The mobile payments startup introduced a premium package on Wednesday called “Business in a Box,” which promises to provide retailers with all the hardware they need to set up a proper cash register to process payments.

Merchants can now purchase two of Square’s credit card readers, an iPad stand and a cash drawer for $299 and buy a receipt printer for another $300. None of these options are particularly innovative, but offering the package further establishes Square as a company that can help small businesses handle all their payment processing needs. It’s also a nice additional source of revenue for Square.

Square was co-founded in 2009 by Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and now processes more than $10 billion in payments annually from more than 3 million users and a network of 250,000 merchants. The startup is said to be valued at more than $3 billion.

Image courtesy of square.

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and receiving emails using the native Mail client. In light of that study, we found five ways to make your iPad email faster and more productive.

1. Change Your Email Signature
It may be a trivial point, but there’s a debate to be had on whether having a “Sent from my iPad” signature is really a good idea.

There are a couple of reasons for this. First and foremost, whereas an email signature on your phone may let recipients know that you are out of the office but still responsive, a “Sent from my iPad” could come across as unprofessional (iMore’s Rene Ritchie expands on this point).

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, letting every email recipient know that you have an iPad could make it more likely to be stolen. Granted the odds of this actually happening are low, but why take the risk?

To change your email signature simply head to Settings, Mail, Contacts and Calendars, to Mail and then Signature. You’ll then be able to change the signature as you see fit. If you want to set-up different signatures for different accounts, this is also possible. You just have to tap Advanced and change the email signature per email account.

2. Tweak Your Sounds
Waiting for a business email and want to know instantly when it has arrived? You can do to an extent on the iPad by setting up email alerts and sounds for different email accounts.

Go to Settings, Sounds and you can then configure sounds for new email, sent email, new tweets, Facebook posts, Calendar and even reminder alerts. Pro Tip: Don’t bother tampering with the ringer and alerts volume, because the volume is not affected by tweaking the volume controls.

3. Preview More Emails
The Mail client on the iPad previews two lines of incoming emails by default, but you can adjust this if you would like to see more or less information.

Do this by heading the Mail, contacts and calendars and then Preview. You can then play with the preview options with having no preview lines of the email (so just the person’s email address) or up to five lines of preview text.

4. Turn Off Push Notifications for Low-Priority Mail
It can be difficult keeping on task when your iPad’s notifying you every two minutes about emails that are frankly not so important. Luckily, there are ways to get around this.

In Mail settings, there is an option to Fetch New Data. You can set emails to be fetched every 15 minutes, 30 minutes or hourly or hit the Advanced bar to manually decide per email account.

This may be useful if, for example, you’d rather the iPad fetches your work email but not new messages from any personal accounts. If that were the case you would set the work email to “Fetch” and the personal accounts to “Manual.”

5. Access Your Drafts Faster
If you want to get to your Draft inbox faster than before, there’s a very quick and neat way of doing that. When you’re in the Mail app, simply tap and hold the compose button and you should find the Drafts box appearing in the bottom right hand corner.

6. Set Up VIPs
Another way of keeping an ear and eye out for emails from important contacts is by using the new VIP tool on iOS 6.

Put simply, it allows you to set “VIPs” and prioritize these emails by setting alert sounds for individual contacts. As an added bonus, all emails from these people can be found in the VIP section.

To set VIPs, you need to touch on the blue arrow to the right of the VIP section. It will then show which people are listed as VIPs, give you the option to add more and also enable you to set custom alerts for emails from these people.

You could, for instance, choose to have VIP emails display in a certain way on the lock home screen and pop up with a mail sound.

The post 6 Ways to Make iPad Email More Productive appeared first on Responsive web design agency | Inbound Marketing company.

When you think about your marketing funnel, how do you think about the work you do to optimize it? You may have never considered it, but a lot of what you probably do is work to minimize the number of breaks in your marketing chain.

Ideally, you should be working to carry information and context about your leads throughout the different stages of your funnel — minimizing as many breaks in your marketing chain as possible, and strengthening the impact of your marketing. And today, minimizing breaks in the chain means putting your data to use in as many ways as you can. In this post, we’ll walk you through exactly what this means in a modern-day marketing world — and how you can apply (and gain) context in your individual marketing channels to help you more effectively move leads further and further down the funnel.

First, a Brief History of Data-Driven Online Marketing

The Early Days of Online Marketing

In the early days of online marketing, tools like Google Analytics helped us understand our audience in aggregate. Minimizing breaks in the chain meant figuring out what worked on a high level, and optimizing our marketing to make it more appealing to our audience as a whole. We saw which keywords drove traffic to our website, and we worked to rank higher for those keywords. We saw which pages our prospects were viewing, and we put calls-to-action on those pages. Web analytics fueled a revolution in marketing based on data, but it was marketing in aggregate. In other words, we didn’t have a way to connect the dots between the mass of traffic we were measuring and the real people it represented.

The Middle Ages of Online Marketing

In what I think of as the middle ages of online marketing, technology took us a step further. We used a lot of different marketing tools — an analytics tool, a CRM system to tap into our sales team’s data, an email marketing tool, a landing page tool, a blogging platform, a social media tool, etc. We could optimize each channel individually — landing pages based on their conversion rates, emails based on their open and clickthrough rates — but sharing data between these individual systems was difficult at best, and often impossible. Wanted to infuse your CRM system with data from your latest email marketing campaign? It was doable, but very manual. Wanted to give your sales team a digestible history of interactions with a lead across all of these tools? Let me know if you ever figured that one out.

A Modern Marketing Era

Luckily, we’ve entered a modern marketing era where these are solvable problems thanks to integration. With a modern marketing software platform (like HubSpot), all of your marketing tools talk to one another, right out of the box. (And if you still use many different tools, today you might be able to glue them together with the help of a savvy developer.) Means aside, it’s possible to do things we never would have dreamed of doing just a few, short years ago. Rather than marketing to one audience with one message, we can now market to an audience of one, delivering a consistent, personalized message specific to each individual across every medium. The content you serve to each individual can be tailored based on the context you collect from every channel.

There is an important paradigm to dig into here. Every time a lead or a potential lead comes into contact with your brand, you have two opportunities: 1) to learn more about them (acquire context), and 2) to leverage what you already know (apply context to your content). And as we mentioned up top, today, minimizing breaks in your marketing chain means putting your data to use in as many ways as possible. Collecting context, and applying it to your content.

Modern Marketing: Context and Content

The implications of applying context to your content are huge. Your marketing results improve when you deliver more relevant messages to your prospects based on what you already know about them; and your campaigns are supercharged when you can deliver the same consistent message across every medium your prospects see. You can even have a huge impact on your sales team’s performance. In the same way a snowball grows as it rolls down a hill, you accumulate more and more data about your leads with each and every marketing touch point as they move through your funnel. And when the time is right for your sales team to reach out, that data can be transformative to their processes.

Lost on where to start delivering this kind of a personal marketing experience to your leads, prospects, and sales team? Let’s take a look at some real examples of opportunities to gain and apply context with every marketing tool in your arsenal, at every step in the funnel, and through every channel your leads touch.

