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Have you started using Pinterest for your business yet? Wondering if it makes sense to even consider doing so since there are so many options in the marketplace for your marketing efforts?

Why not take a look at what our Inbound Marketing channel sponsor, HubSpot, has created to help navigate this potentially strong avenue for your marketing efforts? “How To Use Pinterest for Business” is a free ebook that gives you insight into this social marketing phenomenon. In it you will learn

• How Pinterest works and top reasons you should be using it
• How to create a Pinterest account and grow followers
• How B2B & B2C firms use Pinterest for lead generation and sales
• Examples of how real-life businesses leverage Pinterest for growth

Be sure to get your free copy today!

You know when your boss asks you what your leads goal is, and you don’t know how to answer because it’s basically just a shot in the dark? Or how about when he asks how your new fangled inbound marketing is going to help you drive leads to the sales organization? It’s hard to make the case for inbound to a non-believer when your projections aren’t based on math, isn’t it?

It’s high time to start making your monthly inbound traffic and leads goals based on your business’ growth goals. And we’re here to tell you how! The good news is that it’s ridiculously easy, and with the help of our friend Greg Elwell over at B2B Inbound, we’ve created an Excel template that you can download and save to make this goal-setting easy as pie every month. With just a few quick inputs, this template will do all the math for you, and you’ll be able to know exactly how much traffic and leads your inbound marketing efforts need to drive each month for your sales organization to hit their numbers, and your company to meet its growth goals.

Download the excel template now so you can follow along with the instructions on how to use it below!

How to Calculate Your Monthly Inbound Traffic and Leads Goals

Step 1: Enter Your Monthly Revenue Goal

This number is how much new monthly revenue your sales team needs to book, which you are going to attribute back to leads generated from inbound marketing.

But wait, what if you’re only using inbound marketing to generate new customers? Let’s go to the next step!

Step 2: Enter the Percentage of New Revenue Driven From Inbound Marketing

Here, you’ll input how much of that new revenue will be driven by inbound marketing. So if you’re only generating leads via inbound marketing, well, go ahead and put 100% in there. For the sake of this example, we’ll just say you’ll drive 80% of your monthly revenue from inbound marketing.

Step 3: Enter Your Average Revenue Per Client

Now, it’s time to input your average revenue per new customer. If you don’t know this, a simple way to calculate it is by taking your total revenue collected over the past 12 months, and dividing it by the number of customers you have.

And in this step, you’ll get your very first calculation — right there in that orange box. Now you know exactly how many new customers you need your inbound marketing efforts to generate to meet your growth goals (based on the information you’ve input thus far). Pretty good information to know, eh?

Step 4: Enter Your Lead-to-Customer Conversion Rate

Now, enter your current lead-to-customer conversion rate to determine how many leads you need to actually get those customers. You can also input a goal if you’re targeting a better conversion rate to see how that affects the number of leads you need to generate to hit your goals.

If you’re not sure how to find your conversion rate, simply take the number of new customers you acquire each month and divide it by the number of leads you generate.

Step 5: Enter Your Visitor-to-Lead Conversion Rate

Finally, let’s figure out how much site traffic you’ll need to generate! Enter your current visitor-to-lead conversion rate, and this template will deliver the number of visitors you need to bring to your site. Again, you can also enter a target visitor-to-lead conversion rate if you’re looking to improve upon this metric (and by extension, get a bit of a traffic reprieve and still meet your goals).

Not too difficult, eh? Now it’s your turn. Download this Traffic and Leads Goal Calculator, and see how your inbound marketing efforts can help your company hit its growth goals next month!

How do you calculate your monthly traffic and leads goals right now?

If you think marketing and advertising are one and the same, there’s a pretty good chance your marketing efforts are being less than successful.  

If you cast your mind back to the bad old days, companies would advertise to you left right and centre. You would be bombarded by less than subtle sales messages wherever you went.

Our TVs, magazines, newspapers and mailboxes were full of ‘buy from us now’ messages desperate to grab your hard earned cash.

But the landscape looks very different these days, with businesses moving away from advertising and towards marketing.

Nope, still don’t get it

In that case, you’re probably a business that has dabbled in social media, blogging, article and video marketing only to decide that it doesn’t work for you.

Well, the reason it’s not working is probably because you’re still advertising rather than marketing.

Let me explain.

