Check out the new Hippo Direct YouTube Channel which will feature short videos related to mailing lists, email lists, direct marketing, and online marketing tactics.
And sometimes we'll just have silly videos to give you a laugh.
You can bookmark the Hippo Direct YouTube channel at
http://www.youtube.com/user/HippoDirect
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.
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."
You can use the free
Google Alerts tool to get instant email notification whenever Google finds a new page on your website.
Last week I received a Google Alert which told me that Google had found and indexed my latest blog posting approximately one hour after it was published on the internet.
This technology is an easy way to track all new pages which Google finds that contain either your personal name or company name (or any search phrase). Most questions re the service are answered on the Google Alerts Help page.
You can also use Google Alerts for more detailed marketing and public relations purposes, including tracking all mentions of a brand name, or monitoring the re-positing of your press releases. A recent blog post from HubSpot provides step-by-step instructions.
I recently listened to a webinar from
Marketing Experiments called
Twitter Experiments: Getting beyond the "now what?"
Very early on in the webinar the Go2Meeting software crashed and kicked out all listeners. A few minutes later the system crashed again; and once more about 5 minutes later.
Normally these technology bugs would have caused me to abandon the idea of listening to this webinar. However, since the topic was Twitter-related I checked the special Twitter subject area (aka Hashtag) which was created so participants could share their comments (aka Tweets) re the webinar.
Several observations re this unusual webclinic:
1. The interest in using Twitter as a marketing tool is so great that, despite the internet snafus, more than 800 participants rejoined and listened to the last half of the free one hour webinar.
2. After the sharing of frustrations with technology problems worked its way through the Twitter system, the Twitter content switched to comments on the webinar presentation. Many of these comments either restated key points of the presenter (which is a good way to get a quick skim of most important ideas); other comments raised new questions and answers not covered by presenters; and even more comments mentioned new Twitter services and tools which the presenters would not be able to cover during the webinar.
3. The volume of Tweets which occurred during the first 20 minutes of the webinar moved #webclinic temporarily into a top 10 most popular ranking of all Twitter topics.
4. The comments from webinar listeners on Twitter about Twitter were more interesting and educational than the comparatively bland content of the webinar.
5. You can view the entire log of Tweets here.
The middle of page 50 show where the crashes begin and community of participants realize the tech problems are not on their computer, but rather with with webinar software. You can view comments as the story progressed by clicking "Newer" on the top or bottom of"Realtime results for #webclinic" page. Page 49 occured after page 50, but before page 48...and so on.
6. The transcript of "#webclinic" Hashtag reveals how easy it is for enterprising Twitter users to quickly assist and establish online relationships with potential clients, vendors, and referrers of business leads.