Website/Blog Content & Calls-to-Action

Context You Can Apply

• Show Targeted Calls-to-Action (CTAs): It goes without saying that your website should have prominent CTAs on every page to encourage visitors to convert into leads — and motivate leads to take the next step. But are those calls-to-action targeted to show your leads an offer they’ve never seen before? Showing your website visitors an offer to download an ebook or whitepaper that a lead has already converted on can be a missed opportunity. Use dynamic, Smart CTAs to show the right content to the right visitors.

• Show Targeted Images: In some cases, it might even make sense to modify the imagery leads see on your landing pages and website pages. If you primarily sell to two different groups of people (architects and contractors, for example), and you know that a lead is a contractor from his or her past downloads or page views, why not show that lead relevant images of contractors using your product — images that they can better identify with.

Context You Can Gain:

• Behavioral Data: As prospects move through your website (even on their first visit, before becoming a lead), you are probably collecting web analytics data on their interactions with your site. But is that data stored in aggregate, or is it tied to them as an individual? When they finally do turn into a lead, can their history of page views and important events be applied to their record in your CRM and marketing databases? Can you use that data to determine their buyer persona and lifecycle stage? 
• Lead Intelligence: The first time a lead comes to your website, it’s important to consider how they got there. Are you tracking the channel or campaign that first brought them to your website? If they came to you from a search engine, are you capturing the keyword that introduced them to your brand, as well as the first page they viewed? This can give you important context about their initial interest and what their intentions might be. 

Forms & Landing Pages

Context You Can Apply

• Targeted Images and Messaging: Landing pages present a huge opportunity for applying context about a lead, and many of the same rules for applying context to website or blog pages apply to landing pages, too. Targeting images is a great starting point — targeting all of the content on the landing page based on who is seeing it can be even more effective. (Note: This should be something your marketing platform can handle on the back end. In HubSpot, for example, Smart Calls-to-Action that are targeted based on the viewer can direct users to different, targeted variations of your landing pages.)

Context You Can Gain

• Ask More Detailed Questions Over Time: Forms are all about gaining context about your leads. When a prospect or lead is willing to fill out a form, it’s a special moment — you have demonstrated enough value that the prospect is willing to give you some valuable information in return for what you’re offering. But when that special moment occurs, are you taking full advantage of it? Dynamic forms that use a feature called progressive profiling can ensure you never squander that special moment by asking the same question twice. Instead, progressive profiling analyzes what you already know about a lead, and pulls from a queue of questions to ask for details you haven’t already collected. Using progressive profiling is a fantastic way to accumulate more valuable, deep information about your leads over time.

Email & Marketing Automation 

Context You Can Apply

• Granular Segmentation: This is perhaps the biggest opportunity to leverage what you know about a lead to market to them more effectively. When you have a large volume of data about each lead, you can segment your database more granularly and send closely targeted messages to each segment that better match their interests and where they are in your funnel. Your segmentation might leverage implicit details like lead score, page views, key actions, or responses to specific types of content; it might also leverage explicit details like company size, job title, geography, or other characteristics.
• Personalized Message and Sender: You’ve all likely noticed this in the emails you receive — a personalized subject line, and content within that addresses you by your first name, for example. But why stop there? There are plenty of other ways you can personalize the content of an email. For example, you might mention a detail like the lead’s business vertical, geography, or something else that makes the email feel more personal and relevant. Or, if the lead is being worked by a specific sales rep, why not personalize the sender name to make the email appear to be coming directly from the rep the lead already has a relationship with?

Context You Can Gain

• Engagement With Your Messages: This one is fairly obvious. Over the course of an email campaign, tracking which messages (and which parts of each message) resonate with your leads can give you important insight into their interests and where they fall in the buying cycle. For example, if a lead clicks on a link in an email that’s offering them a free consultation, you might infer that they’re further along in the buying process than someone who converts on an offer to download a purely educational ebook about an industry topic. 

Your CRM System & Your Sales Process

Context You Can Apply

• Lead Intelligence for Your Sales Team: Over the course of a lead’s journey — from their first encounter with your brand until the point at which they’re ready for sales intervention — you’ve likely collected a lot of data about them that could be valuable to your sales team. Your sales team can likely infer details about a lead’s interests, their level of urgency around a potential purchase, their level of fit for your product, and much more. Since most CRM systems aren’t natively designed to handle the volume and type of data that a marketing campaign is capable of generating, it’s also important for you to consider how you can help surface relevant, interesting details for your sales team. HubSpot, for example, gives your sales team access to a chronologically ordered timeline of lead interactions, along with a way for you to quickly surface the most important details for your sales team.

Context You Can Gain

• Details From Other Sources: Depending on your sales process and the origin of an individual lead, your CRM system may be full of details you can use to better target and personalize your marketing messages. Think about the context a sales rep could capture during a five-minute conversation with a lead who turns out to be a good fit for your business, but is not yet ready to make a purchase. If your sales team isn’t already capturing that data in a structured way, it may be worth considering if it’s possible to fit capturing these types of details into their workflow. 

Social Media

Social media is a channel that can’t be personalized in the same way email messages or your website can be personalized, but there are still ways in which you can apply context you have about your leads to the content you share in social media.

Context You Can Apply

• Context From Past Leads as a Whole: Looking at your leads database overall, or leads from past social media conversions, are there things you can infer about your best leads that can help guide your future content strategy? Do certain content offers resonate with more people — or people who represent a best fit lead? Do certain types of offers seem to work best in social media as a channel?
  

Context You Can Gain

• Behavioral Data: Similar to email, social media presents an opportunity for you collect implicit details about your leads. What offers resonate with your leads? In general, your social media posts should be heavier on content, and lighter on direct pitches or landing pages, but are you able to track when a contact interacts with your content through social media, even if it’s just a click on a link to a blog post and not a conversion on a landing page?
  

With the tools available to marketers today, there are a lot of different ways to optimize your funnel and improve your marketing — from A/B testing button colors and experimenting with PPC bids, to website redesigns and testing different types of blog posts. All of these are important, but few can have the kind of impact across all of your channels in the same way as a concerted effort to share context between your marketing tools, and apply it to the content you create.

How big a role does context play in your marketing? In what ways can you improve?

The post How Context Strengthens Your Entire Marketing Funnel appeared first on Responsive web design agency | Inbound Marketing company.

“Your Instagram feed on the web functions much like it does on your mobile phone. You can browse through the latest photos of people whom you follow with updates as people post new photos.”

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In this article I’ll share what Facebook’s Graph Search is, how it works and how it fits your marketing strategy.

What Is Graph Search?

Graph Search is Facebook’s latest revision to the search feature that helps users find connections to people and places that have always existed in the graph.

In a sense, it’s a clean interface into the breadth of Facebook data that people have entered into Facebook, but contextualized to each user.

Watch this video introducing Facebook Graph Search.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SD951tHz38g

Think about that for a moment. Facebook’s new Graph Search serves up personalized search results in real time based on a person’s graph, and it does this for over 1 billion people.

Kudos to the Facebook engineering team for this major achievement.

As you’ll see below, it’s early for Graph Search. The features and use cases haven’t been fully fleshed out. And Graph Search is still in a very limited beta program.

But this first version gives us clues about how Facebook may evolve and the strengths on which they’ll try to build.

Walkthrough of Facebook Graph Search

Let’s start with a search about one of my favorite foods—bacon!

