McIntosh Marketing Blog

Facebook is now generating more user traffic than Google.  YouTube is the second biggest search engine on the internet. 80% of companies use LinkedIn as a primary tool to find employees. A US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction. Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé. In fact, In 2009 Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen.

• There are over 200 million Blogs
• 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands
• 77% of women are more likely to look for a product in a store after reading about it on a social site
• 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations
• Only 14% trust advertisements
• Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI

The fact of the matter is the question you should be asking is not if we should develop and engage a B2B social media marketing strategy, but how fast can we become effective at it. You have three options, either one you need to initiate right away before your web savvy competitors leave you behind.

1. Start educating yourself with books and seminars, so you can start a cohesive and effective social media plan.
2. Designate a person within your company, group or religious group to become your in-house social media expert.
3. Hire a SEO company with proven results in developing a comprehensive and profitable social media strategy.

Although I have had the pleasure to read many helpful books on marketing, this is my first book review on our company blog. And I am quite happy to announce that I had a great time reading Halligan & Shah’s newest book entitled, Inbound Marketing: Get Found using Google, Social Media and Blogs. The foreward was written by internet marketing author David Meerman Scott, so I knew that I was in for a treat.

Both authors are top executives at Hubspot, a true industry leader in internet marketing and social media. For the last few months I have been following Hubspots’s blog postings via Facebook.

Not only was this book an easy read, it was highly educational in that it provided contemporary examples and several analogies that made their point come across with little effort on my part to discern any aspect of what they were describing. I purchased this 215 page book last week and had  it read, cover to cover, in 5 evenings of part-time study. Yet this book was full of many applicable ideas and technologies.

What I really loved about this book were the checklists at the end of each chapter. This added a simple “To Do” list that I feel inspires others to act within the pragmatic aspects of internet marketing tools that they clearly lay out in their book.

The book is simply about the basics and how to get them implemented to achieve results, namely being found. I learned a tremendous amount regarding:

• How Barack Obama really won, using social media successfully.
• How The Grateful Dead served as an excellent prelude on how to succeed as an internet marketer.
• How to build a “content factory”.
• How to do a blog correctly and how to get found, as well as knowing the #1 reason why they fail.
• How social media can fit within the B2B sales model to increase customers and sales.
• How to pick keywords and using PPC as a beta-testing method to narrow the right terms.
• What affects link value and what not to do so as not to become banned by Google.
• Basic usage tips with social media giants, such as Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Digg, YouTube and StumbleUpon.
• How to covert visitors into leads, and leads into sales.
• What one should look for in a PR agency.

And lastly, I was highly appreciated the last chapter entitled, Tips from the Trenches for Startups, that gives 26 steps on how to implement all that was detailed about in their book. I consider this book more than just a great read, but an important resource in helping any trying to increase their B2B results with internet marketing.