How to Grow Your Instagram Exposure

Are you using Instagram to promote your business? Want to increase your exposure? Making a few simple tweaks to your Instagram marketing can generate more engagement and increase the visibility of your content. In this article you’ll discover how to get more exposure for your brand on Instagram. #1: Embrace the Hashtag Descriptive hashtags on […]

This post How to Grow Your Instagram Exposure first appeared on Social Media Examiner.
Social Media Examiner - Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle

from Social Media Examiner http://bit.ly/1M29eUJ
via IFTTT
Google My Business Listing
from Tumblr http://bit.ly/1IVq6xe

4 Science-Backed Reasons to Read More (Even If You're Busy)

When was the last time you read a book?

If you’re like me, you probably have a reading list of books and articles a mile long. It’s not that you don’t want to read them, but making time to actually do so isn’t always easy. 

Your schedule is full of projects and meetings, you’ve finally organized your priorities and learned to manage your time, and after all that, you just can’t make time in your day for yet another activity.

However, if someone as successful and busy as Warren Buffett spends 80% of his day reading, surely we can spend a few minutes a day with a book.

So how do you make time to read? Simple. You don’t. But before I get into that, there are a few science-backed reasons to prioritize reading no matter how busy you are.

4 Reasons Why You Should Prioritize Reading

1) It improves brain connectivity.

A study published in Brain Connectivity by researchers at Emory University found that reading improves brain connectivity. This means that the brain becomes more efficient at processing information. In fact, those changes linger at for multiple days after reading a novel.

2) It helps prevent Alzheimer’s.

A study by the National Institute of Health that followed over 700 dementia-free participants age 65 and older found that intellectually stimulating activities - such as reading - reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s disease.

3) It improves our ability to empathize.

In 2011, the Annual Review of Psychology, published a study which found that when people read about an experience, the brain is stimulated in the same neurological regions as if they were going through that experience themselves. In other words, when reading about another person’s experience, our brain is trying to guess that person’s feelings.

4) It improves theory of mind.

Another study in 2013 published in Science showed that reading literary fiction improves theory of mind, the ability to guess what another person might be thinking or feeling. In other words, reading improves social perception and empathy.

How to Read More (Without Making Time for Reading)

So the benefits of reading have been proven, but making time to read can be a daunting task. Let me tell you something interesting: You can read more without making time for reading.

What does that mean?

Well, when some of us imagine the idea of reading, we tend think that we have to set aside a huge chunk of time to get into the book. And when it comes to long-form articles, we often feel the need to read it all in one sitting. That’s the opposite of what effective readers do.

Ryan Holiday said it best,

Where do you get the time to eat three meals a day? How do you have time to do all that sleeping? How do you manage to spend all those hours with your kids or wife or a girlfriend or boyfriend?

You don’t get that time anywhere, do you? You just make it because it’s really important. It’s a non-negotiable part of your life.

Don’t think of reading as an activity you want to do. Think of it as something have to do.

Make it a habit to carry a book around with you and crack it open every time you get the chance.

• Meeting with someone over coffee but they’re late? You have 5-10 minutes to read.
• On the toilet? You have another 5 minutes to read.
• Waiting for the water to boil so you can make your pour-over coffee? Another 5 minutes to read.
• Having a snack? Read.

Don’t install games on your phone or binge watch Orange is the New Black on Netflix (at least not too much). Don’t check Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or email. That time can be spent reading, even if just for a few minutes.

And all that time adds up. Imagine on an average day we have a total of 60 minutes of downtime. And let’s say that, on average, we can read one page in two minutes.

In 60 minutes a day, we can read 30 pages. With those assumptions, you can finish a 300-page book in just 10 days.

That’s about the pace I read, and I was able to finish How to Win Friends and Influence People, a 214-page book, in a week.

Not bad.

On the other hand, if you read a lot of articles to keep up to date on the latest news in your industry, you might have a bunch of articles that you have to read.

If that’s the case, use a tool like Pocket to save your articles for later. You can even download the Pocket app to your phone so you can access your articles for your reading pleasure anytime, anywhere. 

What’s Stopping You?