In the screenshot below, you can see a search for “bacon” in the old Facebook search format. Search results provide a listing of Pages, People and Places with the search term “bacon.”

A search query for “bacon” in the existing, original Facebook Search format.

This is helpful if you’re looking for something that includes “bacon” in the title of the Page, a person/profile or a place. But it doesn’t give you any insight into all of the other places on Facebook where there may be relevant social context to bacon. Who likes it? Who has commented on it? What else can the social graph tell us about friends and bacon? The original Facebook search does nothing for you if you want to know these things.

This is dumb search, in essence, not unlike what we experienced with the first search engines in the late 1990s.

Facebook’s Graph Search

Now let’s walk through a Graph Search for bacon. Here’s what you see when you use a semantic search for “bacon” on Facebook.

Facebook Graph Search results for “bacon.”

Note that I’m provided with suggestions related to the search term I’ve entered. You can get to the Facebook Page for bacon, the Interest, the People who like bacon, My Friends who like bacon, photos of bacon, web searches of bacon and bacon wrapped water chestnuts.

Who knew?

To navigate to one of the semantic search options, you can use the tab key to go a level deeper to find the people or Pages that you want.

This is really Facebook’s first foray into what is known as semantic search. Put simply, semantic search is a concept referring to technologies that make a search respond to what the user enters to try to better understand what the user wants to know.

Think of it as interaction between the search technology and the user to provide better search results. Search engines have done this for several years now when they fill out your search box for you and provide suggested keywords. It’s employing technology to get you closer to your answer without your direct intervention.

Semantic search is a relatively new technology, so you have to accept this as an ongoing evolution and not a revolution. Semantic search is getting better every day, but has a long way to go to be precise based on your interests and behaviors.

Search for Facebook Interest Pages

Here’s a look at the bacon Interest Page to see if there are any changes. Sure enough, there are. You get additional information on the interest provided by Wikipedia. OK, that’s useful.

Screenshot of the bacon Interest Page.

Additionally, you can immediately see who among my friends likes bacon, as well as photos that are captioned with the word bacon. This was discoverable before, but not nearly as easily. Overall, the Interest Page layout is different and improved in order to make social context clearer to the user.

You may notice as well that at the top of the screen, the URL carries a ?sid=0.002… code. The implication here is that Facebook is tracking how people use Graph Search in order to improve the product.

Note the code at the end of the URL for this search.

Additionally, the Interest Page includes posts by friends about bacon and Related Pages, which are in the screenshot below. It’s interesting that these posts are not individually mined by Facebook and made searchable, although I suspect that’s a forthcoming feature for Facebook’s Graph Search.

Finally, wistful posts from my friends about bacon. People just love bacon.

Search with the “Friends Who Like” Option

Continuing on in the semantic search, there’s an option in the Search Bar for “My Friends who like bacon.”

In the screenshot below, you’ll see a long list of my surely cholesterol-challenged Friends who like bacon.

My friends who like bacon, provided by Facebook’s Graph Search.

You’ll see a long list with the ability to refine your search on the right side of the screen. This appears to be sorted by the number of friends and subscribers for these items.

At the top of the list is Brian Carter, a fellow author and speaker. Interesting that I don’t interact with him all that much, but he’s at the top of my list. I’d have expected this to be sorted by the number of interactions we’ve had rather than social reach. But that’s something Facebook can tweak later.

In the right-hand sidebar, you can narrow your search further to find specifically who you’re looking for. Additionally, at the bottom right of the screen is a link to “More Pages they like.”

Curiosity kills me, so I decide to take a gander at that one. Not a lot of surprises here. As you can see, I have supportive friends who like my book, Austin, eating healthy and technology. Yep. Sounds about right.

This is a handy tool to identify Pages you should like. Interestingly, these are not sorted by the number of Page likes, but rather the number of friends who like each Page.

Pages liked by my male friends who also like bacon.

If I go back to the top of the screen and click the search box, I get another level of friends who enjoy bacon. Now Facebook’s semantic search technology combines your groups and affiliations with your search term, in this case “bacon.” Presumably this is to give you the best opportunity to find people with intersecting interests and commonalities. Clever.

I use the feature to find a friend or two in each category. I wouldn’t necessarily call this “intelligent,” but if it were hooked up to Siri on my iPhone, I’d be simultaneously amazed and creeped out by now.

Next level of Facebook’s semantic Graph Search—suggesting I look at people from my groups and past affiliations who also like bacon.

In the “bacon” search results in the image below, you’ll notice “Photos of Bacon.” When you click the search box here, you are again presented with additional semantic options. In this case it’s “Photos of Bacon taken in Austin, Texas.”

Facebook’s Graph Search providing another level of semantic context beyond Photos of Bacon.

This is designed to get you closer to the search result you want. It reads from your profile to see your location. In this case I’m in Austin, TX and Graph Search tries to match your search term to something that is likely relevant to you.

There are not a lot of options here for this semantic search of Photos of Bacon, but remember this is a new technology that will improve over time and will include more data as time goes on.

Search to Find a Local Business

Are you hungry for lunch and craving a hot dog? Let’s use Facebook to find something.

A search for “hot dogs” gives the following results:

• A Facebook Page for a local Austin restaurant
• A restaurant in Lesage, WV
• The Place Page
• The Hot Dogs Interest Page
• Hot Dogs from Baja California
  A search for “hot dogs” yields disappointing local results.

It’s curious why these particular search results for “hot dogs” come up, and none of the thousands of other places between Austin and Lesage, WV. Do hot dog restaurants not market themselves on Facebook? Doubtful. And if you’re a marketer for a company selling hot dogs, how do you get on this list? Can you even break into Graph Search?

I’m surprised that chains that sell hot dogs, such as Sonic or Dairy Queen, are not listed here while Hillbilly Hot Dogs is. This isn’t terribly impressive, but I’ll chalk this up to necessary cleanup for the Graph Search beta.

Let’s investigate the only viable option for me here—Frank Hot Dogs. The first thing that jumps out is the redesigned Facebook Page that really looks more like a Yelp or Google local business listing. Address, website and map are all prominently displayed, as is the social context of my friend who likes Frank.

Frank Hot Dogs in Austin, TX.

Below the fold is also a listing of other local businesses near Frank, where you can presumably walk off your lunch. Notice in the image below that the listings in the “Places Near Frank” are sorted by the number of likes each local business has.

It’s interesting that social proof (in the form of a like) is used to build out your choices, even though Frank is in downtown Austin and is surrounded by other options.

Places near Frank Hot Dogs.

Search for Hot Topics and What Friends Are Saying

One final scenario here—let’s look at how Graph Search can help us find conversations on Facebook that would interest us.

Apple has been in the news a lot lately with earnings announcements, popular products and conjecture about the company as a stock investment.

Here’s what Facebook has to offer for a search of “Apple”: an Interest, a Sponsored app (interesting), Applebee’s, Apple for Education (?), the Apple Store and Apple as a Place.

Here’s a Graph Search for “Apple.”

When you click Apple, Inc., you get a new set of semantic results. This is significantly better—as I have friends who work at Apple, I was expecting to see that. But it’s several levels down and requires you to go through several steps to find it.

So usability is an issue, and in the efforts to create something “semantic,” Facebook might have made it somewhat difficult to navigate, at least today.

