But for those out there in the trenches, trying to follow all the advice and get their marketing engines running it is not that simple. Sometimes, despite your best efforts you can’t seem to move the marketing needle enough.

Why Your Inbound Program Isn’t Working

Marketo‘s new whitepaper, “Amplify Your Impact: How to Multiply the Effects of Your Inbound Marketing Program“, takes a different route from others out there. I was pleasantly surprised when they decided to attack the core of the problem by saying “It can be common for organizations that implement an inbound marketing strategy to see an early lift. However, while early results are strong, the leads can dwindle to a trickle“. That’s not your typical Inbound Marketing whitepaper!

The reasons, according to Marketo, are many:

1. Your aim is too wide
2. Some prospects may find you, but many don’t know you exist
3. Others may know your exist, but don’t understand what you do
4. You aren’t reaching the decision makers
5. Sometimes you can’t break through the noise
6. Sometimes there isn’t any noise
7. Inbound marketing has a diminishing return

Content developed for inbound marketing should be more focused on your prospects’ problems and concerns than on your product or solution – Marketo

For each problem listed above, you can find good examples that might reflect exactly what you are facing at your company. In some cases, a few tweaks may get you back on track but in other cases you should re-evaluate your strategy. They also list a few things other companies are doing that you should think about, such as:

• Have a staff dedicated to inbound programs
• Combine inbound AND outbound programs
• Ensure you have nurturing programs too

The Right Marketing Program Mix

“Increased output is not directly linked to a greater number of leads or customers or higher profit. You need to strategically determine where to spend your time – especially if you have a limited amount of resources”

The quote above, from Marketo, is the key for your inbound marketing troubles. The combination of the right programs based on their effectiveness for your particular situation is what will generate the best results. And, according to Marketo, outbound programs have their place in your marketing arsenal. They explain that while inbound marketing supports your newly created content by sharing it on social channels, making it faster and easier for your content to be found, outbound marketing (paid sponsorships, banner ads, etc.)can help you further spread the word about the content and multiply the number of new views you generate (and thus the number of shares, likes, etc.).

The mixing of both Inbound and Outbound Marketing programs helps with:

• Brand recognition
• Making prospects speak your language
• Capture your target

The last part of the paper touts the benefits of marketing automation (expected, since Marketo is one of the players in this space) to help with your nurturing campaigns. As Marketo puts it:

“The leads you’ve generated via inbound marketing are often still conducting research and evaluating their solution options. That’s where lead nurturing comes in — you need to invest in the process of building relationships with qualified prospects, with the goal of earning their business when they are ready to buy. Marketing automation helps you deliver relevant information over time to keep leads interested, engaged, and educated until they’ve made that decision”

Besides, marketing automation also helps to:

• Raise open and click rates
• Enables A/B testing beyond landing pages
• Creates new landing pages easily
• Shorten sales cycle
• Lets sale show when their prospects are engaging online
• Automates repetitive tasks
• Delivers sophisticated reporting and analytics

The free whitepaper is worth a read. The part where they talk about inbound marketing campaigns gone wrong can give you some interesting food for thought and help you rethink how your own campaigns are being setup.

For a marketer, email is possibly the most powerful medium ever created. In addition to be instantaneous and simple, it’s a personal medium that can be tailored to every person, it’s opt-in, meaning that you’re reaching an already-engaged audience and, best of all, the cost of sending each email is effectively zero.

However, the problem with email marketing is that it’s very much like a relationship, difficult to keep the excitement and enthusiasm up for a long period of time. This is true for both the marketer and the recipient.

So how can you help keep that spark alive when sending email after email? A lot of it comes down to simple creativity. However, there are several things you can do to revitalize a dull campaign and re-engage both yourself and your audience with your email marketing.

Here are just a few that you can consider:

1. Take a Survey

If an email campaign is a relationship, then every great relationship starts with communication. You need to take a moment and listen to your subscribers.

Take time out from your regular email campaign to have your readers fill out a short survey and learn what they want out of your emails. You might learn that there are whole directions you haven’t explored or that there are topics of interest you haven’t talked about yet.

Aside from that, getting your readers engaged and making them feel as they have a voice in the newsletter makes them more likely to stay and more likely to pay attention to what you send out.