Downtime is reading time. If you want to read more, promise to yourself that you’re not going to make time for reading but instead say, “I will read.”

Then just do it.

If you need a list of books to start with, Harvard Business School’s required reading list is an interesting place to start.

So what book do you plan on reading next? Let us know in the comments section below.

from HubSpot Marketing Blog http://bit.ly/1M17NGb

Mobile Marketing

from Tumblr http://bit.ly/1SCXMEt

Coachella, Tomorrowland, Bonnaroo & More: How Top Music Festivals Use Social Media

English music producer Simon Cowell once told Rolling Stone Magazine, "You have this amazing thing now called fan power. The whole world is linked through a laptop. It’s absolutely brilliant.“

He was talking about music artists here, but this can apply to any type of event host or marketer. Social media allows us to promote our events more strategically, listen to and engage with our fans, enhance attendee experience, help measure the event’s overall success, and find areas for improvement in the next time you put it on.

Music festivals have a lot to teach social media marketers about using Twitter and YouTube to promote and enhance attendee experience for their own events. To help extract some of these lessons, we looked at a few major music festivals in the U.S. and Europe.

How do they use Twitter to ensure their event runs smoothly? How do they use YouTube for advertising?And how can they leverage Twitter engagement to identify the emotions their fans expressed before, during, and after the event?

Let’s tune in to some of this year’s biggest festivals – from Coachella to Tomorrowland – to see how smartly they leveraged social media, using insights and metrics provided by advanced social media analytics tool Talkwalker.

(And click here to learn everything you need to know about live-tweeting an event.)

Making a Splash on YouTube

What better way to tell prospective attendees what your event is going to be like than showing them videos from past iterations?

The folks who market Belgium’s famous music festival, Tomorrowland, got 37.4 million views and over 250,000 likes on their promotional video, as of this posting. That’s 10X as many views as Sziget, Coachella, EDC, EXIT, Lollapalooza, and Bonnaroo combined.

Making Twitter a Reliable Place for Information

Looking for a way to amplify your message? Twitter is one of the best avenues for broadcasting constant and timely information about practicalities, codes of conduct, recycling, health and safety, on-site activities, and much more.

For inspiration, let’s take a look at some of the best examples of how music festival marketers use Twitter during their events.

1) Sharing logistical information

2) Advising visitors to be eco-friendly and to keep the place clean

3) Reminding people to take care of their health & safety

4) Promoting on-site activities

What happens if you ignore your attendees on Twitter?

"Is there an infirmary?”

“Which is the best parking entrance?”

“Where can I see the program?”

Nowadays, when event attendees have questions, many of them will turn to Twitter for answers – and they’ll expect a response. Quickly.

Twitter is a great way for organizers to provide assistance to a wide audience in a timely and cost-effective manner, provided you use a good social monitoring system. This way, event hosts can both keep visitors happy and detect early signs of crisis, which will likely improve sales on-site and encourage attendees to come back again next time.

In our social media analysis, we noticed that Electric Daisy Carnival, a music festival based in Las Vegas, wasn’t properly monitoring their Twitter feeds. They announced the hashtag #EDCHELP ahead of time as an official hashtag channel for all customer inquiries – and yet, no representative seemed to have taken charge of answering any of the questions and complaints posted on Twitter.

The result? Regular festival-goers like Christopher Chen suddenly found themselves becoming spontaneous customer service agents. He saw that no one was answering people’s questions on the #EDCHELP hashtag and took it upon himself to provide information and advice to random fans.

Here are the first tweets from Chen to @EDC_LastVegas, which he tagged with #EDCHELP:

And here are some tweets from Chen to EDC attendees when he began replying to their questions:

Depending how many people attend your event, make sure that you have enough people on staff to answer attendee’s questions on Twitter. (HubSpot customers: Learn how to create streams in the social monitoring tool here.)

Drumming Up Excitement With Hashtags

Hashtags now play an essential role in increasing the social media presence of brands because they encourage discussions online. Once you choose and announce an official event hashtag, be sure to use it in every single tweet about the event, even if you have to shorten the copy of the tweet itself to make room.

