DEFINING E-MARKETING STRATEGIES IN THE 21ST CENTURY
May 18, 2013 at 12:46PM by Sylvia Garcia of the Webhuckster Group
Everyone’s aim when they start a blog is to gain subscribers, however once you have them what is the next step? You need to keep them interested and convert them to buyers at some point in order to grow your online business. So how do you do that?
We all know that having contact information is important. The larger our database of subscribers, the greater our potential for success…but is that really enough? Many e-business owners create email marketing campaigns that simply do not work. Thousands of emails with low open rates are sent to subscribers each and every day. So why don’t these campaigns work? Because you’re not connecting with your audience. Forget trying to convert your subscribers into buyers. Think about building a relationship with them first.
The first rule of thumb is to not start pitching to your contacts right away. You shouldn’t do anything to annoy your subscribers or they will vanish faster than they appeared. First offer them information they need. Give them free, invaluable info…good quality content they can relate to. Build a good rapport with them.
The second rule of thumb is to not automate everything. Add a personal, human touch to your emails. Create copy that speaks directly to your subscribers. Offer them the opportunity to respond to you. Let them see that the relationship is a two-way street and keep in mind that pushy sales campaigns are outdated. Our audiences are too sophisticated for that. The new trend is to suggest and educate them and let them ask for information on your products and services on their own. When you are constantly interacting with them, it creates a human bond that brings immense credibility and attachment.
Of course all this doesn’t mean that you should deviate from your goal. Focus on it and proudly put it forward. If you are new to the e-marketing game and are afraid the call to action might disappointment your subscribers, don’t worry. This will not be the case if you have already correctly formed a rapport with them. In fact, most subscribers will actually look forward to the special discounts and offers from you. Be bold about it and say it loud and clear.
If you are properly equipped with this latest style of relationship marketing, email marketing will work for you. Just remember to be friendly, honest and add a little personality and you will be sure to see amazing email marketing results.
Source: http://webhuckstergroup.com
May 17, 2013 at 3:00 AM by Kieran Flanagan
The only certainty in the SEO world — or, really, the digital marketing world — is change. And over the past two years, we have seen a whole lot of it. Both Google Panda & Penguin have severely disrupted what works for search marketers, leaving many rather confused about what they should be doing to attract more organic traffic. And not only that; it has left many unsure which best practices may now actually actively harm their organic search strategy. Continue reading
Posted on 05.14.2013 by Michael Garrity
On Friday morning, Matt Cutts, the person in charge of Google’s webspam team, announced via Twitter that the search engine would be rolling out the next generation, version 2.0, of its Penguin update (originally released in April of last year).
This update will likely have considerable ramifications on the way that Google sorts and ranks pages on its search engine results pages (SERPs), as these types of overhauls entail altering the search algorithm, as opposed to just an index refresh.
The first Penguin update focused on black hat SEO and links/link quality, as part of the company’s apparent desire to keep “spammy” sites stuffed with low-quality links from reaching the upper echelons of the SERPs (or even the first couple of pages, for that matter). It’s been tweaked a few times since then, with the first refresh (Penguin 1.1, if you will) simply cleaning up and implementing the algorithm update in the way it indexes pages, and the second refresh adding the Disavow Links Tool, which puts the onus of identifying and removing bad links on the webmasters.
But this new update promises to be much more significant and should resonate more with all websites and webmasters. In a video released yesterday (see the bottom of this post), Cutts said that the upcoming Penguin update, which is expected in “a few weeks,” will likely go deeper and have more of an impact than Penguin 1.0, but didn’t really elaborate beyond that. He also explains that Google is looking to give special ranking “boosts” to sites that are authorities in a specific industry, community or space, meaning it will return those sites above loess authoritiative sites in related queries. He doesn’t define how they will determine that authority, however.
Naturally, this has led many Web pros to wonder just what this new update will entail, and how it may affect their own performance in the SERPs. For now, all we can do is speculate.