2. Hold a Contest

People love contests and they get excited about the prospect of winning something. Whether it’s a contest for a large prize, a coupon to a certain percentage of subscribers or something else altogether, contests are a great way to generate buzz and interest in your email campaign.

Contests work especially well if you couple them with promotion elsewhere, offline and on, and can be even more effective if you reward your readers for attracting new subscribers.

But even if you can’t do anything grandiose, a simple contest is a great way to renew subscriber interest and improve your metrics. Just be careful to follow all relevant laws.

3. Reward Your Subscribers

Sometimes reviving a dull relationship is as simple as saying “Thank you”.

Offer a special deal to your readers just for being on your list. Give them something that makes them feel important and like they are your most valuable customers just because they are on the list.

This reward doesn’t have to be something large, just something unique that is only available to subscribers. Whether it’s a small percentage off, early access to new merchandise or a free download, anything that makes your subscribers feel as if you’re catering to just them will help keep their interest and their loyalty.

4. Segment Your Audience

Ideally, the more information you have about your audience the better. In addition to their name, email and other contact info, you ideally should know at least some about their interests, especially if you’re in a business that has a variety of products catering to many different types of customers.

However, even if you don’t have that information, you can still target your subscribers by publishing themed emails aimed at one or two specific segments. The idea is to talk directly to a part of your audience and engage them deeply. Though your other subscribers will likely ignore the email, you will come back and reach out to them another day.

All in all, segmenting your audience and reaching out to them is a great way to make your emails more relevant, interesting and useful.

5. Revamp Your Template

Revamping your site’s template is a long, difficult process that involves changing out multiple parts and, possibly, confusing a much larger audience. With your mailing list, you can make changes a great deal easier and, with the smaller audience and lack of search engine visibility, the risks are less.

So, if your campaign seems stale, it may be time to revamp your email template. Not only is this a chance to add new visual appeal, but you can also add new features such as a fast fact, a relevant quote or a promotion.

In short, if you’ve been using your old email template for a while and would like the chance to bring in some new content, a new template might be just what you need.

6. Test, Test and Re-Test

Of course, if you’re going to do any of the above changes, you want to test them as thoroughly as possible.

Most email service providers offer an easy way to split A/B testing where you send out slightly different emails to various groups and see which are the most effective. This allows you test one variable at a time, such as a new subject line or a tweak in the template.

However, even if you can’t do A/B testing, you can achieve the same result by changing the emails you send out between mailings. Basically, by making small changes every mailing and closely tracking results, you can hone in on things that improve your response.

In the end, the only thing that is required to keep the interest and spark in your email campaigns is a willingness to try new things and to engage with your audience. If you can do those two things, there likely won’t be a single boring week for your newsletter.

It does mean, however, that you have to be vigilant with your campaign and, even if things seem to be going well, you have to be willing to take a risk.

With email, if your campaign isn’t moving forward, it’s stagnating and a stagnating campaign is a dying one.

About the Author:

This guest post is written by Lior Levin, a marketing consultant for a company that offers a to do list application for businesses and individuals, and who also consults for a company that convert psd to html format.

Participating in social media is time consuming, so it’s only natural that people look for shortcuts. However, some shortcuts become disastrous detours, and this is often what happens when a company relies on automation for significant portions of its social updating.

Automatic feeds come in two flavors. Fully automatic feeds publish to a social media platform without any human intervention. An example of this is setting up your Twitter updates to automatically feed into your Facebook company page.  Semi-automatic feeds require intervention. For example, my HootSuite social media interface allows me to publish the same message simultaneously on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, and soon, Google+.

Why to Avoid Automatic Feeds

The catch is, while automation is tempting for publishers, it is often annoying to readers. The following three consequences of overfeeding are why you should avoid automation, or at the very least use it judiciously.

1. Stream clogging. Automation encourages publishers to over communicate. If you overload any given platform with updates, your connections will either mentally tune you out, or physically tune you out by removing you from their stream (think Facebook) or disconnecting from you altogether (think Twitter). Most social platforms enable users to finely tune and personalize their incoming content, dooming any type of mass merchandising effort. And even though you can’t stop your mail to prevent junk mail, social media users can and do stop messaging they regard as spam.