While many events create official hashtags (like EDC did with #EDCHELP), it’s also interesting to analyze the unofficial hashtags. These are hashtags attendees tweet that make sense to them when they don’t bother to look up the official hashtag.

For example, the Budapest music festival Sziget’s trending hashtags this year included #Budapest (which is great news for the city’s tourist office) and #szitizen, which is related to their Mission:Szitizen game, an international game the music festival’s marketing team put on with the goal of inspiring the most dedicated Sziget fans to show the whole world what they got.

From the chart below, you can also see that that the #szitizen hashtag was not once used in a negative way. From this, marketers can derive that a lot of people felt mostly positive about that campaign:

Here were the trending hashtags for California-based festival Coachella (left) and Tennessee-based festival Bonnaroo (right), along with figures on their use over 30 days, both overall and split by positive and negative sentiment.

Feel the Social Media Vibes

How are people feeling about your event? We thought it would be fun to see how people were feeling about Lollapalooza, a Chicago-based music festival that takes place in late July and early August each year using the keyword cloud from social media monitoring tool Talkwalker.

Vibes were positive: The word “excited” came up first in terms of volume with 633 hits over the last month in combination with the word “Lollapalooza.”

It's interesting to compare the performance of top keywords related to one event over a series of iterations. How did people feel about Lollapalooza last year compared to this year? Which words came up at what volume over the last few years?

Keyword trends as a whole will also help you come up with the right wording in your next social media and SEO campaigns, and can ultimately help you differentiate your event.

These are just a few of the social media marketing tips that we recommend to event marketers. Have more tips? Share with us in the comments, or tweet us at @Talkwalker.

from HubSpot Marketing Blog http://bit.ly/1VX1yYs

Mobile Marketing

from Tumblr http://bit.ly/1KMjUW1

5 Easy Ways to Help Reduce Your Website’s Page Loading Speed

The adage “patience is a virtue” doesn’t apply online. 

Even a one-second delay can drastically reduce pageviews, customer satisfaction and drop conversions. 

The speed of your site even affects your organic search rankings. Since 2010, Google has been accounting for a site speed in its algorithm. 

So what’s the biggest factor contributing to your page speed?

Size.

It takes browsers time to download the code that makes up your page. It has to download your HTML, your stylesheets, your scripts and your images. It can take a while to download all that data. 

As web users expect more engaging site designs, the size of a site’s resource files will continue to grow. Each new feature requires a new script or stylesheet that weighs down your site just a little more.

How do you make sure your site is up to speed?

There are some great resources for analyzing your site’s speed. Google’s PageSpeed Insights and GTMetrix are probably the most popular. Both services will analyze your site and tell you where you’re falling behind.

A little warning: the results can be a bit daunting sometimes, but most fixes are relatively quick and easy. You might not fix everything the speed service recommends, but you should fix enough to make the site experience better for your visitors. 

Let’s learn how to speed things up!

While a few modern content management systems like HubSpot implement speed-enhancing options out-of-the-box, the more common systems like Wordpress and Joomla require a little manual labor to get up to speed. 

Now let’s look at some essential speed solutions that every webmaster should consider. 

1) Optimize Images

Images are one of the most common bandwidth hogs on the web.

The first way to optimize your images is to scale them appropriately.

Many webmasters use huge images and then scale them down with CSS. What they don’t realize is that your browser still loads them at the full image size. 

For example, if you have an image that is 1000 x 1000 pixels, but you have scaled it down to 100 x 100 pixels, your browser must load ten times more than necessary. 

Scale your images before you upload them to your site, so you don’t ask for more from your visitors than you should. 

Take a look at the size difference when we scaled down one of our images:

The second way to optimize your images is to compress them. 

There are several free online tools for image compression, such as tinypng.com, that can reduce your image sizes dramatically without losing quality. You can see size reductions anywhere from 25% to 80%!

2) Browser Caching

Why make visitors download the same things every time they load a page?

Enabling browser caching lets you temporarily store some data on a visitors’ computer, so they don’t have to wait for it to load every time they visit your page.

How long you store the data depends on their browser configuration and your server-side cache settings.