One likely scenario involves Google’s silently growing social network, Google+, which passed Twitter in Dec. 2012 to become the second largest online social network in terms of active monthly users (according to a Global Web Index study). Whereas Google started out by aggressively (over) marketing G+ when it first went live, the company has slowly backed off in favor of quietly integrating the social network with its myriad other products.
It wouldn’t be at all surprising, then, to see Google trying to incorporate G+ more intricately into its search engine, as well. And since the original Penguin was largely about links and link quality, one might expect Penguin 2.0 to put a special emphasis on links appearing on the social network. That is, content that gets linked to on or from Google+ will be weighted more heavily, or at least with more credibility, than if it were just a link on a random website or blog.
In other words, Google could end up viewing links that also appear somewhere on Google+ as being of a generally higher quality than others, so it may end up giving them a boost in the SERPs. And if that’s the case, it wouldn’t be surprising if Google Search also paid attention to the activity around links on Google+ (e.g. shares, +1s, etc.) in order to better determine just how “quality” they may actually be.
Should this end up being the case, it would mean that brands and content publishers, especially, will want to become more active on Google+, sharing links on the social network in order to give them more authority or credibility in the SERPs, especially if they expect these links to appear on other websites or blogs.
Of course, this is all just speculation, and Google is being, and will continue to be, quiet on the subject until the release of the new update, as it always is. I’m just saying, it would be an interesting way for the company to quietly nudge people toward using Google+ more often, although the downside would be the creation of an increasingly insular, exclusive “Google Universe” that may alienate Web professionals and users even more than it already has.
Source: Website Magazine
May 13, 2013 at 2:14PM by Sylvia Garcia of the Webhuckster Group
With social media platforms springing up everywhere and mobile marketing exploding, it’s really tough to know where to focus your marketing expertise and dollars. I’ve listed a few ideas to help give your marketing effort a boost:
Were these tips helpful? Any ideas you want to share regarding creative marketing strategies? Please leave any comments below.
Source: http://webhuckstergroup.com
May 12, 2013 by Sylvia Garcia of the Webhuckster Group
Mother’s Day is tough for me because my mother passed away in 2006. But I like to focus on all the great things she did and was, as opposed to the fact that she is no longer among us. On this day I’ve chosen to share a story I wrote about her many years ago.
MY WONDER MOM
I grew up in a middle-class neighborhood on the south side of San Antonio. My father Raymond was a World War II veteran who was one of the first in his family to graduate from college. He earned his BA in journalism, with a minor in music, from Trinity University here in San Antonio after he returned from the war. He was severely injured while stationed somewhere in Europe, hit by shrapnel, and earned a Purple Heart. Dad was a traditional man who loved his family, God, and country, and was proud to have served in the military.
My mother, Gloria, was a beautiful young woman with a small, straight nose, full lips and huge, almond-shaped, bole-colored eyes. My grandmother placed her in a convent at the age of five, and then abandoned her altogether at the age of 15, when Grandma ran off to California with her new husband, my grandfather Adam. My father’s older sister, Aunt Ernestine, was a friend of Grandma’s and took Mom in on the pretense that Mom would serve as nanny/housekeeper to help my aunt tend to her children, but my aunt had really taken pity on her and treated her like a daughter. And that is how my parents met. Several years later they went on a few chocolate soda and movie dates before Dad proposed and Mom readily accepted.
I think that because she had been abandoned, Mom was eager to finally belong to a real family unit. When she began to give birth to us children, who she called her little chickens, she made a promise to herself to never let any of her children experience the pain of abandonment she’d experienced as a child. When my brother Toby was five years old, one of my uncles, whose wife couldn’t have children, asked my father if he could raise Toby as his own. Dad gingerly approached Mom about it and her response was to fight tooth, fang and claw to keep Toby. She adamantly refused to give him up. That, in a nutshell, was my mother. In spite of her past, or possibly because of it, she was inherently intent on providing a warm, loving environment for her family, and was not about to give up any of her little chicks.
Mom was a stay-at-home mom, as most wives were in the 50s, but she was also one of the few wives on the block who could drive a car. Dad worked at the local Air Force Base and Mom would drive him to work every morning so that she could then drive us to school.
