How to Gain Subscribers Without Buying Email Lists

Are you getting no where buying lists from the same people? Are the lists you are buying the same lists that your competitors are buying?

Try something different. There are ways to gain prospects without having to purchase a list...it just takes some effort. I know...manual effort is a crazy concept, but to find the gems, you need to do some work.

[via MarketingProfs]

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Five Reasons Why Marketers Fail to Get the Best ROI From Trade Shows

Ahh Trade Shows...these are the hidden gems for leads if done right, or a big black hole if done wrong. It is important that you have a plan of attack, not only from a marketing standpoint, but also a presentation, and logistics standpoint. This is a great article on some tips to follow:

1. Not knowing why they are at a trade show: If your reason for going to a trade show is anything along the lines of “because we always go,” then you need to sit and rethink that reason. What you do for your marketing depends on your objectives.
2. Not doing any pre-event marketing: Trade shows are packed with companies showing off their latest and best wares. So, why should the attendees make an effort to visit your booth rather than your competitors’ booths? The answer isn’t tchotchkes, despite what some people think. 
3. Having bland exhibition booths: You’ve given people a reason to find your stand—but they keep walking past it. Why? The two most likely reasons are your staff or the booth itself. Though exhibition stands can cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars, businesses can still make them stylish and effective. Even basic shell schemes can be made to stand out by using good graphics and a clear message. 
4. Lack of people skills: Manning a booth is hard work, especially if you’re doing it well. Staff members will need extensive knowledge about the company and its products. Plus, they’ll have to work long hours. I’m sure everyone who has been to trade shows has encountered reps desperate to tell you all about their company and what they do. How often do those reps keep your interest compared to the folks who listen to your problem and explain how they can solve it? 
5. Not following up: It’s shockingly common for staff members not to follow up on leads that they get at trade shows. That reflects a serious lack of planning. A simple solution, such as creating a table to record and score leads during the show, make the follow-up far quicker and more efficient.

Given the cost of attending trade shows, not fully preparing for one seems bizarrely self-defeating.

Why do you think marketers often fail to get the most out of their trade-show experience?

[via Marketing Profs]

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Five Tips for YouTube Promoted Video Campaigns

If you are using, like to use, or never thought of using YouTube for promoting video campaigns, I urge you to give it a shot. An interesting statistic:

"Last year, YouTube surpassed Yahoo as the world's second largest search engine. In the UK alone, it attracts 17m unique users each month, with each of these users spending an average of an hour on the site."

I use YouTube often when I need a video explanation of something...it is a great How To tool.

The five tips are:

•  Create a comprehensive Package
•  Consider your keywords carefully
•  Managing your bids
•  Remember to include an overlay
•  Interact with your audience

What are your ideas??

More details in the article by Econsultancy's Rebecca Momberg

[via Econsultancy]

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ROI for Marketing

ROI for Marketing seems to be the moving, and sometimes hidden, target for trying to measure. As quoted by Jason Miller from Marketo, "A surprising 87% of senior marketers do not feel confident in their ability to impact the sales forecast of their programs and 1 out of 5 marketers do not measure their marketing results at all." This infographic will help guide you with more metrics to legitimately measure marketing by. It is broken down into four sections:

1. How to Guide Your Measurement Insight
2. The Stages of Marketing Accountability
3. When Metrics Go Wrong
4. Picking The Right Metrics

[via Marketo]

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48 Ways to Measure Your Social Media Efforts

A question that I receive A LOT...how effective is Social Media, and how do I measure it. What is the ROI...well, the R is "Leads". What is measured inbetween to insure we obtain qualified leads is also important. I came across a good article that summed it up, and the correlation to Automobile Manufacturing, which helps me:

"Consider automobile manufacturing as an analogy. There are an abundance of measures, from machining tolerances on shafts to the temperature in the paint room, which are vital to track during the manufacturing process. The C-level folks may not know or particularly care what these numbers are, but if those values are off, they will affect quality, which impacts rework and warranty claims, which impact manufacturing and repair costs, which impact the ROI of each vehicle.

Similarly, in social media marketing, there are numerous intermediate “process” measures that don’t fit into an ROI equation, but which are vital in optimizing social media efforts in order to minimize “I” and maximize “R.” These metrics don’t represent the goals of social media marketing in and of themselves, but are critical measures to help optimize processes to achieve the ultimate objectives."

Nine Blog Metrics

• Overall traffic
• Traffic quality (e.g. bounce rate, average time spent per visit)
• Most popular posts (indicates topics with highest interest)
• Search traffic
• Social media/network-referred traffic
• Other key sources of traffic (e.g., company website, newsletters, syndication sites)
• Number of RSS subscribers (regular readers)
• Number of email subscribers
• Top visiting organizations (measure of targeting effectiveness)

Six Twitter Metrics

• Total number of relevant followers (exclude the inevitable spammers and oddballs who seem to be attracted to any active Twitter account)
• Interaction (@ mentions)
• Retweets (reflects both level of engagement and quality of shared content)
• Most tweeted links (i.e., which content is most popular with followers)
• Influence (e.g., Klout and Kred scores)
• Brand and mention tracking (e.g., from HootSuite or other social media monitoring tool)

Six LinkedIn Metrics

• Number of company followers
• Recommendations on products or services
• Page views (of LinkedIn company overview)
• Unique visitors
• Click-throughs (on product links)
• Followers by industry, function and company

Five Facebook Metrics

• Number of Facebook page “Likes”
• Friends of fans (indicates an organization’s total potential reach on Facebook)
• Number of people talking about you (the number of unique people who have created content about the company page on Facebook in the past week)
• Weekly total reach (the number of people who have seen one of the firm’s messages on Facebook in past week)
• Most popular posts

Ten YouTube Metrics

• Number of subscribers to the company channel
• Total number of video views
• Change in views and subscribers over last 30 days
• Engagement measures:
  • Likes / dislikes
  • Comments
  • Shares
  • Favorites added or removed
• Top videos, last 30 days
• Playback locations (e.g., regular YouTube page, company channel, mobile device, etc.)
• Top traffic sources

Two Google+ Metrics

• Number of people / organizations in company circles
• Number of people / organizations that have company in their circles
• Note: Google has indicated that it plans to introduce more advanced analytics for Google+ soon

Ten Company Website and Cross-Social-Network Metrics

• Total social media-generated visits to the company website
• Lift in direct visits (an imprecise but correlated measure)
• Lift in branded search visits (another imprecise but correlated measure)
• Major social network visits by source
• Traffic quality by source
• Most-viewed pages by social media visitors
• Top visiting organizations (all social media sources)
• Top visiting organizations (by major social network)
• Lead conversions (all social media sources)
• Lead conversions (by major social network)

If you’ve utilized the first 46 metrics to continually monitor and adjust your social media activities, the final two—the real return on investment for b2b marketers—should validate and quantify the value of all your hard work.

[via Webbiquity]

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