Also note that there is no mention of status updates or comments that people have made about Apple. I’d really like to see that in one place.

You need to go through several steps before you find out what your friends are saying about Apple.

Summary

Facebook has taken the next step in evolving beyond social into social-driven search. Is it going to replace Google anytime soon? No, but that isn’t the question to ask today. Facebook is taking steps to make social relevant in the context of search—and that’s a long-term project.

This first version is promising, but has a long way to go to meet its full potential.

The takeaway for marketers is that the basics really haven’t changed significantly. You need to host a thriving and growing community on Facebook to take full advantage of how the industry evolves. You need more fans, more comments and more social engagement. That’s always been the case. But we haven’t known where the industry is heading necessarily.

Graph Search is a window into the future, but a largely unrealized vision today that will take time to emerge. Think about how Facebook will improve the overall user experience using data in the Graph in the future.

Slowly but surely, it’s becoming a bigger part of our lives. What do you think about this new feature? Leave your questions and comments in the box below.

The post Facebook Graph Search Review: How it Works appeared first on Responsive web design agency | Inbound Marketing company.

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! Oh wait, no, it’s just a marketer.

Despite all my hard work, I probably won’t be able to fly without spending a couple hundred bucks and 2 hours waiting for airport security. (Also, I hear laser vision doesn’t work as well when you’re wearing glasses.) But just because my super hero dreams have been shattered, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t celebrate your super hero abilities … your super hero marketing abilities.

That’s right. Even if we can’t fly faster than a speeding bullet, we all still have certain marketing super powers that we should be proud to celebrate. Some of us know our strengths already, and some of us may still be trying to find them. Either way, if you’ve ever wondered what makes you and your colleagues such effective marketers — the Bruce Wayne of blogging, the Incredible Hulk of Analytics — this fun little decision tree is for you.

So, are you ready to find your marketing super power? Figure it out now so you can keep flexing those marketing muscles of yours.

Alright, have you found your marketing super power? Great! Now, like true marketers, let’s analyze it so we can learn what it means

What Your Marketing Super Power Means

The Blogger: You are the master of written content! As a super hero blogger, you are truly in tune with and knowledgeable about your particular industry. Not only are you driven by your passion for marketing, your industry, and the written word, but you’re also mind-blowingly organized. Most likely trained by blog writing ninjas in the mountains of Tibet (kind of like Bruce Wayne), you’re pretty much Batman (or Batwoman), but better because, well, you blog.

With this great power, comes tons of research! It’s no secret that a blogger’s best friend is timely and accurate information. So, be sure to stay on top of industry news, statistics, and new studies to provide your readers with the highest quality, most relevant content possible.

The Social Butterfly: Everybody loves you, and you know your way around the social networks like Tony Stark knows his way around the electromagnetic spectrum — yeah, he studied electrical engineering at MIT. Needless to say, you’re a genius when it comes to engaging with people on a regular basis, and you know how to represent the personality of your company on social networks.

As a social media mastermind, you’ve got to stay focused on how to maintain meaningful relationships between your brand and its many fans, tweeps, and connections. Remember, your greatest tool is your ability to relate, connect, and use thoughtful content to keep people engaged. Make them love your brand as much as they love you! Each social network has its own nuances, and it’s up to you to discover them to best reach your audience.

The Analyst: Patient, logical, and obviously analytical, your powers lie in your insatiable appetite for statistics, and how those statistics can make or break any marketing strategy. You don’t worry about the content and how attractive it looks — you live for what the numbers tell you about that content. Analyzing data, and using it to adjust tactics and strategy is your super power.

We’ll call you the Professor X of your marketing team, always keeping a cool head and logically finding solutions and better practices for improving your company’s marketing strategies. Remember to keep your eyes on market conditions and changes in your industry that may affect your company’s performance, and make suggestions to help battle these changes.

The Optimizer: Patience and a strong understanding of what makes marketing offers attractive are your greatest gifts. Your assets revolve around your ability to work between the realm of analysis, and content. Not only do you understand how the content — both in copy and design — affects your marketing strategy, but you know how to increase its influence through optimization. You, my friend, are the Mystique of the marketing team. In order for you to be at your best, you take on the role of many to perform the tasks of one.

As the optimization expert, you must understand how your work affects both Sales and Marketing. You should make recommendations to your team on how to best optimize their landings pages and content by changing URLs, replacing graphics, adding keywords, changing layout, and editing forms. And don’t forget to try new, innovative ideas when optimizing anything for your company!

This decision tree didn’t cover all areas of marketing — was your marketing super power left out? Share your super power, and what qualities make for excellent marketers in the comments.

The post Discover YOUR Marketing Super Power [Decision Tree] appeared first on Responsive web design agency | Inbound Marketing company.

In Nielsen and McKinsey’s Social Media Report, consumers were surveyed to discover how they use social networks.

Here are seven key findings from that report.

#1: More Time Invested in Mobile

The survey found that consumers are increasingly looking to their smartphones and tablets to access social media.

While the PC is still the most widely used device when it comes to social media consumption, the study found that time spent on mobile apps and mobile websites accounted for a 63% increase (compared to 2011) in total time spent.

Additionally, 43% of users said they use smartphones to access social media, while 16% connect using a tablet.

Mobile and particularly apps are where people are spending their social networking time.

Key Takeaway: When it comes to consuming social content, it’s all about mobile. For marketers, that means that mobile has to be your top content priority this year.

If you haven’t done so already, here are some ideas to get you started:

• Set up a mobile website (there’s a free WordPress plugin for this)
• Register your business on location-based services such as Foursquare, WHERE or SCVNGR
• Use SMS and MMS to attract customers
• Build your own app (even if you’re not a developer) using GENWI, Mippin, MobiCart or ShoutEm
• Get more mobile marketing tips in Jamie Turner’s excellent book, Go Mobile!

#2: Pinterest Usage Continues to Rise

Pinterest continues to experience exponential growth since its launch in 2011. The platform had the highest increase in audience and time spent of any social network across all devices such as PC, mobile web and apps.

Pinterest continues to be the most popular social networking site on the Internet.

In addition, a May 2012 Harvard Business Review article titled, “Moving customers from pinning to purchase,” states that:

“Pinterest users reported a surprisingly high correlation between pinning and subsequent purchasing: more than 1 in 5 Pinterest users has pinned an item that they later purchased. In the social world, this is a high conversion rate.”

Key Takeaway: As a marketer, remember that product photography is more important than ever when trying to persuade Pinterest shoppers to pin and buy your hottest-looking items. Capitalize on their shopping experience and make your profile as creative and visually engaging as possible.

Also, don’t forget to engage with people who have pinned your items to see if you could nudge them into buying something!

#3: Social Networking Generates Positive Sentiments

One of the most interesting findings in this survey was that 76% of participants said they experienced positive feelings after engaging in social networking.

Some of the words used to describe how they felt were: informed, energized, excited, connected and amused. However, 21% reported negative sentiments after social networking; examples are overwhelmed, anxious and wasted time. 24% remained neutral.

Consumers generally feel good after engaging in social media.

Key Takeaway: Social media is saturated with sentiment-rich data. Every update, tweet, blog comment or online review is a critical source of data that can inform your CRM program. As a marketer, you should be very interested in gathering and analyzing sentiment data to see if your social messages are producing the desirable outcomes you’re looking for.

