Inbound Industry Report: May 29, 2012

By Laura Pinter | Posted May 29, 2012 | Link | Filed in: Inbound Report

Top marketing news, articles and tips from the fourth week of May 2012.

Marketing & Sales Strategy

Many businesses struggle to answer the question, “How do we get one-off customers to come back?” Derek Halpern (@derekhalpern) was inspired after a trip to a local spa, when an employee simply told him to "come back soon." He followed up by suggesting that an email marketing campaign could help turn newcomers into repeat customers. Here are some of his suggested starting points that can be applied to many types of organizations:

Collect email addresses to begin the lead nurturing process.
Smart follow-up is key. Approach them as a friend, and show that you have their best interest in mind.
Create a customer loyalty program, and include a deal offer to get them to continue buying.

In addition to strategy, marketers must also address the executional challenges that can hinder marketing and sales efforts. Adam Needles (@abneedles) argues that we need to become stewards of the demand generation process, and identifies three common barriers to inbound marketing success:

Campaigns organized around channels instead of goals.
Training and skillsets misaligned with modern marketing needs.
Measurements and reporting focused on outputs (activities) instead of outcomes (results).

SEO

Algorithm updates, search engine restrictions and optimization methods have drastically changed throughout the past year, prompting SEOmoz (@seomoz) to update its popular Beginner’s Guide to SEO. Included in the resource are new sections focusing on social sharing, link building, data analysis and more.

Once you master the tips and tricks in the SEOmoz guide, take some notes from Neil Patel’s (@neilpatel) 3-step, high-converting keyword plan. A brief overview of his recommended approach to make your SEO make you money:

First, research keywords for your site’s SEO to create a base of untapped opportunity.
Next, build a semantic keyword base focused on trends, social tags, related searches and geographic location when relevant.
Last, create a master document to organize keywords and assign them to target pages.

Facebook News

After Facebook’s public debut last week, some smaller shareholders are now suing the social network giant, alleging that it failed to publicly reveal pertinent numbers leading up to the IPO.
Facebook launched two new mobile apps— Facebook Camera and Pages Manager. Camera takes advantage of Facebook’s Instagram acquisition, allowing users to shoot, filter and share single or sets of photos, and scroll through friends’ uploaded images. Pages Manager helps page admins easily keep up with Page activity on the go.
Facebook’s Promoted Posts are now live, giving brands the option to pay to promote a post from their Timeline to increase reach and impressions. Prices range from $5.00-$300.00.

Company Headlines

Hewlett-Packard Company plans to lay off 27,000 employees—about eight percent of its workforce—over the next two years as part of a massive restructuring plan in response to declining profits and revenues.
Mindjet, the brainstorm and mind-mapping tool, enters the social collaboration market with Mindjet Connect. Building on the acquisition of Cohuman, Mindjet Connect Vision & Action work to bring project execution and collaboration together.

Stats & Studies

A recent study by Simply Measured analyzed usage of Google+ brand pages, showing somewhat optimistic findings about brand adoption and engagement growth. Augie Ray (@AugieRay) expands on this data with his own small study, in which he compares engagement of ten top brands on Facebook and Google+.

What articles made your top list last week? We’d like to hear your opinions.

Stay updated: Subscribe to the PR 20/20 blog, check us out on Facebook or follow the team on Twitter.