impact in driving marketing results.

First let’s define inbound marketing. Wikipedia defines it as the concept of earning the attention of prospects, making yourself easily found and drawing customers to your website by producing content customers value.

1. Content — it’s probably our favorite word at TREW marketing and with good reason. Having quality content on your website is a staple for inbound marketing. And it’s not always for selling or marketing, it’s also for educating and/or establishing thought leadership.

One piece of well-written, well-placed content can have multiple uses. You can blog about it, use it as a call-to-action on social media sites, and repackage it in the form of a video, webinar, or white paper.  Just think about how that one piece of content used in multiple ways and channels can drive your search marketing efforts.

2. Search — Search engine optimization (SEO) is all about tweaking your website to make it more search-engine friendly and earning inbound links through stellar content. As our culture becomes increasingly digital, search is now one of the largest channels for demand generation. Ranking in top positions on generic search terms has a large impact on your brand and gains in customer mind-share vs. your competitors. How do content and search impact each other and how can you leverage them to drive your results?

Let’s consider blogging. One of the main benefits of business blogging is the rewards it delivers to SEO.  Having your SEO and blogging strategy aligned is key to ensuring that you are optimizing blog content with keywords for which your business is seeking to rank high in natural search. If you are pushing to rank for a specific keyword, your blogging strategy should support that. For example, let’s say you are a software developer; by creating content about best practices for software development, the best tools to use when developing software, etc. and working in using specific keywords about your software, you will optimize that blog post and earn higher SEO results.

3. Measurement. Now that you’ve created content, and are optimizing SEO to your advantage, how do you measure results? The most effective way to make sure you’re getting the most from your inbound marketing efforts is to regularly analyze data across all of your marketing channels so you can see how your integrated campaigns perform, and make adjustments to your marketing programs on an ongoing basis. Key inbound marketing metrics include web visits, time on site, leads, and sales conversions.

Need help building your inbound marketing strategy, or managing your integrated marketing efforts? Contact TREW Marketing or explore our services, including:

• Marketing audit
• Virtual marketing manager
• Search engine marketing
• Content development

Don’t be a hold-out — join the inbound marketing revolution. You’ll not only see an increase in awareness and conversions, but you’ll build a cohesive customer experience that will lead to long-term loyalty, and bottom-line results.

Last week, the TREW Crew headed to Boston for a full-court press of training on HubSpot software and inbound marketing best practices. This follows over 50 hours of training by the team this past summer, culminating in TREW being named a HubSpot Certified Partner just two weeks ago. Here are our top takeaways from the week – look for lengthier posts to come diving into these and other topics from the conference.

1) 1+1=3

During Inbound 2012, HubSpot announced their latest 3.0 software release themed around cool new features combined together for a greater impact (or the more catchy articulation of 1+1=3).

Dharmesh Shah on stage at Inbound 2012 showing off the features of the 3.0 release

Of these new features, there are a few stand-outs that the Hubspot-Certified TREW Crew is excited to implement right away. (For illustrative purposes, we will discuss these features using a fictitious TREW prospect named Larry).

• Smart Calls-to-Action (CTAs) – Larry has already visited TREW Marketing and downloaded the Smart Marketing Guide for Engineers, so the next time Larry visits the site, he would see an offer for our white paper, Inbound Marketing: 5 Keys to Generating Leads on Your Website.
• Smart Forms – When Larry returns to the TREW site for more fantastic TREW downloads, we will remember his information and not ask for the same personal information again.
• Contacts timeline view – Not only can we learn about Larry from what he has shared with TREW, as well as by viewing his social media activity, the new HubSpot timeline view provides us with a visual story of the actions Larry has taken on the TREW site and lifecycle status.
• Social media management – HubSpot 3 makes social sharing easier, providing us with the ability to post to multiple accounts and platforms. It has built-in scheduling (and timing suggestions) so that we reach Larry when his is more likely to be plugged into his social accounts.

These are just a few of the many new cool features in Hubspot 3. For more about this new release, visit the Hubspot website.

2) Marketing Math – Calculating Visits to Leads to Sales

We all would like to formulaically know how many visitors to our website it will take to convert the right number of leads to generate the revenue our business needs. Up to now, that has been difficult, but with HubSpot’s automated and highly analytical inbound marketing tools, it gets a lot easier.

Mike Volpe, Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) of HubSpot, shared his process for doing just this, using an example revenue goal, sales data, and analytics from his HubSpot marketing tools. By knowing his average revenue per customer, and historical data on his lead-to-customer and visitor-to-lead conversion rates from HubSpot, he gladly signed his marketing team up to do their part to support sales.

Look for another post to come that goes into much greater detail about this example, including formulas and real numbers. In the end, his marketing team needed tens of thousands of leads to generate less than one hundred more customers for sales – and the key to marketing doing this job is a continuous flow of new content, distributed across marketing channels. To read more about this and whet your appetite, check out our new Inbound Marketing white paper.

3) Content is Still King.

We’ve said it in blog posts, we’ve said it books, and we’ve said it in probably every client meeting over the last five years:

Content. Is. King.

According to everything we learned at Inbound 2012, content is still king. But, marketing best practices have to adapt, because as Gary Vaynerchuk said (with much more *colorful words), “As marketers, we take every good idea, every great new technology, practice, and tactic, and we ruin it. We use it and we squeeze the life out of it until no one likes it anymore.”

Drastic statement? Think about traditional mail. Surely our grandparents were excited to get mail. Are you excited? Probably not, because it’s full of junk and ads. Marketers ruined it. We use a spam blocker to filter our marketing emails and a DVR to skip commercials. Mass-produced, generic content has been squeezed pretty hard, but content is still important.

So how is content evolving? With context. Content is still king, but it needs to be in the right context for the audience. Marketers have to understand what their customers and potential customers want, what their interests are, and provide content that will appeal to those customers best in order to succeed.

4) Try again.

The slide above is from Rand Fishkin’s, CEO of SEO software company SEOmoz, keynote speech on SEO tactics. In this new age of inbound marketing, we feel a sense of duty to constantly pump out content and make it go “viral” – to reach new audiences by blogging and sharing via social media.

Rand’s example of his guide, “SEO: The Free Beginner’s Guide From SEOmoz” was a great case study of how he launched and re-launched this guide. On the first try, it did not generate much traffic nor did it capture the top spot on Google’s results page. He then revised and re-launched it two, three, and even four times to finally earn the top ranking spot on Google, which now effectively drives traffic back to his website.

The lesson here is that you can launch a revised white paper year over year at the same URL. With each new version, Google will see the new signals accruing at this URL and will increase its ranking in the search engine results. Also, don’t be afraid to blog about the updated version, and post it on social media multiple times. If your first attempt failed, no one will care if you revise and repost it…because no one saw it to begin with.