#4: Twitter Drives Social TV

Twitter has emerged as the most powerful driver of ‘social TV’ interaction. That means when people are watching the Super Bowl, American Idol or the elections, they are simultaneously using Twitter to share their thoughts and experiences with friends.

In June 2012, a third of active Twitter users tweeted about TV-related content, which was up from 26% at the beginning of the year.

Tweeting while watching TV is becoming a very popular social phenomenon.

Key Takeaway: Social TV is still a new concept for marketers. However, considering that an average of 43 minutes are spent each day watching TV (HubSpot), and that many of those viewers are then sharing their experiences online, marketers should find ways to align any TV advertising with their online strategies (e.g., incorporating hashtags or tweetable sound bites in their TV commercials). This prolongs the conversation about brands beyond the TV, while allowing for extended word-of-mouth marketing.

#5: Social Care is the New Customer Care

Social care is a way for companies to provide regular customer service through social media platforms. The study revealed that one in three social media users prefers social care to contacting a company by phone.

Consumers use a variety of channels for social care. For example, they are most likely to comment or ask a question about a company’s products or services on the company’s Facebook page (29%), on their own personal Facebook profile (28%), on official company blogs (15%), on Twitter (personal handle – no mention of company, 14%) and on Twitter (company’s handle, 13%).

Social care is transforming the way brands respond to customers.

Key Takeaway: Social media has conditioned consumers to get immediate feedback. As a marketer, the risk of failing to meet such high expectations is not just losing customers, but having negative comments about your brand blasted around the user’s network and their friends’ networks. If you can get social care right, you will create a wide gap between your brand and your competition.

#6: Mixed Feelings about Social Ads

Another interesting finding was how people react to social ads. While 33% of people surveyed find ads on social networks to be annoying, 26% are more likely to pay attention to an ad posted by a friend.

Generally a Like is the most common action taken after seeing a social ad (26%), followed by a share (15%) and a product purchase (14%). As far as demographics go, the study found that Asian-American consumers were the most likely to respond positively to social ads, while white consumers were the most likely to be turned off by social media advertising.

A lot of people find social ads annoying, especially if the ads are not relevant to them. Image source: iStockphoto.

Key Takeaway: Because advertising on social media is more annoying than other digital areas, marketers should proceed with caution and make sure their ads are highly relevant and targeted. On the bright side, many people don’t mind social ads if they’re tailored to suit personal tastes and interests. This presents a great opportunity for marketers to raise brand visibility.

#7: Social Listening a Key Consumer Activity

Social media is transforming the way consumers around the globe make purchasing decisions. Consumers are using social media to listen and learn about other consumers’ experiences (70%); find more information about brands, products and services (65%); and compliment brands (53%).

Most social media users are listening to other people’s experiences.

Key takeaway: We tend to think of social listening as something only marketers and research analysts do. However, it’s interesting to see that consumers are also active listeners. This is an opportunity for marketers to educate consumers through compelling content, improve customer experiences (using social care) and maintain strong customer relationships to uphold a positive brand image.

The post 7 Social Media Trends for Consumers appeared first on Responsive web design agency | Inbound Marketing company.

Calls-to-action (CTAs) are the directional signals on your website. If the goal of inbound marketing is finding people who are excited to learn about your product or service, then your CTAs are the big (occasionally red and blinking) heralds telling your site visitors where to go next.

We know that marketers who use CTAs on their websites are more likely to convert visitors to leads than those who simply post a ‘Contact Us’ button on their site and pray. And over time, you’ll even learn which CTAs perform better than others to reach your different lead generation goals — like converting net new leads, versus nurturing leads into marketing qualified leads.

But inbound marketing isn’t always about the bing-bang-boom conversion; sometimes, we need to put our conversion obsession aside and focus on other marketing goals. Just like dating in real life, sometimes making an upfront ask just isn’t the right call — and that means sometimes, your marketing actually shouldn’t have a call-to-action. If that sounds like marketing blasphemy, then read on to learn about some of those rare cases in which you actually should not use a lead-generation CTA in your marketing.

PR and Social “Buzz” Campaigns

There are certain PR and social media campaigns where your goal isn’t to drive new leads, but to generate buzz. If the whole point of a campaign is to create a little mystery and get people talking about you, adding a big red CALL NOW! option at the bottom of your page will ultimately distract from your overall goal.

This teaser play works really well for interesting new product launches, or even if you’re just trying to expand the top of your marketing funnel. For instance, when we launched our parody of the popular “Gangnam Style,” we didn’t include a CTA. Not in the video itself, or even the blog post we used to promote it. Why? Because we weren’t looking to use that video directly to get new leads. Instead, we wanted to generate interest in HubSpot among a wider audience than those we were already reaching. And frankly, who would want to read an ebook about using Facebook for Business after watching a Gangnam Style video? I doubt very many.

But a little bit of mystery, especially when it’s well-deployed at the beginning of a relationship, can be a great way to get future customers to learn about you. Once you’ve built some social buzz, nurture those new social contacts by following up with great content like blog posts and lead-generation content to show people the heart of your company.

Prospect and Fan/Follower Generation

Similar to buzz campaigns, at the very top of your funnel sometimes prospecting, and not lead generation, is the primary goal of your pages.

When your audience is in their exploratory phase, you want content to successfully showcase your thought leadership and earn readers’ trust. Dropping a lead-gen CTA too early might scare off visitors who are interesting in performing some action with you … just not something so high-commitment as becoming a full-fledged lead. To further the dating analogy, it’s like asking your date up to your apartment, when a goodnight kiss would have sufficed.

That’s why it’s important to give your readers some options, particularly on your more top-of-the-funnel marketing assets, like your blog or social media channels. For instance, on our blog we include options for new readers with whom we haven’t built up enough trust for them to become a lead, like a CTA to simple subscribe to our blog, or social share and follow buttons. For a new reader, it’s much more reasonable to ask them to share a great article or sign up to read more in the future, than to ask them to attend an hour long webinar we’re hosting next week.

And remember, there are other legitimate marketing goals you can try to reach with your content other than lead generation. Increasing your list of subscribers and social media reach are two extremely important ones — ones that often result in more leads down the road.

Content You Want to Give Away Form-Free

A raging debate among marketers is whether or not you should always give away certain kinds of information for free. To gate or not to gate, also known as “free” versus “form-free,” is a question of what resources you allow users to access without requiring they provide information via a landing page form. While we believe that leaving all content ungated makes growing your a Marketing and Sales machine more difficult when you’re operating off a lead generation model, when you advance further down the marketing funnel, there are indeed some instances where you might want your content to be totally void of CTAs.

Many businesses decide to use CTAs to generate downloads of their middle- and bottom-of the funnel content in an attempt to generate marketing qualified leads (MQLs). However, for many companies (ours included), gating this kind of content actually harms lead and customer conversions. As far as case studies go, many leads — particularly for B2B sales organizations — don’t perceive case studies to contain enough value to bother converting again. In fact, it could even be perceived as a barrier to moving along in the sales process, as this is the content they should be receiving for free from their sales rep to help close a deal. So while another conversion may be great to advance leads further down your funnel, including a call-to-action to view it might be costing you more than the new lead intel you gather gives you. Some other MOFU and BOFU content you might consider ungating include customer testimonial videos, product pricing and other sales-centric information, and content designated for existing customers,.