2.Redundancy. Publishers sometimes lose sight of how many of their connections frequent multiple platforms. When I see the same update on three platforms, I remember it, but not in a good way. My assumption is the sender either doesn’t understand me or doesn’t mind bombarding me. Either way, the sender is not inspiring me to interact or do business.

3. Inappropriate style. The composition of a tweet, which is limited to 140 characters, does not lend itself to doubling as an effective Facebook post. Conversely, updates from other networks feeding into Twitter may be severely truncated, rendering them cryptic or entirely incomprehensible. Each platform has its own stylistic conventions that encourage conversation and action. Ignoring them only renders your social media activity less effective.

How to Avoid Automatic Feeds

Why do companies use this sort of indiscriminate messaging? Besides the convenience factor, I believe many companies simply don’t have a clear and distinct communication strategy for each social platforms on which they engage.

For example, a B2C firm might use …

• Twitter to announce daily Twitter-only promotions
• Facebook as a place for customers to upload photos of themselves using the product
• LinkedIn for business updates relevant to employees and stakeholders

A B2B firm might use …

• Twitter to distribute industry news and analysis highly relevant to its customer base
• Facebook to provide in-depth information on its products and solicit feedback
• LinkedIn as a recruiting channel

You’ll notice that each example necessitates targeting a particular audience segment and then theming the message to appeal to that segment.

Putting a purpose behind social communication not only eliminates the temptation to use automatic feeds, it allows companies to give audience segments a clear and persuasive reason to connect and much more important, stay connected and engaged. A constant barrage of thematically unconnected updates might accomplish the former, but never the latter.

Any business in social media for the long haul needs a strategy that employs something other than convenience as the linchpin.

About the author:

 Brad Shorr is Director of Content & Social Media for Straight North, an Internet marketing, Chicago-based agency. They specialize in niche, middle market B2B industries such as flame resistant apparel and thermoplastic injection molding. Follow @bradshorr on Twitter for non-automated discussion of all things marketing.

The tactics discussed in the article are:

1. Target Your Content to an Audience Likely to Share
2. Participate in the Communities Where Your Audience Already Gathers
3. Make Your Blog’s Content SEO-Friendly
4. Use Twitter, Facebook and Google+ to Share Your Posts & Find New Connections
5. Install Analytics and Pay Attention to the Results
6. Add Graphics, Photos and Illustrations (with link-back licensing)
7. Conduct Keyword Research While Writing Your Posts
8. Frequently Reference Your Own Posts and Those of Others
9. Participate in Social Sharing Communities Like Reddit + StumbleUpon
10. Guest Blog (and Accept the Guest Posts of Others)
11. Incorporate Great Design Into Your Site
12. Interact on Other Blogs’ Comments
13. Participate in Q+A Sites
14. Enable Subscriptions via Feed + Email (and track them!)
15. Attend and Host Events
16. Use Your Email Connections (and Signature) to Promote Your Blog
17. Survey Your Readers
18. Add Value to a Popular Conversation
19. Aggregate the Best of Your Niche
20. Connect Your Web Profiles and Content to Your Blog
21. Uncover the Links of Your Fellow Bloggers (and Nab ‘em!)
22. (Bonus) Be Consistent and Don’t Give Up

While I was indeed doing most of what they suggest, there were a couple of good tactics I had either neglected completely or kept postponing (yeah, I procrastinate sometimes… ask my wife!).

Your Checklist for Increasing Blog Traffic

Take the list above, make it into a checklist format, print it and place it somewhere next to you (like, on the wall right in front of you!). Then, make a point of every week to review it and plan your tactic for the coming week. It’s a lot to do but if you break it down into weekly tactics, dedicating 1 hour or so for a handful of them, you will see great improvement in your blog traffic.

You know what? Let me help you out. Here’s the list in a PDF format ready for you to print and use. It includes a few extra blank lines for you to add your own tactics based on your company’s goals and specific industry opportunities.

Oh, and don’t be like me. Download it now and start doing it today!

1. We don’t have a marketing person or department
2. We don’t have enough time to create content
3. Our website sucks, we want to fix it first
4. We are still researching topics for our blog posts
5. We don’t know where to start

Any other typical reasons I missed? You have probably heard (or thought yourself) a few more, I bet.

