Business Blogging: Tips and Case Studies Mike Volpe Charlie King Ilya Mirman

Marketing is Changing

Outbound Marketing

Outbound Marketing is Harder Annoying Salesperson

More Bad News…

The Good News…

Inbound Marketing BlogSEOSocial Media

Inbound Gives Leverage

Budget vs. Brains

Advice for the road ahead

Stop thinking like a marketer or advertiser.

Start thinking like a publisher and socializer.

Some Ideas and Case Studies

Target Content to Your Personas

What Gets Shared? Rarely Shared Frequently Shared Product info Free trials Software documentation New market data Educational content Top-notch blog posts

Content Makes You Interesting

Case Study: HubSpot Blog Top 3 source of leads ~10% visit company website ~10-20% lead conversion rate

SEO and Social Help Blog Results 25-30% of visitors from SEO Google is 90% of our SEO traffic 20-25% of visitors from social media Stumbleupon Twitter Facebook Reddit Delicious Digg LinkedIn Friendfeed

Blog Article Performance Metrics

Traffic, Leads and Sales

…By Channel or Source VisitorsLeadsSales SEO Social Media

Case Study: Reynolds Golf Academy Charlie King Director of Instruction Reynolds Plantation

Reynolds Golf Academy Golf school near Atlanta / Augusta led by GOLF MAGAZINE Top 100 Instructor Charlie King Golf lessons / schools and corporate outings on a 16-acre campus w/6,550 sq-ft indoor teaching center and state-of-the-art technology Marketing: magazine ads and direct mail GOAL: More website traffic and leads More cost effective marketing & business growth

What We Did Blog 4-6 articles a month SEO optimized, keyword rich Video 23 videos, include in blog articles eBook “New Rules of Golf Instruction”

Results 50 times more web leads Over 600 blog subscribers Thousands of eBook downloads

Tips and Takeaways Content is King - you can be your own media mogul Get started before your competition to get ahead Make SEO part of your blogging strategy Even non-technology businesses can benefit from a blog

Case Study: Cilk Arts Ilya Mirman VP Marketing Cilk Arts

Cilk Arts, Inc. Mission: To provide the easiest, quickest, and most reliable way to optimize application performance on multicore processors. Our Goal: Own a multicore programming standard Cilk++ Runtime on every processor Cilk++ used by all C/C++ multi-coders [Update: Cilk Arts acquired by Intel in July]

Go To Market Approach Open source business model “You share / we share” public license Low-touch, low-cost sales model Broad awareness, trial, adoption Big bet on Inbound Marketing No sales people Hired 1 marketer (me) 8 months before shipping product to implement Inbound Marketing approach Blog as primary marketing vehicle Entire team contributed (~1 post per week) Helped us engage with the developers we hoped to serve; understand what content they’re interested in

Results Reached over 100,000 developers Traffic and awareness matched or exceeded competitors Adoption at >250 universities worldwide >6,200 inbound links >3,000 leads Blog posts boosted search engine rankings for key terms

Don’t know ahead of time which topics will strike a chord Get the whole team engaged Don’t obsess over # of comments Links drove our search engine rank

Metrics: Visits, Sources, Links Inbound Links

Do… Get your whole organization engaged in contributing content A small, dedicated team can drive some real traffic and interest If no serious commitment, blog will fail Be real, be genuine Let your personality come out Build an editorial calendar with a broad set of interesting, valuable content Target the key personas you care about You’ll discover which topics are worth investing more in Invite guests to contribute Leverage content in many ways Blog, e-Books, Tutorials, etc. Consumable via YouTube, SlideShare, social media sites, etc.

Don’t… …be a blatant, self-centered commercial …focus on just one topic …make your blog your only social media effort; instead, spend time on other blogs, community sites, and contribute …worry about # of comments …worry about slow periods (# of visitors, subscribers, comments)

Summary SEO Social Content

Additional Resources Facebook Marketing eBook Twitter Marketing eBook Social Media Marketing Kit Blog:

Q&A Free Trial of HubSpot: Mike Volpe Charlie King Ilya Mirman

Appendix

What’s HubSpot? Marketing software for SMBs Over 1,800 customers in 2 years 100+ employees, lots of MIT grads

Case Study: Website Grader Free interactive tool 1.5 million URLs 40,000 inbound links 5,000 websites w/ badge & link 4,500 Del.icio.us bookmarks Great PR coverage (TechCrunch, RWW) 50,000+ visitors from StumbleUpon 100,000+ opt-in s & leads

Case Study: HubSpot TV Weekly video podcast live viewers 1-2K views / episode Top 10 marketing podcast in iTunes 70,000 views in first year Guests: MC Hammer, Biz Stone, David Meerman Scott, Chris Brogan