It can be difficult to strike the right balance between generating enough leads, and generating qualified leads. Do some testing in your target audience on what kind of information your audience is willing to “pay” for with their information, versus the kind of credibility and trust you build by offering up content for “free.”

Nonprofit Outreach, or Other Altruistic Causes

Online media has an incredible power to bring people together. As digital marketers, we primarily use these tools to bring our prospects together with our marketing content, and hopefully our sales teams. But there are certain major events that compel us to step outside of ourselves for a second, forget that we’re inherently selfish, and try to help one another.

And you know what makes inbound businesses uniquely poised for this transition? They spend a lot of effort developing a following, which they can leverage for good … good that has nothing to do with lead generation. If your business is trying to raise money for a good cause — we did this when we were trying to raise money for the Red Cross over the holidays — our marketing content was completely devoid of lead generation CTAs. For instance, we purposefully left a lead-generation CTA off of our blog post promoting Red Cross donations — because not only would a CTA be in poor, but it really isn’t the point of the post in the first place.

And remember, it’s not just philanthropic causes that should cause you to leave the lead-gen CTA at the door. For instance, when Sales and Marketing industry leader Zig Ziglar passed away, we published a blog post honoring his teachings — which also included no lead-gen CTA. Again, the point of the post was not to generate leads; it was to come together as a community and honor an industry legend and share some of his best quotes with the world.

Business Models Not Based on Leads

Finally, it’s incredibly important we all recognize that a lead generation campaigns only make sense if your business model relies on, well, leads. For other business models, adding a lead-gen CTA is likely to distract from your page’s primary objective, rather than complementing your marketing approach.

For instance, there are plenty of businesses out there working off of an ad- or impression-based model. These marketers aren’t looking for leads, they’re looking for impressions and clicks. Think folks like NBCUniversal, CNN, or Boston.com.

And don’t think we’ve forgotten about our ecommerce marketing friends. Instead of focusing on generating leads, it’s usually more important that you drive transactions; these will yield new contacts you can then nurture into repeat customers. When online success depends on website sales, your best bet is to channel your audience directly to a product page and/or shopping cart, not a gated tip sheet about how to one of the products you’re selling. Inserting competing CTAs on a page can be distracting — if the purpose of a page is to sell hiking boots, don’t ask people to do anything else.

In what other instances do you recommend marketers not include a lead-gen CTA? Share your thoughts in the comments!

Image credit: purpleapple428

The post When NOT to Use Lead-Gen CTAs in Your Marketing appeared first on Responsive web design agency | Inbound Marketing company.

Guess what. We’re almost 2 weeks into the new year already. Can you believe it?

Now that we’re in the swing of things, it seems like companies everywhere are picking up some serious steam. You can tell they’re planning for a long 12 months ahead to start their fiscal year out right and please their devoted users, fans, prospects, and customers.

How can you tell? Updates! Updates everywhere!

That’s right. Facebook has a secret announcement coming up, hot new measurement tools are coming out for Instagram, Yahoo! is improving its search feature, and even Digg is playing along. The real question is, how can your company take advantage of these updates to improve its own marketing? We’ll give you some fun, actionable tips throughout this weekly round-up so you can also kick your year off strong. Ready to get started? Here are the top marketing stories of the week.

Why Asking StumbleUpon to Remove Your Links Is Dumb, From Search Engine Land

This sounds frighteningly similar to a story from this summer in which a certain website (which shall remain nameless) sent a lawyer at Guardlex to sue another website … over an inbound link. Well, as it turns out, StumbleUpon is getting regular requests every week from users asking StumbleUpon to remove links to their sites for fear that Google is punishing them for it. The reasoning behind this thought process? Google’s algorithm changed by leaps and bounds in 2012, especially with its Penguin Update, which punishes websites that have accumulated bad, spammy inbound links over the years. Because of this, people are in an absolute panic.

But what they should understand is that Google is punishing sites that have bad inbound links, not all inbound links. In other words, StumbleUpon is an established, reputable social network, and links from this site will not hurt you in the SERPs. Furthermore, Google’s Disavow tool can also help safeguard you against bad inbound links. So don’t go blaming StumbleUpon for those inbound links — they’re the good kind. To learn more about what links you do and don’t want, read the full post here.

Our Top Predictions for Facebook’s Secret January 15th Announcement

Have you heard? Facebook is revealing something on January 15th, but nobody seems to know exactly what that “something” is just yet. So let’s speculate a little, shall we? Search Engine Journal reported that a new, single-column Timeline design has rolled out in New Zealand. Do you think this could be what the secret announcement is about? It’s possible, but we didn’t want to settle on just one idea. Facebook could be releasing a smartphone, launching a gaming platform, or even acquiring Google! It could be anything.

That’s why we thought it would be more fun to share our list of 10 creative predictions for this secret announcement on January 15th. Even more fun, we invited our readers to join the discussion by leaving their personal predictions in the comments, and we’d like to invite you to participate if you missed your chance the first time around. What do YOU think Facebook will reveal? Please feel free to read all 10 predictions and leave a prediction of your own in the comments there.

Hot #Instagram Analytics Tools to Optimize Brand PR Power, From Search Engine Watch

How are you measuring the success of your efforts on Instagram? Oh, you didn’t know you could actually measure anything on Instagram? (Besides any closed-loop marketing analytics you have set up to measure the impact of referral traffic from Instagram, of course.) Well that’s understandable, since the app itself still doesn’t have its own set of analytics like, say, Facebook Insights. Luckily, Search Engine Watch has highlighted a list of extremely useful third-party tools that will measure your efforts — including things like hashtags, Likes, comments, keywords, users, and filters. No more guessing! Check out the list of 5 tools here:

1. Nitrogram: This social analytics dashboard is specifically meant for brands, so you can track your reach and engagement over time.
2. Simply Measured: This tool brings all your social media profiles together for team collaboration.
3. Webstagram: Track your keywords and bring your brand’s Instagram feed to life right on your website.
4. Statigram: Meant for tracking and managing photo contests and followers.
5. Stickygram: To tell you the truth, this one isn’t really a measurement tool. But Search Engine Watch included it on the list anyway for its talents in bringing your online efforts offline in the form of a magnet!

If you’re interested in learning more about how brands are using Instagram, check out the full story here.

Digg Says It’s Growing, Starting to Monetize, From Marketing Land

Looks like Digg is finding more opportunities for marketers to advertise on its platform! The new Digg platform launched about 6 months ago and is now starting to monetize. At the moment, it’s doing this through the “Apps We Like” section on its homepage, which includes only sponsored mobile applications at the moment. These apps change every week and are generally handpicked by the Digg staff, which is different from the process many other platforms are currently using for monetization and bringing in new advertisers.

However, mobile developers are also welcome to apply to be a part of the sponsored program. If your company has a mobile application, you might want to consider Digg’s new advertising option. If you not, you’ll still want to pay attention for when (and if) Digg broadens the advertising spectrum to include other types of products and services to display. If you’re interested in learning more about Digg’s growth and marketing opportunities with the platform, read the full story here.

