H2H Marketing

Type “social media” into a Google search bar and you’ll find roughly about 4.7 billion results in .30 seconds. Next, try “social media conference.” You’ll see something along the lines of 1.2 billion results in .25 seconds. Social media is important but I’d argue we aren’t celebrating it for the reasons we should. Instead, we are forcing social media to conform to traditional thinking and processes rather than adapting business philosophies and supporting methodologies to meet new opportunities.

Today I’m telling you a story, a beautiful story, where one of the most harassed brands in Italy (Trenitalia) was able to solve a problem of a particularly demanding customer (me).

Unfortunately, many business owners and heads of companies fail to upgrade their social media strategies due to jam-packed schedules and the day-to-day demands of running their organizations.  They just keep doing what they have done in the past like tweeting their blog posts and posting premium content offers to their social channels.  If you have not hopped on the video content train, now is the time.  Excellent video content can dramatically increase social lead conversions and the overall ROI of your social media marketing; the investment of time and resources is well worth it.  A great way to test the waters is to create a short, highly shareable video.

Today we're very excited to present our first European State of Inbound Marketing Report. The report provides 10 amazing insights compiled with the help of the marketing community in Europe. We've also accompanied each insight with lots of information to help you improve your own inbound strategy in 2013 and beyond. But we didn't stop there -- we also used our data to help answer the question: Is Europe really 18 months behind the U.S?

Generation Y, also referred to as Millennials, and Generation Z represent those individuals born in the late 1970s or the early 1980s to the early 2000s. They follow Generation X, my generation, and they are already a powerful force in the future of the global economy and politics.

Guest posting is the process of writing content for website that isn’t owned or operated by you. Often, brands will receive a link back to their website in exchange for the free content they provided the blog. As Wayne Barker of Search Engine People puts it, everyone wins when a guest blog exchange is successfully executed: you gain positive SEO and exposure to a new audience, the blog benefits from a fresh voice, and readers can enjoy a new perspective. Here are the primary benefits to your website from guest blog posts exchange:
Read more at http://www.business2community.com/blogging/an-exhaustive-guide-to-exceptional-guest-blogging-0485890#HsIGAqp2TfLLkQOX.99

The first mile of customer engagement is a post-commerce or post-transaction strategy that invests in an ongoing experience to keep customers happy now and over time. Doing so sparks positive word of mouth and in turn influences decisions the dynamic customer journey that defines the new era of connected consumerism. If in fact getting closer to customers is a key objective, then why do many businesses neglect the first mile of customer experience?

In my previous post, “Using Video Content to Drive Brand Awareness, Leads, and Sales,” I took you through the first four steps of the definitive B2B video marketing strategy.

In this second post, we focus on executing your video content strategy, maximizing impact, measuring results, and ensuring that you create sustainable campaigns that add long-term value to your organization. 

If you haven’t read it yet, the new book advances his “shareable moments” concept into a framework for social media engagement by identifying when, what and how organizations can best shape thedynamic customer journey, suggesting social media marketing should be about shaping intentional experiences or the experiences customers have through experience architecture. 

Your company or organization may already be hosting great events, but are you developing a sound content marketing strategy to make those events more engaging? Are you actually turning events into content? Events pack apowerful content marketing punch, because people attending events will remember their experience at your event far longer than they’ll remember reading a blog post. If you start approaching events with the same strategic focus you give other forms of marketing, you can capitalize on this powerful source of content. 

Recently, Joe Pulizzi wrote a post on the 12 Roles Essential to the Future of Content Marketing. In it, he listed the new roles we need to consider, not only as marketers, but also as people who drive business for our organizations. It’s a reflection of the growing responsibility we have as marketers — and the growing need for us to step up our leadership role. 

Time and time again, we get asked for benchmark data, particularly about customer generation. Well, you may remember we recently launched our 2013 State of Inbound Marketing Research Report, and we used the mounds of research there to try to, you know, "give the people what they want."

And the people want benchmark data.

The blueprint assumes you have basic SEO knowledge: you’re not scared of title tags, can implement a rel=canonical, and you’ve built a link or two. (If this is your first time to the rodeo, we suggest reading the Beginners Guide to SEO and browsing our Learn SEO section.)

 

Collaborative marketing will mean that marketers truly shift from marketing “at” consumers to marketing “with” consumers. We have reached a tipping point where a penalty will be paid by those companies who simply view social as a mass communication channel for blasting out messages to a mass audience.

In the world of online and social media, attempting to follow, track, analyze and make sense of everything out there, as it pertains to you and your business, can be overwhelming. MediaMiser has taken its decade worth of analysis knowledge and its huge Enterprise level backbone and added a simple interface that will allow small to medium size businesses to make sense of all the noise.

Andy’s question inspired us to take a closer look at some of the content marketing challenges faced by North American B2B marketers who work at small businesses (companies with 10 – 99 employees), as compared to their peers at enterprise organizations (companies with more than 1,000 employees). We’ll also share some insights on ways content marketers can address these issues — regardless of the size of the organization they work for. 

According to an Econsultancy and Adobe trend report, marketers see mobile optimization as the number oneopportunity in 2013; yet they struggle with executing on an effective mobile content strategy. And while there are plenty of great studies out there that portend mobile’s takeover of the web, there’s not much information about the best (and worst) approaches to publishing content that is mobile-friendly. Obviously, mobile is a whole new ball game. So how do we play? 

 

Simple Tips for a better post writing

I first started to dabble with content marketing in 1998. At that time, I worked in the internal communications department for an insurance company. Our goal was to get the employees to use our internal processing and database services, rather than outsourcing. Our solution: We created a monthly print newsletter focused on educating employees on the latest Microsoft Office updates and enhancements. Over the following six months, employees did start to use more of our services. The newsletter was part of the solution that made this achievement possible.

Throughout 2012, video marketing for B2B businesses undoubtedly showed an upward trend in both effectiveness and popularity, and most industry observers expect this to continue into 2013 and beyond.

Here are a few relevant findings from respected industry reports and trends to back up this claim

This April, 1,100 passionate marketers from every corner of the world traveled to San Diego for Social Media Marketing World (#SMMW13), to find out.

The number of conference takeaways and buzz was immense.

For this article, I’ve focused on 26 takeaways from SMMW13, including notable quotes by presenters and their session titles.

Over the years, companies invested in automated solutions to improve the efficiency of inbound customer engagement