Our childhood was pretty wholesome, especially by today’s standards. There were backyard barbeques, street stickball, and games of hide-n-go-seek, a version that involved all of the kids on the block. There were also many road trips on weekends, drives to the country or, during the holiday season, to Windcrest, an upper middle class community in Northeast San Antonio famous for its Christmas light displays, and we traveled to California every other summer to visit my grandparents and uncles. My maternal grandparents lived on a farm in Buena Park, California. They had several horses on the property, a few goats and pigs, and some chickens. Their neighbor, a woman named Bobbie, owned a dairy farm and taught us how to milk cows and churn butter. And my uncles, Mom’s younger half-brothers, Danny and Joe, taught us to ride horses and took us to Knott’s Berry Farm, Disneyland, the beach and Pacific Ocean Park, which has since been shut down. We loved spending our summers in California. On alternate summers Grandma and my uncles came to Texas to stay with us.
Although we didn’t have a lot of money during our flypaper childhoods, Mom and Dad provided the basics. We had a somewhat reliable vehicle to get us to where we needed to go, a warm, loving and stable environment in which to thrive, and plenty of food to eat.
Still, we younger siblings have voiced one complaint regarding our upbringing and that is that we didn’t always get to wear new clothes like the older ones did. However, as I write this now, actually seeing the words on paper, this complaint seems pretty lame. With six children to feed, my parents mainly bought the older children new clothes and the rest of us were forced to wear their hand-me-downs. This was not as simple as it sounds. There was a bit of a discrepancy in our ages, so the clothes that may have been trendy when our older siblings wore them, were handed down to us years later when the rest of the civilized world had moved on to newer, more stylish options. That left us sporting some outdated and sometimes silly outfits to the movies and church on Sundays and such. Still this wasn’t a huge issue when we were in grade school because we went to a Catholic school where we were required to wear uniforms.
Values like tradition, family, community, patriotism and religion were huge back then. People were not concerned with child abductions, home invasions, car-jackings or even the issues surrounding single-parent homes to any huge degree. I attribute this to the fact that we went to schools where we were allowed to pray without anyone lobbying to deny us that sacred right. It was a time of salubrious nurturing and discipline, and as a result, the products of that period were mainly hard-working, God-fearing, patriotic, honorable people who were always willing to help out a neighbor in distress. At least that was the perception from my vantage point.
Norman Lear, the American television writer and producer, warned that unless we return to the more traditional values of family and community, and find our heroes among those who work for the long-term benefit of the many, we are headed for moral and cultural extinction. Anyone who scoffs at that should watch the news.
But, back to grade school…
When I was in the second grade my class presented a play. All of the girls needed flower costumes for the main scene. The costumes were supposed to have bright, white daisy petals that fanned out from ear to ear across our heads, with brilliant yellow fabric framing our faces, along with a green, knee-length dress to simulate the stem of the flower. I excitedly described the costume to my Mom, in detail, and asked her if we could go purchase a green dress.
“Let’s just get some green material and I’ll make the dress for you.”
“What? Nooooooo… all the other girls are getting new dresses.”
“I’m sorry but we can’t afford to get you a new dress. I’m going to make you one. You’ll see, you are going to love it.”
With that we headed to the fabric store. Mom went to look at fabric while I searched through the patterns, looking for something that even slightly resembled the pictures of the costumes the Nuns had shown us. After a few minutes Mom came toward me sporting a brilliant smile, one she often wore when excited.
“I found the perfect fabric. It is a bit heavy but it’ll look great for the stem of the flower. I also got some yellow fabric for the flower.”
“Don’t you need a pattern? What about the white petals?”
“No, I don’t need a pattern. Patterns are for beginners. Don’t worry! C’mon, let’s go.” She smiled again and led me out of the store.
Her enthusiasm was contagious, plus I was eight years old and had no reason to doubt her, so we happily left the store, packages in hand. Before she could get started on my costume we had to prepare dinner.
After dinner, as my sister Mary Eleanor and I were washing dishes, Mom took my measurements.
“Lift your arms…no, don’t hold in your stomach, I want it to fit comfortably.”
