Kipp Bodnar from HubSpot posted an excellent blog 
called "27 Marketing Lessons B2B Marketers Should
Know". His posting describes the top marketing ideas
from this week's MarketingProfs B2B Forum.
My 7 favorite marketing tips are:
1. Make sure that you focus on using your company's most important keywords in your social media status updates.
2. Create as much content as possible and repackage across multiple mediums such as blog posts, podcasts and webinars to increase lead generation.
3. In the current Web 2.0 environment, Marketing = Publishing.
4. When doing email marketing, have a clear reason why you're testing specific elements of the email campaign.
5. Kipp says that 20% of searches done in Google every day have never been done before. Which means that you should continue creating content which is relevant to your business so that next week's searchers can find you.
6. Mobile marketing, which is sometimes called SMS or text message marketing, is becoming an important B2B marketing method.
7. The primary purpose of social media content isn't to provide something for people to read. Instead, it's to provide something which leads to new thinking or new discussions.
Here's a behind-the-scenes peek at the strategies which Hippo Direct is using to grow our business, and increase sales for our clients. The graphic below shows the Hippo Direct Content Wheel.
The underlying idea is to write original articles and other useful content, then share and publish variations of this content for different market segments. All of the spokes to the right of center represent places in which we distribute our content:
- Blog
- Websites
- Email Newsletters
- Promotional Emails
The spokes to left of center are channels from which the vast world of internet users and prospective clients can access and share our content:
- Links From Others
- Twitter
- Facebook
- LinkedIn
This Content Wheel plan can be used by any business with a website and blog to dramatically increase the reach and results of their marketing program. It combines inbound marketing and social media with direct marketing and email marketing.
I recently spent a week with family on a Caribbean cruise. During our port visits, part of each day included a stroll through the town's main shopping district. 
I had vowed not to think of work during this vacation, but as I passed so many stores with the same merchandise, the marketing part of my brain kicked in with a few questions:
* Why are some of these stores more crowded than others?
* How do these places stay in business when so few who visit buy anything?
Then I started thinking of how similar a busy street filled with tourists is compared to the busy internet filled with searchers.
Here are some observations on how we can all improve the sales results from our retail store or our website:
Make sure lots of traffic is flowing by on daily basis.
Store: Cruise ships deliver 10,000 or more potential buyers per day to places such as St. Thomas, San Juan, and Nassau.
Website: Google processes 2 billion search requests per day. In each one of these requests the user is seeking something via keywords typed into text box.
Become a destination location.
Store: We visited several specific art and jewelry stores because we had been given coupons with chance to win a free gift.
Website: Get referrals to your website via blogs, social media such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, plus links from other websites.
Stand out from the crowd to get people in the door.
Store: Best examples which I saw included: eye-catching window displays; compelling store employee in street saying intriguing phrases loaded with marketing keywords; juggler; energetic music; air conditioning blasting through the front door of store; free shots of rum; samples of fresh made candy.
Website: What do people buy from you? What do you do better than other companies?
Give incentive to start relationship then move toward bigger sale.
Store: Sales associate begins friendly chat with store visitor, then introduces the most qualified buyers to store manager who can close the big sales.
Website: Give something of value free as incentive for online registration.
In a recent
blog post called "My 2010 Marketing Wish List", Hubspot's CEO Brian Halligan shared his ideas on how every business can improve their marketing results.
One idea that really caught my attention was Brian's claim that most marketers have a completely upside-down view of what's important to stimulate website traffic and new customer leads.
He says "the concept of a website should get turned on its head. Companies spend 90% of their "internet time" worrying about what is happening on their website -- when they should be spending 10% of their time there and 90% of their time out where the customers are -- blogs, other websites, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc."
Any company's best mailing list is their customer email list. Yet most traditional direct marketers struggle to make external email lists work for them due to either a lack of targeted email lists, or poor ROI from lower click thru rates and higher costs.
Here are 5 tips on how to find or create more cost-effective and responsive email lists:
1. Use an email append service to add email addresses to your existing customer and prospect postal mailing lists.
2. Make barter deals with other list owners to send promotional email messages to each other's email lists and/or email newsletters.