27 Pre-Designed Calls-to-Action for Your Customization

Did you know that by changing the design of your calls-to-action, you can improve clickthrough rate by 1300% (or more!)? Did you also know that PowerPoint is actually an incredible design tool? Seriously. If you don’t have a designer or fancy design software on hand, you can still create compelling calls-to-action to convert your website visitors into new leads and customers. We’ve even created 27 pre-designed calls-to-action right here for you to easily modify and customize, all within PowerPoint!

And once you’ve designed your CTAs, it’s important to collect data about how well they’re performing immediately, so you can see exactly how many views and clicks your new designs are reeling in. That way, you can conduct A/B tests and select only the designs that are performing best — and improve the design of those that are underperforming. And because we want to help you out not only with the design of your calls-to-action, but also the measurement of their success too, we’re sharing a free tool that allows you to upload your new CTAs to your website and see how well they’re performing on the spot. Want to try it out for yourself? Click here to start customizing your CTAs now.

Yahoo! Image Search Adds Flickr Photos, From Marketing Pilgrim

Do you ever look to Creative Commons to find free Flickr images to pair with your marketing content? Well, it looks like Yahoo! is integrating this option into its latest image search update. This is great news for content creating marketers! If you’re interested in testing out the new Yahoo! feature, click the arrow for the left-hand search options and click “Labeled for Reuse,” and you’ll be able to find all sorts of images you can legally use for your blog and social media posts.

Just be careful to give credit where credit is due (cite your sources), and double check to see if the image truly is available for commercial use. If you’re more of an on-the-go type, this feature is also available across all mobile devices. Looks like Yahoo! has really stepped up its game! If you’d like to learn more about this new update from Yahoo!, you can read the full story here.

Did you come across any other interesting marketing stories this week? Share them in the comments below!

Image Credit: rondostar

The post Helpful Instagram Analytics Tools, and Other Marketing Stories of the Week appeared first on Responsive web design agency | Inbound Marketing company.

Once viewed as a niche player in the social space, Pinterest has become one of the fastest growing social networks ever, harnessing both an increased user base and its exponential growth as a referring site to become a considerable force in the marketing world.

Equally important for businesses to consider is the buying power behind Pinterest: Pinterest users purchase items more often and in greater quantities, spend more money, and shop more frequently than any other social network. So if your initial trial of using Pinterest for business has yielded positive results and you think Pinterest is a viable social media marketing platform for your business, you know what the next step is, right? Optimization!

To get you started, below we’ll outline 10 great tips to optimize your business’ Pinterest presence for search.

1) Choose an Optimized Company Username

In November 2012, Pinterest finally launched Pinterest business accounts, which make registering for a business account (or converting a personal account into a business account) easy and painless. Going the “business” route also makes it easier to verify your website, add links to your Twitter and Facebook accounts, and add Pinterest buttons and widgets to your company site or blog. For more detailed information about how use Pinterest’s new business accounts, check out the free HubSpot ebook, A Guide to Pinterest’s New Business Accounts here.

The first thing you should do to optimize your Pinterest business account for search is to make sure your company name is straightforward. The field to indicate your company name has no character limit; but the challenge often comes with your username, which is confined to 15 characters. If your full company name fits — fantastic! But if it doesn’t, choose something memorable, keyword-conscious, and easy to spell that is also clearly associated with your business. For example, The New York Times has amassed over 44,000 followers using the username “NYTimes,” while Martha Stewart Weddings in the Middle East chose “MSWeddingsME” to differentiate itself from other Martha Stewart properties, but still capitalizing on search traffic for weddings.

Furthermore, be sure to verify your website. Log in to your Pinterest account, and go to ‘Settings.’ Check to ensure you’ve listed your website here before clicking the ‘Verify Website’ button.

2) Optimize Your Page’s ‘About’ Section

The Pinterest ‘About’ section provides you with 200 characters of prime keyword real estate, so use this space wisely. In addition to being descriptive and keyword-sensitive, your ‘About’ section should also be simple, succinct, and specific. Two hundred characters is plenty of space for a keyword-rich overview that covers the who, what, and where of what you do, so use it smartly — and don’t forget to add your website URL in the space provided!

3) Include Links Back to Your Website 

Pinterest re-pin links used to be “dofollow” links, but last year, following standard practice with other social networks in the space, Pinterest adopted “nofollow” links. In other words, these links do not pass any SEO authority. But even those these links won’t give you any extra oomph in terms of SEO, we still recommend optimizing for user experience and brand awareness. After all, what good is search engine optimizing your Pinterest presence if you’re not ultimately driving users back to your website?

Always include a reference link back to your website with your pins, and if you re-pin a post that features your content or products, edit the description to include a full link (just don’t use a URL shortener here, as Pinterest is known to mark pins containing shortended links as spam). Including a link back to your website will not only reinforce that the image is associated with your brand, but it will also open up a direct pathway to purchase (for ecommerce) or learn more (for services).

Etsy is a great example of a Pinterest presence that excels at mixing great content from other sites with products featured on its own site. In doing so, Etsy always includes a direct link to purchase the item on their site along with the username of the specific Etsy shop owner. A great example is Etsy’s pin featuring a humorous burrito card, which includes a brief overview of the card under the image and a direct link to see the product on Etsy in the link’s description.

Think of links in Pinterest as providing the next step for pinners — where they can find the image they loved enough to click, re-pin, Like, or comment on. Use links to make that distance between the pin and the content/product as short as possible so you can improve the experience of your users and eventually drive more traffic and awareness to your site — social signals that search engines may end up picking up on in their algorithms over time.

4) Differentiate Your Pinboards

By default, Pinterest offers some general pinboard options to get users thinking about how to bucket and organize their pins into different boards. For businesses, however, getting more specific and unique in your board descriptions is critical to helping you get found on Pinterest. According to a study by RJ Metrics, more than 3% of pinboards are titled “For the Home,” followed by “My Style” and “Products I Love,” all three of which are default board names recommended by Pinterest.

Break through the pinboard name clutter and be specific and keyword-conscious in the selection of your board names. If you’re an interior designer, replace “For the Home” with “Modern Kitchens” or “Children’s Bedrooms” so that potential search terms align more closely with what end users might be looking for and increase the likelihood of standing out from the massive clutter of default –or just plain unoriginal — board names.

5) Speak Your Customers’ Language

Pinterest is not a place to play inside baseball and use expressions that are unique to your company. Your ‘About’ sections and board names should all be optimized using terms your target customers and buyer personas actually use in their everyday lives. Being relevant on Pinterest means understanding what your customer is looking for, what he or she is most interested in buying or pinning, and what related industries or topics the pinner might be seeking out. It should not feel like an advertising board for your products; instead, it should feel like a comfortable space that’s curated around the style, needs, and lifestyle of your potential clients.

One great example of speaking your customers’ language is fashion brand 2 Penny Blue. 2 Penny Blue is a high-end fashion brand specializing in blazers, but instead of only pinning items they make and sell, the company’s Pinterest boards are centered around the types of style and advice that 2PB clients might want to emulate, including a board called “Style Muses” featuring Audrey Hepburn and Gwenyth Paltrow, accessory boards packed with current trends, and pins like a guide to navigating champagne cocktails.