As soon as we were done with the dishes we washed up and went to bed. Mom stayed up to work on my costume. The next day was Friday, and the play was to be held that evening. I couldn’t wait to get home to see my costume. Some of the other girls had brought theirs to school and were showing them off to everyone. They were gorgeous. Bright, beautiful, white daisy petals with lemon-drop or mustard-colored fabric surrounding their faces, just like the pictures the Nuns had shown us.
Mom continued to work diligently on my costume that entire day and had it hanging on my closet door, wrapped in gray plastic, when I got home.
“Are you ready to see it? Here…hurry, try it on!” I could tell she was really eager to see my reaction. Her enthusiasm was contagious.
“Yes…let me see it!”
The costume was almost entirely green. It was basically a long rectangle with short sleeves. The hem fell way below my knees and a green hood that she’d attached to the back bodice tightly encased my head. On the top of the hood stood a huge, foot-long protrusion that was meant to be a flower stem, with a small yellow bud attached at the top. I felt and looked ridiculous in it.
To say that I was disappointed was a huge oversimplification because disappointment was only one of the emotions I was feeling. Still I tried really hard to disguise my displeasure because I knew how excited she’d been, and how diligently she’d worked on it.
“I love it!”
“Really…I was hoping you would.”
“Yes…it’s beautiful.” I smiled largely as I said it.
I showered then Mom carefully brushed my hair and helped me put on my costume, which was no easy task because aside from being way too tight it didn’t have buttons or a zipper. I looked like a chunky green sausage stuffed in a cramped, too-small casing with a huge horn on top. My brothers couldn’t stop laughing when they saw me in it but Dad told them to hush and we all settled into the car and headed to the school.
“Psst…you look like a big fat, green moco! And what’s that thing poking out of your head?” That was my older brother, Raymond. Dad turned around and gave him ‘the look’. After that the ride was a somewhat uneventful affair.
When I got to the school the other kids took one glimpse at my costume and burst out laughing. The Nuns told them to behave and be still but didn’t give them ‘the look’ so they kept on laughing. I remember thinking that I was glad my Mom wasn’t in the room to see their reaction to her creation. Then I began to cry and one of the Nuns took me aside and asked me what was wrong. I told her that I felt bad because I was ashamed of the costume my mother had made for me and that she’d worked very hard on it and had seemed so proud when I put it on. She studied me carefully for a moment.
“Do not worry your little heart. I have a special part for you. How good are you at memorizing?”
“Memorizing?”
“Yes, dear…if I teach you the Pledge of Allegiance in Spanish, do you think you can memorize it in a few minutes?”
“Yes…I…think so.”
“Juro fidelidad a la bandera
de los Estados Unidos de América,
y a la república que representa
una nación bajo Dios,
indivisible cón libertad
y justicía para todós.”
That was so many years ago. I was able to memorize the Pledge of Allegiance so instead of having to perform with the other children in their beautiful costumes, I was offered a solo performance that earned me a standing ovation from the entire audience made up of our parents. Well…okay…at the time I was so overcome by the applause that I didn’t realize that they stood because I’d cited the Pledge of Allegiance. Still, as I scanned the sea of faces, there was one that radiated the most. It was my dear mother’s. To this day I’ve never witnessed an expression of pride that could mirror my Mother’s on that day. But then that very possibly could be because hers was positioned at me.
In hindsight I believe that Mom had an agenda when she created that costume. I’d carefully given her the details of how the costumes were supposed to look. And I know that Mom was creative enough to come up with a garment that at the very least resembled the others. Mom clearly wanted mine to be different. She wanted mine to stand out. All she ever wanted was for us to be happy and successful, but she wasn’t the type to be in our faces about it. As I grew older I noticed that she mainly took a backseat to Dad and let him be the one to push us about getting an education, or give us advice as far as career paths and such.
Still in her own discriminating manner, and by example, she taught me so much. She taught me unconditional love in its purest form, diligence and patience. She taught me to have inner strength and compassion that extended beyond our inner circle, because her circle of compassion had been widened enough to embrace everyone with whom she came into contact. She’d been through so much in her life, not the least of which was being abandoned by her mother, yet her love for her children, family and people in general was constant, over-flowing and sometimes even overwhelming.
