Inbound Industry Report: Feb. 13, 2012

By Laura Pinter | Posted February 13, 2012 | Link | Filed in: Inbound Report, Marketing

Top marketing news, articles and tips from the second week of February 2012.

Content Marketing

Inbound marketing is driven by content, and undoubtedly impacts your brand, website search marketing, social media and PR efforts. In 4 Hidden Benefits of Content Marketing That Go Beyond ROI, Joe Chernov (@jchernov) looks beyond the analytics, and shares a few unique advantages that showcase the value of content marketing for any organization:

Help recruit top talent by presenting your content marketing strategy upfront, which can act as a deciding factor for prospective employees.
Market the popularity of your content internally to boost morale, and open doors for others to get involved.
Create a trusting, meaningful relationship with your audience: “Strive to sell without selling.”

Additionally, if your content strategy involves a blog, build up your content platform by building relationships with other writers. For tips, check out 7 Crucial Tactics for Writing a Wildy Successful Guest Blog Post.

Social Media

We’ve all heard that authenticity plays a significant role in marketing your brand. Eric Wittlake (@wittlake) argues, though, that this view is both irrelevant and unrealistic. Instead, he suggests “Replacing the ‘Authentic’ in Social Media” with being “believable.”

The conflict is simple: Being authentic focuses on you; being believable shifts focus to your audience—where it needs to be. An interesting thought: “There are hints of your authentic business everywhere, and when you deviate too far, you are no longer believable.”

Instead, shift your focus: deliver value, be true to what you say you are, and show your personality.

SEO

According to Dave Sottimano (@dsottimano), it only takes an hour to discover—and fix—your website’s biggest flaws. Sottimano breaks down the process into three parts. Dedicate twenty minutes to each:

Architecture—Broken links, unneeded redirects, multiple subdomains and inconsistent URL structure.
Indexing & Crawling—Penalties, URL tags (i.e. “noindex” or “robots.txt”) and page total vs. Google’s indexed page total.
Duplicate Content & SEO—URL parameters (i.e. search= or keyword=), duplicate text content and pagination.

Tom Foremski (@tomforemski) shares an infographic relating the Goldilocks fairy tale to search engine optimization, which touches on a number of SEO tactics. Different approaches yield different results, categorized on either end of the spectrum—“too hot” (spammy), “too cold” (apathy), and “just right” (profitable).

In the News

Google dominated the headlines last week with two new competitive introductions: Google Drive, which takes aim at Dropbox and other online storage services; and its Solve for X website, which rivals the TED organization, focusing on talks about “radical technological ideas.”
MIT professor Catherine Tucker released a study that indicates an untapped opportunity in Facebook social advertising. The research analyzed a nonprofit’s Facebook ad campaigns, showing that data can be used to glean more targeted information through friendships.
Reading Rainbow, the popular PBS children’s show, returns in digital form. The show’s producer and host plans to introduce a mobile app with enhanced digital books for children.
Rand Fishkin (@randfish) and Dharmesh Shah (@dharmesh) introduced Inbound.org, a community-curated platform for inbound marketing news.