3. Capture more email addresses via your website by giving away a free product, service or information such as white paper or webinar.
4. Ask all of those customers whose email address you don't have to give it to you. You can try different fun, creative techniques to do this such as trivia or weekly sports contests, or monthly giveaway of a low-cost premium. It's amazing how appealing a $ 50 gift card is to most people.
5. Does your business have completely separate databases for accounting and marketing purposes? Perhaps your accounting staff has many email addresses of customer contacts that aren't in your marketing database.
That's what one of my long-time clients told me last week. This marketer has been selling publications via direct mail for the past 15 years. But he's lost faith in prospect marketing.
His plan is to keep mailing to only his list of customers. While this strategy will reduce his marketing costs in the short-term, the lack of new customers will cause his business to shrink by 10% or more each year.
The cumulative effect of no new customers will cut the size of his business in half over the next 5-6 years; and eliminate a decade of profits from all those potential new customers who never got the chance to buy from him. It's like turning an abundant lake into a drying watering hole.
The only way to avoid this type of exponential decay is to keep prospecting. And get creative to find ways to make the top lists work. Some techniques to try are:
* mailing to just the top performing selects from a few lists
* repeat mailing to the top compiled lists
* mailing to title slug address when can't find enough lists by contact name
* conducting A/B split tests re publication pricing, or different sales copy, or premium offers.
* appending email addresses to customer and prospect lists to create more productive email addresses for marketing use.
In her recent blog posting called "
Using Email for B2B Lead Generation", Tamara Gielen states that "the key ingredient is an offer that matters, a useful, relevant, helpful, appreciated something, whether it's a whitepaper, ebook or tip sheet."
To that I'll add, think of email marketing as a process which develops trust in you and your company. Especially for expensive services and products, you will have more success wooing your new customer over a series of emails, and back-and-forth chats, rather than a slick one-shot try for a quick sale.
1. Use a
mailing list broker. You get
free expert marketing research and advice. Plus you can benefit from your broker's relationships with list owners and managers to get special treatment.
2. Save money on mailing list purchases by reusing lists (with owner approval), rather than re-ordering the same list a few months later.
3. Use only postal lists for your prospecting, not email lists. This requires moving your marketing planning ahead a few weeks, but will give you the following benefits:
* more return on investment for your marketing dollars
* access to the best lists for you, rather than just those with email addresses
* reduce list costs by splitting names among multiple offers
* can mail to your best list segments twice per offer
4. Make sure that your postal list of customers and prospects is deliverable at highest level -- and lowest postage rates -- by running list against the USPS national-change-of-address (NCOA) database once per quarter. If you don't have vendor for this service, Hippo Direct can perform NCOA on your lists for a low fee.
5. The best list that you have is your email list of customers and prospects. Hippo Direct can help you better utilize your email list by:
a. reducing transmission costs for your promotional emailings -- we can transmit your emails at a low rate of just a few cents per message.
b. designing and implementing an email newsletter program so that you can constantly educate, inform, and market to your email list of customers and prospects. Costs for this this type of marketing program can be suprisingly low.
c. attracting more registrants to your email list via a more compelling "join our email list" link on your website.
e. review of your email messages and internet "action path" with recommendations to improve email open rates, click thrus, and conversion rates once prospects land on your website.
While marketing newsletters 20 years ago I learned that "
renewal at birth" was one of the quickest and most profitable ways to generate new revenue. As part of the letter which we sent to thank new subscribers for their order, we offered them the chance to extend their introductory offer discount for another one or two years. This very low cost offer became our number two source of renewal revenue.
Your website provides you with similar opportunities to grab additional online sales. One great idea, which comes from Larry Chase's Web Digest for Marketers, is to put a sales offer on the "Thank You" page which is served whenever a form is submitted. The reason this technique works so well is that any website visitor who has taken some action regarding one of your products or services is likely to do more -- if you ask. See more tips from Larry at "6 Quick Tips for Sales Lead Gen".