Mom’s method of rearing us children had been a bit unorthodox. There are many who certainly think so. But when I became an adult that’s exactly what I loved about her. I loved that she wasn’t afraid to think outside the box, color outside the lines, or dance to the beat of a different drummer. I loved that she instinctively fought hard to keep her family together even when she was young and impressionable and hadn’t been taught to fight that fight, certainly not by example. I loved that she questioned things she didn’t understand and fought tooth, fang and claw to protect the underdog. When I read the passage by Norman Lear, I believe he had someone exactly like my mother in mind when he wrote it. Mom wasn’t the celebrity or sports figure type of hero. Those things would’ve seemed superficial to her. She was the everyday, unassuming, common hero who didn’t need or want applause or recognition. She was content to take a backseat, to let others, and especially her children, shine. She was ahead of her time in that she was outspoken, yet she didn’t speak out for the sake of taking a position or because she liked the sound of her voice, she just simply couldn’t sit quiet when she thought someone was being treated unfairly. I loved that about her. And if I had to pick the one thing that I loved about her the most, not by any means an easy task as there are many things that stand out, I guess it is that she was never, ever afraid to stand out from the crowd if it meant that she could help someone in the process. And that is now, as it certainly was back in the 50s, a true measure of courage and heroism.
Happy Mother’s Day to all of the great mothers out there. Your 24-hour jobs are not easy by any means. But you do it because you realize that nothing in the world is more important than raising decent human beings. So to all of you, and to all of the mothers who are smiling down at us from heaven on this special day, I want to say thank you and God bless.
Source: http://webhuckstergroup.com
…Update “Few Weeks” Away
May 10, 2013 at 5:08pm ET by Danny Sullivan
In March, Google’s chief web spam fighter Matt Cutts promised that the Penguin Update designed to fight spam would get a big refresh later this year. Today, Cutts gave an update — keep waiting. It’s still a few weeks off. Along the way, there’s some confusion about whether the next Penguin Update will be Penguin 2 or Penguin 4. It’ll be Penguin 4, in how we reckon things. Let’s dive in.
Publishers have already been wondering if a change in rankings that many have noticed this week was some type of Google update. Google won’t say what, if anything happened.
However, Cutts has ruled out that it was the significant Penguin Update he warned in March would be coming.
Note that Cutts refers “Penguin 2.0″ as the coming rollout. How can that be, when we’ve had three confirmed Penguin updates already, with Penguin 3 happening in October?
This all goes back to a different update, the Panda Update, which first launched in February 2011. That was Panda Update 1. Of course, we didn’t call it Panda 1 then, because as the first Panda Update, it was just called “The Panda Update.”
Two months later, Google made a huge change to Panda, so the next version was called Panda 2. But when the third release happened, and people started calling that Panda 3, Google said that because the changes to the filter weren’t so dramatic, it would better be called Panda 2.1.
That left it to Google to call the shots on whether a Panda Update was big enough to go through a full point change or not. And that became ridiculous when we got to something like Panda 3.92, last September. As we explained then, when the updates started going to two decimal places, we felt maybe just a straight Panda 1, 2, 3 and so on number order made sense, no decimals involved.
When what would have been Panda Update 3.93 came around, we decided enough was enough. We renumbered all the Panda Updates that had happened, regardless of how big they were, believing that was a clearer way forward.
The number no longer reflects whether there’s been a major “generational” change or not. The number is just a common reference point for everyone to use, not some type of magnitude.
For the record, here’s where we are with Panda. The impact each update had on queries is shown, when provided by Google, after the number:
Panda 25 was the first time Google itself didn’t confirm whether a Panda Update had happened, part of its policy that it wasn’t likely to confirm these going forward, since they rollout over the course of days now. Instead, it was left to third-parties to decide if one had hit.
This also means that the update that’s caused chatter this week might be Panda 26. It might be something else. We don’t feel confident enough to declare it Panda 26 ourselves, which is why our list stops at Panda 25. But with Penguin ruled out, it does suggest that maybe Panda 26 had happened this week.