To set up browser caching on your server, check out the resources below or contact your hosting company:

• Apache Caching
• IIS Caching
• Nginx Caching

3) Compression

Enabling compression is like putting your website into a zip file.

Compression can dramatically reduce your page’s size and thereby increase its speed. According to feedthebot.com, compression can knock off 50 - 70% from your HTML and CSS files! That’s a ton of data your visitor won’t have to download.

Compression is a server setting, so how you implement it will depend on your webserver and its settings. Below are some resources for the most common webservers. If you don’t see yours, contact your hosting company to see what they can do.

• Apache
• IIS
• Nginx

4) Optimize Your CSS

Your CSS loads before people see your site. The longer it takes for them to download your CSS, the longer they wait.

Optimized CSS means your files will download faster, giving your visitors quicker access to your pages.

Start by asking yourself, “do I use all of my CSS?" If not, get rid of the superfluous code in your files. Every little bit of wasted data can add up until your website’s snail-pace speed scares away your visitors.

Next, you should minimize your CSS files. Extra spaces in your stylesheets increase file size. CSS minimization removes those extra spaces from your code to ensure your file is at its smallest size.

So how do you minimize your CSS files?

First, see if your CMS already minimizes your CSS or if there’s an option for it. HubSpot, for example, already minimizes your CSS by default whereas Wordpress or Joomla do not.

If your CMS does not have a minimize CSS option, you can use a free online service like csscompressor.com to minimize your files. Simply paste in your CSS and hit “Compress” to see your newly minimized stylesheet.

Minimizing your resource files is a great way to knock some size off your files. Trust me—those little spaces add up quickly.

5) Keep Your Scripts Below the Fold

Javascript files can load after the rest of your page, but if you put them all before your content—as many sites do—they will load before your content does.

This means your visitors must wait until your Javascript files load before they see your page, and we know how much they like waiting.

The simplest solution is to place your external Javascript files at the bottom of your page, just before the close of your body tag. Now more of your site can load before your scripts.

Another method that allows even more control is to use the defer or async attributes when placing external .js files on your site.

Both defer and async are very useful, but make sure you understand the difference before you use them:

• Async tags load the scripts while the rest of the page loads, but this means scripts can be loaded out of order. Basically, lighter files load first. This might be fine for some scripts, but can be disastrous for others.
• The defer attribute loads your scripts after your content has finished loading. It also runs the scripts in order. Just make sure your scripts run so late without breaking your site.

All you need to do is add a simple word in your <script> tags.

For example, you can take your original script

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”/path/filename.js”></script>

And add the little code to ensure it loads when you want it.

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”/path/filename.js” defer></script>
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”/path/filename.js” async></script>

The importance of your scripts will determine if they get an attribute and which attribute you tack on. More essential scripts should probably have the async attribute so they can load ASAP without holding up the rest of your content. The nonessential ones, however, should wait until the end to ensure visitors see your page faster.

But always make sure you test each script to ensure the attribute doesn’t break your site!

Conclusion

As online users demand a richer online experience, the size of our pages will continue to grow. There will be flashier Javascript, more CSS tricks and more third-party analytics to weigh down our sites.

As marketers, we can’t let this bog us down.

A little attention will go a long way—remember, just a one-second delay is all it takes to lose a lead.

from HubSpot Marketing Blog http://bit.ly/1eNOi6R

Mobile Marketing

from Tumblr http://bit.ly/1gErLes

4 Ecommerce Pricing Strategies You May Not Have Considered

When determining prices for your ecommerce store, you’re likely to consider traditional methods: markup, anchor, and luxury pricing. There is absolutely nothing wrong with these strategies, especially if you’re hoping to set it and forget it—until sale time, of course. However, these three traditional methods aren’t the only strategies you can employ. If you’re willing to shake things up a little, consider some of these edgy techniques that have seen success.

Free 

What? Free isn’t a price. How could anyone make money by offering products for free in their online store? 

Well, let’s look at the pragmatic side of offering free products on your ecommerce site. People will definitely show up to see the free stuff, won’t they? Even buyers who have never heard of your store and have no intention of making a purchase from you—they’ll stop by for at least a few minutes to browse through the free stuff. In other words, “free” is a great way to get eyes on your brand and your products.

