What Marketers Everywhere Can Learn From P&G’s 1,600-Person Layoff

Yesterday, Business Insider reported that Procter & Gamble is set to lay off 1,600 employees as a result of its decision to cut back on the company’s annual advertising spend of $10 billion. CEO Robert McDonald said he can’t keep increasing his ad budget even if sales continue to increase because of the prevalence of “more efficient” expenditures like Facebook and Google.

This statement seems to imply that P&G has been seeing dramatically increased sales due to its immense ad spend, but the truth is really that the company’s marketing spending is up 24% over the past two years, despite only a 9% sales increase in its 2012 Q1 earnings and a 6% sales increase over those same two years.

Real-Life Companies Moving from Outbound to Inbound Marketing

It looks like P&G finally realized it doesn’t have a sustainable marketing strategy and are thus taking painful steps to fix it. And Mr. McDonald is right; organic search and social media marketing are more efficient than advertising. But the assumption that digital media is free is one that too many marketers fall into, and P&G should be cautious not to make that mistake. From one inbound marketer to another, I’m here to say that not all advertising is inherently bad, and not all digital marketing is inherently effective. The secret sauce for success in all marketing channels lies in the way you integrate them with one another.

So how exactly does a company like P&G, who is allocating more of its resources to social media and SEO, integrate those with the rest of its marketing and advertising efforts? The first thing to remember is that social media and SEO are more efficient, but they’re not free. Doing it right requires time, resources, and technology that costs money, even though it will be significantly cheaper than a $10 billion annual ad spend. But once you get over that idea and accept that social media and search are inextricable, you can start to effectively integrate it with your other marketing channels.

A year ago, one of HubSpot’s customers, Steve Sheinkopf of Yale Appliance, went through a similar P&G strategy shift from outbound advertising to inbound marketing when he realized that “investing in old media may get you 100,000 eyeballs, but they’re not qualified. Only a few of those people are in a position to buy your product.” So he went from spending $750,000 a year on advertising to a greatly reduced $100,000 budget in 2012. The point is, it can (and should!) be done by businesses of every size, yet it’s only efficient and effective when SEO and social media work with your other marketing channels.

Integrating Content Creation, SEO, and Social Media

Perhaps the most tightly intertwined marketing channels are blogging, SEO, and social media; if you leave one out, the others suffer. Last year’s Google Panda updates placed more importance on social sharing, and with Google+ gaining visibility in search results, the tie between your social presence and your search engine presence can no longer be sidelined.

And hey, maybe Google will even start indexing the @ sign so tweets show up higher in search results, too. But we’ll let them duke that out (or you can in the comments section).

Google’s bots are also looking for websites to consistently update their content, for which blogging is a natural solution. Plus, bloggers can select the keywords for which they’d like their website and blog posts to be found in search engines, and craft content around those keywords every single time they sit down to write a post. And as you amass more keyword-rich blog posts, you amass more visibility in the search engines.

Many business owners have been seeing even more success with this method by targeting long-tail keywords. Yale Appliance’s Sheinkopf started targeting long tail keywords in his blog posts when he realized the important term ‘counter depth refrigerator,’ with a monthly search volume of 8,700, was more valuable to him than purchasing listing positions through PPC for terms like ‘refrigerator.’

On the effect long-tail content creation has had on his inbound marketing strategy, he says, “Long-tail keywords sound scary to some people, but it just means you’re targeting a niche audience who is a more qualified website visitor than someone who searches ‘refrigerator.’ Why would I spend my paid ad budget on a term that costs me $20 per click and drives unqualified traffic, when I can blog about a term that drives people who are ready to buy and get 120 inbound links along with it? That’s more valuable and efficient for my sales and search engine strategy than any ad campaign.”

Once you’re done blogging, complete the blogging-SEO-social media circle by socially sharing that content you’ve created with keyword-rich updates. As you continue to provide valuable content you’ve created on social media networks, you’ll see your reach on those networks grow, and consequently, the traffic to your blog and your ranking in search engines, too.

Is There Still a Place for Advertising?