Or maybe not. Isn’t reading Google tea leaves fun?
That leads to Penguin. This is how those have gone, so far:
In our numbering system, regardless of how “big” the next Penguin Update is, we’ll still call it Penguin 4.
It will be big. We know that already from what Cutts has said in the past. In fact, it’s so big that internally, Matt said today that Google refers to it as Penguin 2.0.
Oh dear, but if this next one is the “true” Penguin 2, are we going to make a mistake calling it Penguin 4? I’ll argue not as big a mistake as if we called it Penguin 2.
See, let’s go back to Panda. In October 2011, we wrote that Panda 2.5 was live. Google hadn’t said it was a massive new change, so that seemed the right number. But the following month, Google said that Panda 2.5 would have been better described as Panda 3.0. We corrected that after the fact — but it would have been easier if Google had called it that way from the start.
We can’t depend on Google to consistently tell us how massive a particular update is, or even if an update happens at all. Because of this, linking magnitude to some decimal-based numbering system seems a mistake.
We have to use something that isn’t going to change months later on. The new numbering system has worked well with Panda, and we’ll stick with it for Penguin.
Ideally, I’d love to see Google itself simply list any significant change with the date it happens and some common reference name. I think that’s useful for publishers — not spammers, but any publisher — trying to understand if they’ve been impacted by something that they should correct. You can’t fix what’s wrong if you don’t have a good sense of what it was.
Source: Search Engine Land
May 11, 2013 at 10:40am by Sylvia Garcia of the Webhuckster Group
Webhuckster Group has a new look! Let us know what you think in the comments section below.
Source: http://webhuckstergroup.com
May 10, 2013 at 4:45pm ET by Barry Schwartz
Here’s our daily recap of what happened in online marketing today, as reported on Marketing Land and other places across the Web.
Analytics
Blogs & Blogging
Business Issues
Content Marketing
Copywriting, Design & Usability
Display & Contextual Advertising
E-Commerce
Mobile/Local Marketing
Social Media
Source: Marketing Land
AND CAN IT REALLY MAKE YOU MONEY?
May 9, 2013 at 3:13PM by Sylvia Garcia of the Webhuckster Group
Let me begin by saying that there are no magical tips that can help you get rich overnight but if you are committed it is certainly possible. So what is affiliate marketing? It basically means that if you are a publisher (blogger) you can make money by helping a business promote their products or services on your site. For example, if you sign up for Amazon’s affiliate program and promote their products on your site then you will receive a commission when a visitor you send from your site purchases one of their products. Affiliate marketing is one of the quickest and cheapest (although not the easiest) ways to make money online as you don’t have to create and stock any products or services yourself. You simply hook up a buyer with the seller and take a commission on the sale that was referred by you.
So how does it work? When you join an affiliate program and choose the products that you want to sell, the sellers provide you with a unique affiliate code that you use to refer traffic to the target site. Most affiliate programs offer ready-made text links, banners and other forms of creative copies so that you only have to copy the code, place it on your website and start referring traffic. The trick is to choose products and services that are related to your site’s niche to improve the chances of a visitor being interested in these products or services. When visitors click on these links, they are automatically redirected to the product site and if they purchase a product or subscribe to a service you make a commission. The sellers keep track of your performance through your affiliate ID utilizing their affiliate software (e.g. WP Affiliate Platform). You also have real time access to all sales and commissions stats.
You don’t necessarily need to sell products to make a commission. Different affiliate programs use different payment terms. For example, Pay per Click programs pay you based on the number of visitors (or clicks) you redirect to the Merchant’s website from your affiliate site, whether a sale is made or not.
There are also Pay per Lead programs that pay you when visitors provide their contact information on the target site by filling out a contact form.
So why affiliate marketing? Because affiliate marketing is considered one of the world’s fastest growing and best internet marketing techniques to earn money online. Here are some reasons why:
Just keep in mind that affiliate marketing is a highly competitive market. In order to be successful you will need to study the market needs, learn how to promote products, and learn what works and what doesn’t work.