A Simple Content Marketing Strategy

Yes, creating content is difficult. Creating blog posts, writing articles, shooting videos take time and effort. BUT (a big but for sure) you’ve gotta start somewhere!

So here’s my suggestion for those still on the fence or trying to climb what seems like a very tall content-marketing-fence: Just Do It! (sorry Nike!, don’t sue me for copyright infringement please)

That’s right, just type something and let it fly. Don’t waste time reviewing 5 times before hitting “publish”. Don’t wait three days for your team to give their feedback. Stop having second thoughts of whether anyone will like it.

You know why? Because if you are not producing any content now, anything (yes, anything!) you produce will be better than what you have today.

Yes, it’s that simple

Sure, you don’t want to publish crappy stuff. But you know what? If you add too much stress, too much “process” and too much thinking behind content creation you will set yourself for failure. Small companies or small marketing departments can’t afford to spend too much time on content marketing, I know that for a fact. There are lead generation programs, the new email marketing system being implemented, and something the sales department asked you to do (don’t they always?) a few times already.

So make your life easy and just start writing (or recording, if you will) and publishing. With time, you will be able to put more processes in place, get a good review and approval workflow, whatever you think is necessary to create quality content at your company. But, start simple. Unless you start creating something NOW you will regret not having done it sooner.

“You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new” – Steve Jobs

What do customers want?

Let’s do a focus group and find out. This tried-and-true approach to innovation leading to brand extensions, new product categories, and new marketing approaches has and continues to be used as a cornerstone of market research efforts.

In an interesting BusinessWeek article dating back to 2005, titled “Shoot the Focus Group”, the author states that although there are plenty of examples and ample evidence that Focus Groups fail time and again, companies keep using them.

“The old-fashioned focus group still has its believers even with fiascoes like Pepsi Edge and a decades-long new-product failure rate of about 90%.” – BusinessWeek

You probably know the famous examples of the failure of Chrysler’s Aztek car and the surprising success of PT Cruiser, Coca Cola’s “New Coke”, Ford Edsel, and plenty of others horror stories of focus groups gone wrong.

And why is that? I like Gerald Zaltman’s explanation that “The correlation between stated intent and actual behavior is usually low and negative” which also reminds me of an episode of Mad Men where Don Draper chastises a hired researcher to do a focus group for one of their clients, see below.

Excerpt from Mad Men, Season 4. “The Rejected”.

Faye: Well, I’ve done everything but finish the report.

Don: How’d we do?

Faye: Well, it turns out the hypothesis was rejected. I’d recommend a strategy that links pond’s cold cream to matrimony– a veiled promise.

Don: Hello, 1925. I’m not gonna do that, so what are we gonna tell the client?

Faye: I can’t change the truth.

Don: How do you know that’s the truth? A new idea is something they don’t know yet, so of course it’s not gonna come up as an option. Put my campaign on tv for a year, then hold your group again, maybe it’ll show up.

Faye: Well, I tried everything. I said “routine”, I tried “ritual”… all they care about is a husband. You were there. I’ll show you the transcripts.

Don: You can’t tell how people are going to behave based on how they have behaved.

So, what’s the problem with focus groups?

In a Harvard Business Review article, Turn Customer Input into Innovation, Anthony Ulwick says “companies go about listening to customers all wrong”. Customers are asked to offer a solution to a problem but they aren’t informed enough, aren’t experts in the field and have a limited frame of reference.

“The problem, when there is one, is simple: Companies ask their customers what they want.” – Anthony Ulwick

The solution, according to Ulwick, is to focus on outcomes. This means that instead of asking for customers to submit solutions to a particular problem, they should focus on understanding what customers value most.

Leveraging Social Media for Market Research

But how about using social media? I strongly believe that traditional marketing tactics can be greatly enhanced by using digital tools and when it comes to market research, social media channels should be top of mind. That includes paying attention to comments on your blog, using your Facebook Fan Base to test new ideas, monitoring Twitter feeds, and more.

“I’ll take the status update that someone wrote from the couch in the comfort of their own home as more accurate than the comment they made in a focus group room when they are given a $100 gift card to show up.” – Mike Volpe, CMO at HubSpot

Whether social media will replace traditional market research is up to debate, the active use of social media to complement market research can dramatically improve a company’s success ratio for new product launches and maybe take away some of that bad rap focus groups have.