Like P&G, Steve was seeing that the more he spent on advertising, the less he got back; the correlation between ad spend and customer acquisition was dwindling. But that doesn’t mean all advertising is a waste of resources. Steve still advertises to current customers and super-qualified leads in the bottom of his sales funnel. But because he’s targeting his ads to a niche audience, the ROI is through the roof. And the others who are seeing similar success with advertising are using inbound marketing to target their niche audiences and see worthy results. For example:

• P&G did experience some success with advertising; remember its wildly popular Old Spice campaign, “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like“? The one we at HubSpot — you know, people who are kinda into inbound marketing — spoofed in our 2011 holiday cards? Well, P&G wisely put that video up on YouTube, and it has received nearly 40,000,000 views. Then P&G used the star of the video (a social media star in his own right, a great move for digital marketing success) to create quick, custom videos in response to social media questions directed at him. Turns out, those real-time video responses were the fastest growing video campaigns ever. Now that’s how you integrate advertising and social media for inbound marketing success.

• Coca-Cola is preparing for this year’s Super Bowl by preparing for the 60% of people predicted to watch the game with a second screen, smartphone, or tablet nearby. Its ad spend is being complemented by a game in which viewers can watch the company’s signature polar bear mascots (both rooting for different teams) react to the game in real time.
• Advertising has found its way into the online world with PPC, and when coupled with an organic search strategy, many companies see more success than when focusing on just organic search or just paid search alone. A Search Engine Land Honda case study cites the positive branding effects that appearing in both the top organic and top paid spots has on searchers; Honda experienced a 16% increase in brand affinity, a 42% increase in brand recall, and an 8% increase in purchase intent. Those automakers absent from both spots saw a 16% decrease in purchase intent.

Integrating SEO, Social Media, and Everything Else

For the best inbound marketers, the integration never stops. Your mobile marketing should be integrated with your SEO and your paid search. Your PPC should be integrated with your content strategy. Your content strategy should be integrated with your mobile marketing strategy. Because while each individual marketing tactic gets you good results, when you combine them, you see astronomical returns.

Other inbound marketers are shifting their methodology this way, too. 71% of business executives surveyed worldwide are promoting their social media presence in their email marketing messages. And 63% of them are enabling email recipients to share email content with their social networks (Source: StrongMail research). Marketers are even talking about how to integrate mobile marketing with SEO and paid search to take advantage of the 400% growth in mobile searches over just the last 12 months. P&G and other outbound marketers making the switch to inbound are on the right track, and they’ll see success if they’re dedicated to an integrated view of all of their marketing channels.

How integrated is your marketing? How do you use social media to power your other marketing channels?

Image credit: goldberg

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The Ultimate Guide to Mastering Pinterest for Marketing

Over the past few months, you may have heard some chatter about a brand new social network called Pinterest. Not surprising. According to Compete, unique visitors to Pinterest.com increased by 429% from September to December 2011, and the social network already boasts a user base of 3.3 million. Pinterest is only growing in popularity as the hottest new social network, and in December 2011, it made Hitwise’s list of the top 10 social networks, currently sitting at #5 and beating out big names like LinkedIn and Google+. And as with any hot new social network that comes onto the scene, marketers are chiming in with, “Can I use it for marketing?” “…and, how?”

The short answer? Absolutely. The longer answer? Read on to find out how.

What is Pinterest, and How Does it Work?

Pinterest is a social network that allows users to visually share, curate, and discover new interests by posting (AKA ‘pinning’) images or videos to their own or others’ pinboards (i.e. a collection of ‘pins,’ usually with a common theme) and browsing what other users have pinned. Using a visual emphasis, the social network is very much focused on the concept of a person’s lifestyle, allowing you to share your tastes and interests with others and discover those of likeminded people. The social network’s goal is to “connect everyone in the world through the ‘things’ they find interesting.” Users can either upload images from their computer or pin things they find on the web using the Pinterest bookmarklet.

As with most other social networks, users can perform standard social networking functions such as following the boards of their friends, liking and commenting on other users’ pins, re-pinning content to their own boards, sharing others’ pins on Facebook and Twitter or via email, and even embedding individual pins on their website or blog.