Now, offering everything for free all the time would just be pointless. There must be a method to your madness. Use those free products as the hook and then reel them in. Once those buyers get to your site, dazzle them with everything else you sell. Then go for the upsell or cross-sell. Even if they take the free item and run, you can be sure they’ll be back to see what you’re offering later down the line. At some point, you’ll get them on the hook for an actual purchase.

What can you use for your free hook? Here are some ideas: 

• Small samples
• Software
• Accessories for larger products
• Basic services

Pay-What-You-Want

Also seen as PWYW, the Pay-What-You-Want strategy might sound just as daft as offering free products. After all, won’t customers take advantage of the pricing structure to walk away with products at ridiculously low prices? In short: yes. You will encounter consumers who’ll take advantage of your pricing strategy, no matter what you do.

If that’s the case, what benefit do you have in offering a PWYW pricing model? Believe it or not, your strongest brand allies and supporters will more than make up for those that take advantage of your generosity. In fact, studies have actually shown that profits remain on par with those companies that set a price and demand it.

With no real benefit in revenue, why would a company choose to allow buyers to pay what they want for products? Those same studies show this particular pricing model does result in a lot of free marketing through word-of-mouth. Free marketing? That’s an excellent reason to give this model a try.

Products that work with this strategy include:

• Music
• Movies
• Books
• Apps
• Software

Make an Offer

Making an offer probably sounds a lot like PWYW, which in turn sounds like “take it for free.” There really is a difference, and that difference is probably enough to give you a little peace of mind. 

As with an auction where buyers make bids for products, the Make-an-Offer model builds in a reserve price. In other words, buyers are free to offer well under market value for your products, but that doesn’t mean they’ll get to take them home. You control the smallest amount you’ll take and let buyers pay much more if they want to.

This particular model also tends to gain a lot of ground through word-of-mouth marketing. Even when buyers meet your price expectations, they feel like they got a great deal because they had a say in what they were willing to pay. That kind of power doesn’t happen very often.

Works well for:

• Antiques
• Fine art
• Collectibles
• First-edition books

Flat Pricing 

What if you sold everything on your ecommerce site for the exact same price? Obviously this can’t happen if you sell T-shirts and diamond earrings. What if you only sold T-shirts, though? With one stated price for everything on your site, buyers never get overwhelmed or confused.

As an added bonus, your work in setting up the shopping carts is easy. With only one price for everything, you really can just set it and forget it. This model works well with:

• Similar products
• Products of similar value
• Subscription services

Have you seen any of these tactics used well? Maybe one has worked beautifully for your ecommerce company. 

from HubSpot Marketing Blog http://bit.ly/1IH5Mhe

Mobile Marketing

from Tumblr http://bit.ly/1IeIDkG

Pitching the Perfect Image: A Look at Top Publishers' Image Sizes

There’s no denying the power of visuals – including at least one image in your post can double your shares while also helping your audience retain more information than with text alone.

This is especially true in the PR and media world. When pitching a story, many more PR pros are including images and infographics in the hope of getting a hit. 

Though there are many things to consider when designing an image for a campaign, one crucial thing often falls by the wayside: optimizing the image for the width of the site you’re pitching. Editors don’t want to make their readers have to struggle to understand your image, so if your design is too wide or narrow for the site you’re pitching, you could easily be rejected.

With that in mind, Fractl and BuzzStream looked at the main or featured body tag images for 35 of the top publishers to determine the most popular widths. We also looked at any larger layouts and pop-ups to determine a maximum width for each publisher when available.

We’ll walk you through four insights below that will help eliminate some of the guesswork during your next design phase.

1) More than 90% of publishers support a featured image size of 600 pixels or larger.

Although there is no one-size-fits-all formula for publisher image sizes, 91% of publishers offer a featured image that is 600 pixels wide or larger. In fact, the sweet spot tends to be between 600 and 800 pixels, with more than 80% of publishers’ main image widths falling into this category. Additional analysis revealed:

• The median width for main image sizes is 644 pixels.
• When combined with maximum image widths, more than 95% of publishers can support a width of 600 pixels.
• Only 14% of publishers’ main images are 800 pixels or larger while fewer than 10% of main images are fewer than 600 pixels.