Additional Reading

Here are some interesting articles if you’d like to dig deeper into this topic:

• How Focus Groups Failed Aztek, PT Cruiser
• Ford Edsel and why it became synonymous with failure
• Myth #21: People can tell you what they want
• Focus Groups are Dead: Interview with Mike Volpe, CMO at HubSpot
• Will Social Media Replace Surveys as a Research Tool?
• Market Research via Social Media

Note: Mad Men is Copyright of American Movie Classics Company LLC.

The Blogger’s Guide to Online Marketing is one of ProBlogger’s newest ebooks, written by the Web Marketing Ninja. ProbBlogger was started by Darren Rowse, who wrote the most popular of the ProBlogger products, 31 Days to Build a Better Blog.

For me, one of the things that separates this guide from the (seemingly) thousands of others is that it’s advanced, while still maintaining the tried and true step-by-step style Problogger is known for. So many products, selling from a dollar to over $100, seem to focus on just one thing: starting a blog. Well, if you’re anything like me, you’re well past the point of starting a blog. Now you want to see it actually DO something for you.

My biggest takeaway is that there is so much more to blogging for profit than great content. Yep, content is King, but even kings have armies, a staff, and a whole bunch of other things in place to make sure everything works out. We spend so much time creating great content that sits and earns nothing because we do not understand basic, but still largely misunderstood business practices. Something that occurred to me was that even SEO and design seem quite small when you take a step back and really look at what you are trying to accomplish – a real money-making business.

Blogging well is a feat all on its own. But once that is mastered, there is the bigger task of turning a blog into a viable business – which it can be.

But trying to figure out exactly how to make money blogging isn’t easy, unfortunately. And there is a lot of trial and error – without some sort of navigational guide. You could end up spinning your wheels, getting burned out, and giving it up altogether. I have personally been down that road more than once with blogging.

So in true ProBlogger style, The Blogger’s Guide to Online Marketing includes practical, step-by-step tips. Rather than just an overview of things you’ve heard before, this guide is based in theory and logic and then followed up by simple things to do to start to see the steps work.

As so many successful bloggers will admit, making money from blogging truly is like building a house, and there are foundational elements and then others that you build on top of them. It’s important to get things in order.

This guest post is written by Lior Levin, a marketing advisor for a shipment company that offers Pre shipment inspections, and who also advises for the Tel Aviv University’s department of ma in security.

Demand Generation vs. Lead Management

According to Carlos, Demand Generation has two goals:

1. Filling the funnel
2. Engaging with prospect throughout the funnel

And Lead management is the process used to ensure there is a link between marketing and sales to prevent leads leaking out, falling out of the funnel.

How About Marketing Automation?

On a second video, Carlos then explains that Marketing Automation will not be the only solution for your demand genreation and lead management, but it can support both processes. It is the technology behind your demand / lead processes.

Marketing Automation basically enables your content to reach your buyer at the right time in the buying cycle.

Nice job, Carlos!

With “An Introduction to Inbound Marketing Analytics“, you get an overview of what to measure and why. Especially useful for small companies and those who are just starting out with their marketing programs and need some help identifying key metrics, the eBook is packed with good advice.

Inbound Marketing Analytics Overview

In the eBook you will see metrics for the following marketing tactics:

• Social Media
• Email Marketing
• Lead Nurturing & Marketing Automation
• Your Website & Landing Pages
• Search Engine Optimization
• Paid Search
• Business Blogging

The benefits of analyzing your marketing performance according to HubSpot are:

1. Identify what’s working.
2. Identify what’s not working.
3. Identify ways to improve.
4. Implement more of the tactics that work to improve marketing performance

Agreed!

Get your free copy of the “An Introduction to Inbound Marketing Analytics” eBook.

I like how Vanessa Nornberg described in an Inc.com article a few tips to make your trade show profitable:

1. Buy a booth you can afford
2. Strategically organize your booth
3. No chairs
4. Eliminate distractions
5. No smart phones
6. Leave laptops at the hotel
7. Choose the booth staff wisely

Add those to my previous 12+ tips for trade show success and you’ve got yourself a great checklist for planning your next event!