Pinterest Etiquette

As with any site that is built around content curation, ‘pinners’ (Pinterest users) must be especially cognizant of citing the sources of their individual pins. And while Pinterest makes no direct statement that marketers cannot use the social network for promotional purposes, the site does discourage blatant self-promotion:

“Avoid Self Promotion | Pinterest is designed to curate and share things you love. If there is a photo or project you’re proud of, pin away! However, try not to use Pinterest purely as a tool for self-promotion.”

Couple this with Pinterest’s lifestyle vision, and what its means is that marketers need to find creative ways to promote their brand on the network and truly jive with its vision and user base. In other words, businesses should use the social network to showcase the lifestyle their brand promotes. If you’re a shoe vendor, a pinboard of the shoes you sell won’t cut it. A pinboard of a few of your shoes interspersed with images of places those shoes could take you, however, is the direction you should be thinking.

AARP’s Pinterest account features a pinboard called ‘Quotes to Live By,’ which is a great example of a business using Pinterest to promote the lifestyle of its brand.

How to Create a Pinterest Account

Surprisingly enough, user access to Pinterest still operates under an invitation-only basis. That being said, you can request an invitation, and Pinterest doesn’t exactly seem to be very stingy about granting requests. Visit www.pinterest.com, click ‘Request an Invite,’ and enter your email address to be notified when you have access to create your account. Or you can ask a friend who already has a Pinterest account to invite you — this seems to be the speediest of the two methods.

(Important Tip: Be sure to register your account with the same email address you use for your business’ Twitter account so you can easily share your new pins through your Twitter account, too. Once you receive an invitation to sign up for Pinterest, you’ll want to sign up through the Twitter option, not the Facebook option. This will enable you to tie your Pinterest account to your business’ Twitter account, not your personal Facebook profile. Currently, Pinterest doesn’t offer a connection to Facebook business pages.)

Once your account is activated, optimize your Pinterest profile under ‘Settings.’ Choose your company name as your username and complete your profile information, including a company description, logo, and a link to your website. Be sure you keep ‘Hide your Pinterest profile from search engines’ checked to ‘Off’ so your profile can get indexed in search.

Build Your Following on Pinterest

Once you get started, you’ll want to create a few pinboards before you start trying to build your Pinterest following (check out the list in the next section for some great ideas!). This way, new followers will have a reason to follow your pins; it’s the same reason why you would populate a brand new blog with a few posts before you start promoting it. Unfortunately, because the ‘Find Friends’ feature on Pinterest leverages a personal Facebook profile (not business page), this tool won’t be very useful for your business. Therefore, you’ll want to promote your presence through other means to jumpstart your Pinterest following:

• Add the Pinterest follow button to your website.
• Promote your presence on Pinterest through your other social networks by encouraging your followers/fans on Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and Twitter to follow your pins!
• Consider launching your presence with a Pinterest contest (see below), and write a blog post to promote it.
• Start following users you think would want to follow you back.

Think Outside the Box: 13 Creative Ways to Use Pinterest for Marketing

To get your creative juices flowing, we’ve brainstormed a list of creative ideas (and found some real-life examples) for using Pinterest as part of your social media marketing mix.

1. Feature Your Visual Content: Let’s start with the basics. Pinterest is a visual social network, so if your business pumps out a lot of visual content like data visualizations or infographics, consider creating a pinboard that highlights some of your best visual content. Just as the shoe example above, be strategic about how you pin this content, and mix in other images to amplify the visual appeal of your pinboard.

2. Create a User-Generated Pinboard: Because you can allow other users to contribute their own pins to your hosted pinboards on a user by user basis, this opens up a great opportunity to involve fans and customers in your marketing. Pick out a few of your top fans or customers, and create a board dedicated to their pins. Ask the customer to pin images that showcase the lifestyle they enjoy because of your brand. Does your software save them time? Ask them to pin images of things that represent the time they save or the things they can do with that saved time. This is a great way to leverage customer testimonials in a unique and visual way. Clothing retailer ModCloth uses this tactic in its ‘Guest Pinner Gallery.’