In practice, this means that you should produce an asset that is at least 600 pixels wide in order to maximize placements with multiple publishers.

However, there are certain design situations – such as an infographic that requires tiny labels – that will call for a larger width; so keep in mind that more than 70% of major publishers can still embed images 800 pixels wide or larger without any additional cropping.

2) More than 65% of publishers offer a maximum width of 900 pixels or more.

Although most publishers’ main image widths fall between 600 pixels and 800 pixels, a majority offers additional layouts that can accommodate images larger than 900 pixels. This is great news from a design perspective because it means there is an opportunity to create larger assets that might require more nuanced details. Further analysis revealed:

• Lifehacker, Gizmodo, Rolling Stone, and NBC News offer the largest publishable width: 1920 pixels.
• Although the median width for main images is 644 pixels, the median width for the largest type of images on the publication is 940 pixels – more than a 37% difference.
• With a maximum width of 1920 pixels and a main image width of 636 pixels, Lifehacker and Gizmodo have the greatest differential at 1284 pixels.
• Only four publishers – The Economist, Fox News, CBS News, and Us Magazine – offer a maximum image width fewer than 700 pixels.

Considering the natural syndication levels of the publishers that offer some of the smallest images (three of the publishers actually only offer one image size across the board) designers should remember that the text needs to be legible, especially with an asset under 600 pixels.

Looking for an easy way to ensure clarity? Work with some of these smaller sizes during the initial design phase.

3) Six publishers offer a maximum width that is exactly the same width as their main page image.

Piggybacking on the last thought above, 17% of publishers offer a maximum width that is exactly the same as their main page width. In order from smallest to largest – ranging from 595 pixels to 840 pixels – these publishers include:

• The Economist
• Fox News
• CBS News
• MTV
• CNET
• Fortune

From a promotional standpoint, although this means that these publishers offer little flexibility, it doesn’t mean they should be avoided entirely.

In order to increase your chances of a placement while also optimizing your outreach efforts, make sure that any exclusives you offer these publishers include an asset that meets their standards exactly. If not, your exclusive pitch time is better spent elsewhere – save these outlets for syndication instead.  

4) NPR offers the largest main image width at 948 pixels (which is as large as two images from CBS News).

One publisher that stood out from the rest in terms of the size of its hostable assets was NPR. The publisher offers the largest main image at 948 pixels – nearly 70% larger than Us Magazine. And out of all 35 publishers, its maximum width is only 680 pixels fewer than the largest size available. Other publishers that place an emphasis on large assets:

• Business Insider offers a main image width of 800 pixels with a maximum width of 1000 pixels – a difference of only 200 pixels.
• The difference between Forbes’ main image and the maximum image is fewer than 165 pixels, with the main image being more than 800 pixels wide.

When we compared these publishers by niche, Gizmodo was the most tech-focused publisher to offer the largest maximum width size, GQ offered the largest for fashion, and NBC News offered the largest size for general news as well as the largest maximum width for all 35 publishers.

Whether your design focuses more on aesthetic or function, your production team should consider the different dimensions of publishers’ sites. Take a look at the graphic below, which allows you to easily compare one publisher to another. Although publishers’ sites will continue to evolve – along with the image sizes they offer – this is a great reference for your initial production stages. 

Study by Fractl and BuzzStream.

from HubSpot Marketing Blog http://bit.ly/1fZXwgY

Mobile Marketing

from Tumblr http://bit.ly/1MHvVit

The Marketing Stack for Publishers: What Tools Do You Need?

In the world of sponsored content, an advertiser approaches a publisher and expects the publisher to deliver on their dollar. Inbound marketing has proven itself as an effective strategy to help not only make these campaigns successful, but also to help advertisers find the most qualified leads possible. 

Without the right tools and systems in place, this can be a tall task. For each of the stages in the marketing funnel, consider implementing the following to aide your efforts: 

TOFU Tools

At the top of the funnel (TOFU), a user is trying to find a solution to a problem, and they need information and education to help them with the process. As far as leads go, this group may be large, but they’re usually less valuable and unqualified as you don’t know what purchase decisions they’ll make, or that they’ll make a decision at all. It’s too early to worry about selling, rather you need to help them understand their problem or identify their void first.