Here are a few tips.
Finally, remember that affiliate marketing is a business so you will be much more successful if you treat it like one. It’s going to take a strong commitment on your part, and especially in the beginning, but if you stick with it you are sure to become a successful affiliate marketer.
Source: http://webhuckstergroup.com
May 6, 2013 at 1:59 PM by Amanda Sibley
Ready to get your hands dirty with some Twitter advertising? Now’s your chance! On April 30th, Twitter announced that advertising would finally be available to all users through the launch of its new, self-service ad platform. Previously, advertisers had to be invited to use Twitter ads — and spend a minimum amount of money per quarter — through the full-service platform.
May 6, 2013 at 9:00 AM by Maggie Hibma
As a savvy inbound marketer, you’re already sold on the value of using social media. But good social media marketing is about more than engagement, lead generation, and wider reach … you gotta have some etiquette, man.
Etiquette? Really? Like pinkies-up-at-tea-time stuff? Continue reading
April 30, 2013 at 9:00 AM by Ginny Soskey
At some point or another, we’ve all heard people spout off about the “death” of social media. One day someone announces a boycott of Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest — the next day, the social network is growing exponentially. So how should you, as a savvy inbound marketer, make sense of it all? As a data-driven and social media-loving company, we’d like to set the record straight: Social media is here to stay.
So we’ve combed through some of the hottest new social media research — including the new 2013 State of Inbound Marketing Report — to highlight some of the freshest stats that reveal the truth about the current state of social media marketing. Whether you plan to use these stats to inspire your company’s next marketing campaign, convince your CEO to increase your social media marketing budget, or simply justify your current inbound marketing activities, these 18 social media marketing stats are for you.
1) 27% of total U.S. internet time is spent on social networking sites. (Source: Experian) Tweet this stat!
2) 15% of total U.S. mobile internet time is spent on social networking sites. (Source: Experian) Tweet this stat!
3) Social media produces almost double the marketing leads of trade shows, telemarketing, direct mail, or PPC. (Source: HubSpot) Tweet this stat!
4) Social media lead conversion rates are 13% higher than the average lead conversion rate. (Source: HubSpot) Tweet this stat!
5) 21% of marketers say that social media has become more important to their company over the past six months. (Source: HubSpot) Tweet this stat!
6) 74% of all marketers say Facebook is important to their lead generation strategies. (Source: HubSpot) Tweet this stat!
7) Companies that generate more than 1,000 Facebook Likes also receive nearly 1,400 website visits a day. (Source: HubSpot) Tweet this stat!
8) 52% of all marketers have found a customer via Facebook in 2013. (Source: HubSpot) Tweet this stat!
9) On Facebook, brand posts get half of their reach within 30 minutes of being posted. (Source: Socialbakers) Tweet this stat!
10) 85% of fans of brands on Facebook recommend brands to others, compared to 60% of average users. (Source: Syncapse) Tweet this stat!
11) 43% of all marketers have found a customer via LinkedIn in 2013. (Source: HubSpot) Tweet this stat!
12) 36% of all marketers have found a customer via Twitter in 2013. (Source: HubSpot) Tweet this stat!
13) HubSpot customers with over 1,000 Twitter followers generate more than 800 new website visitors a month. (Source: HubSpot) Tweet this stat!
14) 59% of Twitter users have visited B2B tech brand sites, compared to 40% for the average internet population. (Source: Compete and Twitter) Tweet this stat!
15) 25% of consumers who complain about products on Facebook or Twitter expect a response within 1 hour. (Source: American Express) Tweet this stat!
16) Women are more likely than men to regularly check out a brand’s social page (48% vs. 43%). (Source: Ipsos) Tweet this stat!
17) 23% of marketers are investing in blogging and social media this year, a 9% increase from 2012. (Source: HubSpot) Tweet this stat!
18) Approximately 46% of online users count on social media when making a purchase decision. (Source: Nielsen) Tweet this stat!
Did you learn anything new about social media marketing? Which of these statistics surprised you the most? Share your thoughts with us below!
Source: HubSpot