3. Host a Contest: First, consult Pinterest’s terms of use to make sure the contest you’re holding doesn’t infringe upon its guidelines. And if you liked our previous example, you’re going to get giddy about this one. Hold a contest that asks users to create a pinboard on their own account to demonstrate what they love about your brand, products, or services. If you’re that shoe vendor we mentioned above, you might ask customers to create a pinboard that shows pins of them doing fun and awesome things while wearing your shoes. Ask them to send you a link to their pinboard so you can evaluate entrants, and the coolest board wins a prize! Even better — you can also re-pin the top boards to your own Pinterest page and ask followers to vote on the boards to select the winner. This is exactly what High Point Market did in its October Pinterest campaign to promote High Point Market Week, during which it recruited fashion home trendsetters to showcase their favorite products and trends.

4. Add the Pin-It Button to Your Website: Make it super easy for website visitors to share your visual content or images on Pinterest by adding a Pin-It button to the visual content on your site. Just like other social media sharing buttons, this will help to expose your brand to a brand new audience. Where you showcase your other social media account presence, you can also add the Pinterest follow button, too! Click here to create your website buttons today.

5. Gather Insight Into Your Buyer Personas: Use Pinterest as a tool for understanding the interests and needs of your ideal customers. View pinboards of your customers to aid in your understanding of who your customers are and what they’re interested in. 

6. Re-Pin What Your Followers Are Interested In: Showcase the cool things your followers are pinning in a separate pinboard but re-pinning followers’ pins. This will add a non-promotional, interesting dynamic to your collection of pinboards while promoting engagement with your followers. Whole Foods is a great example of a brand on Pinterest who re-pins other users’ pins often.

7. Become an Curation Expert: Become the go-to Pinterest account for pins about a certain subject or topic relating to your industry. For example, because HubSpot is a marketing software company, we could create a pinboard that features awesome visual examples of great online marketing. Or if you’re a paper company, you could create a pinboard that features really awesome origami paper creations from around the web. Minted is a great, real-life example of a paper company that leverages this tactic by creating themed pinboards that show unique ways to use paper, mixed in with other related lifestyle photos, such as in its ‘Trick or Treat’ Halloween board:

8. Create a Video Gallery: Pinners aren’t only limited to pinning images; they can pin videos, too! Create a pinboard of some of the interesting videos your business produces interspersed with relevant images. How about a blooper gallery while you’re at it? Do executives in your business do a lot of speaking at industry conferences and events? Create a pinboard that features videos of your speakers and images of them speaking or networking at events to promote your speaking program.

9. Feature Offline Events: Create a pinboard that features the best photos and video footage of the annual event you host to help you generate buzz and promote the next one.

10. Use Hashtags: Just like social networks like Twitter and Google+, Pinterest users can leverage hashtags to tag their pins and make their content more search-friendly. Promoting a new campaign of some sort? Create a pinboard around it, and tag it with a hashtag you’re also using on Twitter and Google+ to leverage an integrated, cross-channel campaign. Club Monaco leverages its Pinterest account for this very purpose, using the #cultureclub hashtag and pinboard to promote a section of its website called Culture Club.

11. Showcase Your Business’ Personality: As we’ve mentioned, Pinterest has a heavy lifestyle focus, so what better opportunity is there to give people a peek into the personality of your brand? Create a pinboard that showcases your employees and life around the office — show them working together, show them making your products/services, and show some of the fun activities your business participates in, such as company outings, parties, award ceremonies, volunteer days, etc. Letting people in behind-the-scenes will make your brand relatable, interesting, and humanized. The Today Show, for example, uses one of its pinboards called ‘Anchor Antics‘ to let you into the personalities of the show’s stars.

12. Drive Pinterest Users Back to Your Website (and Track Results!): Incorporating Pinterest into your social media marketing mix might seem like a great opportunity for your business, but you need to make sure it’s generating results to make it worth your time and effort. Whenever possible, include links back to your website and landing pages in your pins to drive traffic back to your website. Keep track of referral traffic and leads generated from Pinterest.

13. Follow Social Media Best Practices: Pinterest is a social network, so it’s a great idea to follow the best practices you operate under for most other social networks. Spend time to increase your following, be engaging with your followers, keep your Pinterest account regularly updated, and drive traffic back to your website when possible to increase conversions.

Have you started experimenting with Pinterest for marketing? In what creative ways have you used it to promote your business?

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