How your small to medium-sized business can thrive in a socially connected world.

Sarah Sturtevant

President, Integrated Website Solutions Inc.

Why B2B companies need a new customer acquisition strategy

What is Inbound Marketing?

Content Marketing vs. Traditional SEO

Keys to success: Listen, Problem-solve, Engage, Be Authentic

Listening Drives Customer Retention & Loyalty

Conversion: Social CRM and closed loop marketing

“There has been a massive transformation in the way we live, shop, work and learn. It’s a tectonic shift.”

-Brian Halligan, HubSpot Co-Founder & CEO

-Old sales/marketing and media inputs of our parents’ generation: direct mail, television, newspapers, magazines, telephones

-New sales/marketing and media inputs into our generation are radically different: websites, mobile phones, tablets, webinars, blogs, podcasts

AND the pace of these technological inputs is ACCELERATING

“We’ve all getting very good at blocking out the traditional marketing playbook.”

-Brian Halligan

Voice Mail – Filters telemarketing and cold calls

Spam Filters – Block email blasts

Unsolicited Direct Mail – Gets thrown out!

TV Commercials – PVR, TiVO technology allows us to skip ads

Google Panda Update (February 2011) rewards websites that offer valuable content and penalizes sites that use content farms, spammy linking or lack usability (i.e. poor user experience).

Google + social media platform launched (June 2011) which, along with “Search Plus Your World” (January 2012) allows Google to mine what content goes viral and personalize search results for those logged into Google accounts.

Google Caffeine or “Freshness” Update (November 2011) rewards sites that publish fresh, valuable content frequently. Content that is shared has proven value or “social proof”.

Google’s Penguin Update (April 2012) penalizes sites that use “black hat” SEO techniques (e.g. keyword stuffing, cloaking, deliberate duplicate content.)

“Rather than doing outbound marketing to the masses of people who are trying to block you out,

I advocate doing inbound marketing where you help yourself get found by people already

learning about and shopping in your industry.

“We need to stop interrupting what people are interested in and BE what people are

interested in.”

– Brian Halligan, HubSpot, CEO

Marketers need to create remarkable content that answers customers’ questions or solves

THEIR problems rather than only talking about our products.

Companies need to speak “human”,

make their online content personal,

ENGAGING and SHARE-WORTHY!

“Inbound Marketing is the entire collection of activities you’d use to get customers.

Everything from content to pull people in, and context to pull people through.”

- Dharmesh Shah, HubSpot Co-Founder

General Electric Pinterest Campaign “Hey Girl, Thomas Edison Has a Crush on You”

Traditional SEO - On and off page optimization, link building and buying, competitor audits, keyword-driven content building, pay-per-click campaigns

Inbound Marketing – along with technical SEO efforts, develop unique, relevant content that solves people’s problems (i.e. is valuable) and distribute it frequently across multiple channels (i.e. blogs, website, social media, email, videos) to earn more organic links on Google.

Credit: Chad Pollit, Kuno Creative, 2011

Rand Fishkin, CEO, SEOMOZ

Inbound marketing leads cost 61% less than traditional, outbound generated leads

1) Reach relevant people

2) Learn about your market

3) Improve your search rankings

Dharmesh Shah, Hubspot Co-Founder and CTO

“Few companies operate effectively in the present. Typical companies only plan

business far into the future.”

-David Meerman Scott,Author of #1 bestseller,

The New Rules of Marketing & PR

Mobile allows us to search online for “What’s Happening Now!”

Real time content

If you are a small to medium-sized business, unless you sell pills, poker or porn, do not hire an SEO expert. Hire a content producer. Unless you have a highly competitive search environment, you are better off creating lots of good content.

-Dan Zarrella, HubSpot

Author, Social Media Scientist“Science of” webinars attract over 30,000

Listen to your customers Engage Problem-solve Be Authentic

“Content is King, but CONTEXT is god!”-Gary Vaynerchuk, NYT Best-selling author of “Crush It”

You have to “care immensely” about your customers and align your content with a customer’s lifecycle stage and their interest graph - “Gary Vee”Gary, a 36 year old New York Times and Wall Street Journal Best-Selling author who is also a self-trained wine and social media expert. From a young age, it was clear that Gary was a businessman. At 8-years-old he was operating seven lemonade stands in his neighborhood and by 10 he had moved onto selling baseball cards at local malls. In high school while working at his family owned liquor store, Gary started reading The Wine Spectator and wine books, and realized collecting wine offered an allure similar to his previous hobby of collecting baseball cards. With a wealth of knowledge and an entrepreneurial spirit, Gary spent every weekend of his college years at his parents’ wine store. Recognizing the importance of e-commerce in 1997, Gary launched Winelibrary.com and helped grow his family business significantly from $3 million to $45 million by 2005.

“Retention is the game. The game is how many people you KEEP.”

Social media is about authentic human communication. It takes time to build relationships, but social technologies turn our world back into a village where our reputations matter.

We can show our customers we care. If your brand does not care, it will die.

The biggest payback for engaging in social media is customer retention.

- Gary “Vee” Vaynerchuk

Complex B2B sales involve 5-7 prospective customer contacts throughout the buying cycle

50% of B2B buyers require 6 or more touches to BECOME a qualified sales lead

It takes 3-6 months to nurture a lead to qualified lead status

- Forresters Research

Lead intelligence timelines, social media engagement tracking, lead scoring, customizable landing pages, segmentation & forms, personalized email marketing, custom fields, smart CTA’s, A/B testing, smart lists, lead ROI tracking, fully integrated analytics – state of the art marketing automation

Inbound marketers must help buyers move through THEIR buying process

and not try to accelerate them through

OUR selling process.

@Forrester

For more information:

Sarah Sturtevant, PresidentIntegrated Website Solutions Inc.Representing,

www.ThomasNet.com

Follow Me on:Twitter: @sarahsturtevantLinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/industryonlineFacebook:www.facebook.com/IntegratedWebsiteSolutions