HubSpot TV Episode #12 – October 25, 2008

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Updates from the Social Media Sphere

• Jet Blue Twitters Its New Terminal – http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/22/jetblue-twitters-its-new-terminal/index.html
  


• LinkedIn Raises Another $22.7m From SAP, Goldman Sachs, McGraw Hill -http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/10/22/linkedin-announces-227-million-follow-on-round-from-sap-goldman-sachs-and-mcgraw-hill/


• Social Media Spectators increased from 48% of the adult online population in 2007 to 69% in 2008 – http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/report_social_web_usage_tipped_2008.php


• Britney Spears on Twitter – http://www.juliaroy.com/juliapatriciaroy/2008/10/britney-spears-in-the-social-web.html


• CBS Launches Social Viewing Rooms – http://nab365.bdmetrics.com/NST-3-50124898/story.aspx?utm_source=nab365&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=enewsletter&ocuid=NTY3ODYxNA==-B5+WANwMqjw=

Major Upgrade to Google Analytics – Who is it for? What’s in it for marketing? (Not a whole lot for most small or medium sized companies.)

• http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/10/22/google-analytics-gets-a-major-ugrade-adsense-custom-reports-api-bubble-charts/


• Custom Reports – Nice for more sophisticated businesses


• Audience Segmentation – Nice for businesses with a lot of traffic


• API – bigger companies might want to build something on top of the data


• Bubble Charts – only for super-duper analytical people

Marketing Update of the Day

• Check out Gary V. and work to have energy like him!
  

Forum Fodder

• “Companies I’ve worked with in the past have wanted to create a blog but got caught up over who should post and how the blog entries should be approved by marketing, management, PR, etc. This led to a logistical approval nightmare and generally prevented the blog from getting started. I’d be interested to hear how people on this forum were able to convince their companies/coworkers to allow qualified company bloggers to post articles without seeking additional approval.”

“R.I.P Good Times”

That was the message from Silicon Valley venture capital firm Sequoia Capital last week. In a slide show it presented to its portfolio company CEOs, it documented the roots of our current economic problems, the outlook for recovery and advised caution.

For marketers, the most chilling piece of the Sequoia presentation is a slide on the advertising market. They show the total U.S. market beginning to shrink and growth of online advertising beginning to slow.

Looking at this slide, you might think companies are beginning cut costs and scale back marketing.

Don’t get sucked into that trap.

Sequoia’s advertising numbers say more about ADVERTISING than they do about MARKETING. Companies are not marketing LESS, they’re just finding ways to market BETTER.

If you pull a Chicken Little, assume the sky is falling and retreat from marketing, you will be devoured by competition that figures out how to market more efficiently.

At HubSpot we’re making our marketing more efficient with a more rigid focus on inbound marketing.

Specifically, we’re doing three things:

(1) Creating More, Better Content — The economy isn’t going to slow down our content production — it’s just going to force us to get more rigorous about assessing the content we create. We’re going to do a better job of creating content that engages people, helps us get found, and interests qualified customers. We’re also going to rethink the way we organize our content.

(2) Increasing our Focus on Search Engine Optimization — At HubSpot, we spend tons of time thinking about search engine optimization. In the months ahead we’re going to be spending even more time on SEO. Google is still the #1 place to be found by potential customers, and in a tight economy organic search results are by far the most efficient way of reaching Google users. We’re in the process of starting a new effort to optimize lower-level site and blog pages for long-tail keywords related to our business.

(3) Getting Smarter About Social Media — A slowing economy means we need to focus on social media more then ever. Instead of paying for distribution of our content or advertising, we need to share our products and content with people in our network and let them gain traction organically. We’re also developing a more systematic company-wide approach to social media.

Notice that none of these strategies cost us anything more than time. In fact, to the extent they’re replacing paid outbound marketing campaigns, they’re saving us a lot of money.

We see the current economic instability as an inflection point — one where the weak companies will slowly starve themselves, and the successful companies will reassess their operations and make them more efficient then ever.

Are you adjusting your marketing strategy in response to the tightening economy?  Tell us how in the comments or in a blog article linking to this post. Next Monday we’ll pick our favorite answer and send the winner a HubSpot t-shirt.

Photo: pbo31 

 

 

If you’re reading this post, we probably don’t have to tell you that page-title keywords are a key part of search engine optimization for any site.

But how do you quantify that importance? How much impact do optimized keywords actually have?

We want to know what you think.

More specifically, we want to know how much you think changes to page titles will affect a new HubSpot client’s traffic.

Here are the details: The new client in question has almost 4,000 pages indexed by Google and a PageRank of 5. Currently, the title tag of every page of their site is the company name. They generate about 4k visitors per month now. Almost every page is an article.

Since it’s a simple change they can make to their system, we plan to instruct them to propogate the title of the article to the title tag of the page. We plan to make the changes by November 1st.

How much do you think their traffic go up in the month of November? Submit your guess in the comments or post an article on your blog explaining your reasoning with a link back to this post.

The five closest guesses to the actual number of visitors this site gets for the month of December will receive a free HubSpot t-shirt. The winner will be invited to write a guest post on the HubSpot blog, explaining his or her methodology. We’ll also update this post with the winner’s profile.

So, how much do you think traffic will increase?