Content Management System (CMS)

When developing content for your sponsored campaign, having a website to house it on that is fully maximized for any audience is necessary. By using a powerful CMS that not only makes it easy to publish content, but also makes sure it’s mobile responsive, you’re ensuring that readers can engage with it on any platform, at any time. Additionally, by selecting a fully integrated CMS—that connects your individual web pages to the actions your contacts take—you’re able to quickly see which areas of your site are helping people move from merely viewing, to eventually making a purchase decision. 

Social Media Management

Social media is an excellent way to drive traffic and leads to your website or sponsored content. With tools that give you the ability to analyze and filter social conversations to better understand where the most captive audience may be, you’re able to cut through social noise to engage with your most valuable readers, and then drive them to your site where they will hopefully convert on an offer. 

MOFU Tools

The middle of the funnel (MOFU) is exactly what it sounds. When people have determined that they definitely have a problem and it needs to be solved, they’re ready to find a solution. This is arguably the most important part of the conversion process, because you as a publisher want to help your advertisers be the ones chosen to fill that hole. Your focus in this stage is lead conversion.

CTAs

You can produce all the leads and sponsored content you want, but without a way to connect the two, what good are these efforts? Make the most of the traffic you’ve driven to your site by building an easy and obvious path for readers to follow toward your offers. Unique calls-to-action should be placed on each and every page of your site, and within your email communication. The language on the CTA should match when type of content the reader is currently engaging in, and what they can expect to find if they click-though. 

Landing Pages

After someone clicks on a CTA to download a piece of sponsored content, you need a place to exchange your offer for a little more information about that reader. This is where landing pages come in. A good landing page will target a certain audience, so it’s important to create landing pages that are tailored as specifically as possible to the types of incoming users you’re going to drive. The landing page showcases your offer, which is gated behind a form the reader must fill out. The fields used on that form need to capture the right information (ask yourself whether or not it qualifies leads for your advertisers).

Automated Emails

Once a reader makes an initial conversion, you can use their email address and personal information to send highly personalized content straight to their inbox. Your email automation software should be integrated with all of your user data (fulfillment, CRM, email, events, etc.) so you can more effectively segment and then target sponsored content to readers who would find it most relevant, and therefore most likely to move down the marketing funnel. Create email lists based off of previous offer downloads, subscription renewal date, contact property info, etc. to dial in on readers with the highest potential purchase intent.

BOFU Tools

At the point when users get to the bottom of the funnel (BOFU), they will make a decision, it’s just a matter of who they will purchase from. They usually don’t need a huge incentive to pull the trigger, and the right offer could do the trick. Your goal is to drive sales qualified leads. BOFU tools can help you manage and measure which of those sales qualified leads actually becomes a customer.

Analytics Software

Once readers get on your site and make an initial conversion, you have the capabilities to track their movements and actions to better understand what content they’re most interested in and what specific content actually got them there. Look at how many leads you drove as a direct result of the various pieces of your campaign—website, emails, calls-to-action, offers, etc. Compare these numbers to whether the advertisers closed the deal when you passed the leads off to them. Tracking numbers like visitor-to-lead rate, leads, MQLs, sales pipeline generated, and net new customers, tells you how well your campaign performed, and what ROI you were able to achieve for your advertiser. 

CRM System

Having a system to hand off leads or sales teams reach out to leads directly can prove quite beneficial. This system should have the capabilities to track exactly what happens with the leads once they’re handed over to the advertisers’ sales team, so that you can better understand if your leads led to actual customers. Find a CRM that fully integrates with your marketing software so you can use one contact profile across all of your systems.

Once you have the tools in place to lead people through each stage of the marketing funnel, the process becomes a lot more streamlined and effective. We know you can create great sponsored content, now go make the most of it.

from HubSpot Marketing Blog http://bit.ly/1ITyjlO

Mobile Marketing

from Tumblr http://bit.ly/1MHpa0k