When you think about your Pinterest boards, consider your customers’ buying habits, average age, and lifestyle, and build your pinning strategy around their terminology, interests, and potential search terms. For example, if you’re a real estate broker, Pinterest is a great place to pin images or videos with helpful tips for buying a home, but it’s also a great place to showcase your knowledge of your community. Boards featuring local schools, attractions, restaurants, and parks will help potential customers understand the markets where you sell and build trust that you understand their needs. Create authentic boards that connect to your clients and how they live, and use terminology that is straightforward and relatable. The search engines, your audience, and Pinterest will thank you for it!

6) Use Your Pins’ Descriptions Wisely

The biggest opportunity for text-based content on Pinterest is the description area for each individual pin. Here, the platform gives you 500 characters to work with, which users can fill with anything from recipe instructions, to notes and commentary, to credits for other vendors, to location and usage information … and more! In fact, HubSpot Social Media Scientist Dan Zarrella researched 11,000 pins and found that the most re-pinned and commented on items were accompanied by descriptions ranging from 200-310 words.

Knowing that, don’t be shy about describing your pins. Include terms that your users will relate to and use on their own, add links to the original product or content, and consider adding instructions on product usage or care. The great balancing act with descriptions is ensuring that you include relevant keywords, relatable context, and easy-to-follow links to the content featured in the post. For example, real wedding website Style Me Pretty has almost five million followers on Pinterest and some of the most liked and re-pinned content on Pinterest. In addition to choosing beautiful imagery that’s relevant to their audience, they also tailor their descriptions perfectly for SEO. Their pin showcasing do-it-yourself noisemakers includes a link to the Style Me Pretty website for instructions, links to the photographer and stylist, and a quick overview of what pinners can expect (DIY noisemakers and escort cards) when they click through on the pin to the website.

One of the single biggest mistakes companies make on Pinterest is being lazy about their pins’ descriptions. Ignoring the descriptions altogether, using language that your customers don’t understand or relate to, linking to irrelevant content (or not linking out at all), or just repeating keywords over and over again is a great way to get lost in the SEO shuffle. Instead, focus on creating remarkable descriptions that help you stand out from the pack.

7) Make Sure the Images You Pin Have Descriptive File Names & Alt Text

Given that Pinterest is a highly visual platform, using interesting imagery that is formatted and named correctly can have a significant impact on the success of your boards — and individual pins themselves. Many companies make the mistake of uploading photos using their default names. For example, an image named 1.13.13ShootImage722.jpg doesn’t help you at all in search, while a clearly named “Boston-townhouse.jpg” can help a search engine decipher what your image is about much more easily. Furthermore, if you pin an image from your website, make sure that image has clear alt text associated with it. The same rule we talked about with pin descriptions also applies here: Use naming conventions your customers will identify with. If a product you’re pinning has an obscure name that isn’t broadly known or intuitive, skip it in favor of a potential keyword search term.

In addition, make an effort to size your images optimally for Pinterest. Pinterest does not place any restrictions on the height of an image, but it does constrict the width of images to 554 pixels. Dan Zarrella’s analysis shows that taller images are more re-pinnable — likely because they take up more space in users’ Pinterest feeds — so use that to your advantage. Make sure your images are properly sized for use on Pinterest, use high-quality, beautiful imagery, and keep in mind that in this case, height is a distinct advantage, so if you’re assembling a “recipe for technology implementation success” or an inspiration board of your company goals for 2013, create an image that is tall, visually interesting, and aptly named using appropriate keywords.

8) Incorporate Hashtags

That’s right! Hashtags are no longer just for Twitter. In fact, hashtags on Pinterest not only allow you to organize pins by a specific theme or campaign, but they also make your pins a lot more searchable. For example, Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida knows that wedding planning is one of the most common uses of Pinterest. As a result, pins on their “Weddings @ Rollins” board, which includes photos of alumni getting married in various locations throughout campus, are organized using hashtags such as #RollinsCollege, #Knowles Chapel, and #Winter Park to ensure that brides searching by city, college, or a specific destination on campus can easily find images of their potential venue.

This maximizes awareness of Rollins College’s wedding venue offerings while staying top of mind for brides searching for those terms. And these integrated efforts have definitely paid off: The Weddings @ Rollins board ranks on the first page of a Google search alongside its homepage for the search term “florida wedding rollins,” giving engaged couples great visual content to drive interest and purchase intent as they plan their weddings.

9) Leverage the Long Tail

As we know from the success of big brands like Amazon, Google, and Netflix, the long tail isn’t just a niche strategy for small businesses. Take a page out of their books when you put your pins’ descriptions together. For example, according to Repinly, food and drink still represent more than 11% of all pins, so if you’re trying to get found by pins about chocolate chip cookies or wine, just writing a short, literal description of your pin is not going to help you cut through the clutter and stand out from the pack. Instead, identify niche, long-tail terms that your customers might pin around, and get more granular with your descriptions.

Stumped about how to get more specific? Consider adding your location, product use case details, or the audience you’d like to target to help you master the long tail. Here are some examples:

• Location: Mistral Boston includes its restaurant name and location right within its Pinterest username, then adds even more clarity by identifying its neighborhood (South End) and style of cuisine (French Mediterranean). Doing so helps them stand out in the space and assists pinners who are looking for great, high-end restaurants in the Boston area.
• Use Case: RELAX Wines fills its Pinterest account with food recipes that pair well with their wines, backyard entertaining ideas, and even ideas for how to put your finished wine bottles to good use (e.g. wine cork ornaments, garden torches, etc). Help people understand creative ways to use your product or services — it will improve your SEO while also providing followers with more context around usage.
• Audience: The Seattle Seahawks football team is one of the top sports brands on Pinterest. By outlining specific gift ideas for men, women, and kids, they leverage the fact that 44% of NFL fans are now female to market holiday products, gift ideas, and specific, targeted holiday promotions, all of which helps fans and non-fans alike identify wish list items for their favorite Seahawk supporters.

When it comes to descriptions, think about long-tail keywords for your business and industry. Identify keywords that are slightly more specific than “chocolate chip cookies” or “insurance companies” to help people find you more readily, and to help you stand out from the crowd in search results. For more information about the long tail, check out our ultimate guide for mastering long-tail search.

10) “Pinjack” Relevant Search Terms and Images

Although the number and engagement of male users on Pinterest is growing, Pinterest’s core user base demographics skew toward female users, so “pinjacking” trends and events relevant to avid pinners can be a great way to increase your organic search. For example, one of the top organic Google search results for “DIY Halloween Costumes” comes not from Walmart, Target, or some costume shop, but from Goodwill Industries of Western Michigan.

By combining highly shareable imagery from other highly trafficked sites, trendy costumes, and great board descriptions, Goodwill Industries has managed to improve its overall online presence and increase visibility outside of traditional terms like “Goodwill locations” or “shopping at Goodwill” by taking advantage of pinjack-able trends (think newjacking, but for Pinterest!) and timing around Halloween to maximize their online awareness and traffic.

The role Pinterest plays for businesses is growing every day. With 11 million users and growing, the network provides a unique opportunity for companies to leverage visual content, quality descriptions, and insight into customers’ lifestyles and needs while growing their reach and improving their organic search results. Just as with any website, your focus as a business should be on creating remarkable content and a strong community around your product, services, and brand. Happy pinning!

Image Credit: Peter Alfred Hess

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