If you’re advertising, you’re effectively shouting at your customers ‘buy now’ with little regard for what they actually want.

Perhaps that approach used to work for you, but today’s consumers want more than that, they want to be appreciated, wooed and persuaded.

The subtle art of marketing

Today’s marketing channels are social media, video and article marketing and blogging. Each of these disciplines offers the consumer engagement, information, and advice – effectively something for nothing. Or at least that is how it appears.

You see, people now want to feel as though you, as a company, value them and their business. They don’t just want you to come along, take their money and then head off into the night.

Today, you must engage with them, talk to them, offer them great information, be responsive to their questions and generally take in interested in what they want. And that’s why you must market and not advertise to them.

You see, marketing is all about getting to know your customer and being interested in what they really want, their likes and dislikes and being prepared to chat with them to build relationships.

Think carefully about them and how your product or service will benefit them and then show them.

The days of the blatant advertising are numbered; today your consumers want more. Talk to them, engagement with them and give them something for nothing. As you do so something magical happens, they begin to trust you and that trust will be manifested in the form of their credit card.

Market to your customers and they’ll be customers for life.

The online world is becoming less and less ‘siloed’ (I am pretty sure that is a ‘made up’ word but I am sticking with it) each and every day. While some individual marketing activities carry merit as a standalone function, it is safe to say that most digital marketing efforts don’t achieve their maximum result without being integrated with other online marketing activities across platforms and channels.

It’s this very reason that our advertising offers here at Marketing Pilgrim, which grew up as primarily display, are now intended to help advertisers through content development as well as promotion through various other digital channels (Interested in learning more? Contact us about Marketing Pilgrim channel sponsorship opportunities today).

A recent study from eConsultancy and Responsys, as reported by eMarketer, show just how marketers are taking this awareness from theory to application.

Is this a revelation of sorts? Well, yes and no. It’s no surprise that the integration of multi-channel marketing efforts is more effective in the modern world of online media. To think that just a display ad will be effective on its own in today’s myriad of advertising options is a bit naive. Ad blindness alone can kill a ‘display only’ mindset. But the fact that your display ad shows up around content or the message is seen in other formats at other places that your prospect goes is critical to understand for marketing success in the online world. What is a revelation, though, is that this practice may be in its infancy and has plenty of room to grow

So just how are marketers looking to integrate their display into other channels. Take a look.

So how do you currently integrate display in cross-channel programs? Are you finding some channels fare better than others?

Share your comments with us and our readers.

Pilgrim’s Partners: SponsoredReviews.com – Bloggers earn cash, Advertisers build buzz!

“Social media has a positive impact on marketing. It democratizes it. It’s not just about who’s got the biggest budget, but who really understands their consumer.”

I’m talking to Victoria Ransom (pictured above) about one of my least favorite things in the world, social media marketing. But there’s no one better equipped to talk about this ever-so-timely topic, and Ransom breaks it down handily on the eve of her company’s big product launch for its social marketing suite.

Ransom runs Wildfire, a rather large social media marketing company that develops software for brands to connect their marketing efforts across most of the big social sites currently in existence. Today, the company is unveiling Wildfire Suite 2.0, a social media marketing maven’s über-tool that allows marketers to get much more specific, much more personal, with their followers and fans all over the social Internet.

The suite will let brands tweak their online marketing to appeal to very specific groups of consumers based on those consumers’ activities and interests. For example, for a sporting goods store, Wildfire’s software can tell the difference between snowboarders and skiers, and it can help the store tailor messages and other promotions (as well as analytics, of course) for each group separately.

It fits right in with the so-hot-right-now concept of interest graphing, but the new tools are also very much in line with the M.O. that is embedded in Wildfire’s DNA: Don’t broadcast; interact. Don’t shout; listen. Don’t apologize after the fact; ask for permission now.

Most of all, Ransom emphasizes that brands aren’t in control of the message, and if they want to get their customers’ attention, the only way to do so these days is by giving them a truly valuable online experience. It’s a belief that pervades Wildfire’s own corporate culture of empathy and charm (yes, the word “charm” actually pops up in internal company materials).

Inside Wildfire

This emphasis on honoring the consumer is quite divorced from old-school, spray-and-pray marketing tactics of broadcast, print, email, and direct marketing. And it has a lot to do with the Wildfire team’s makeup: They’re mostly young or young-ish social media users, themselves, and they deeply understand what works online and what doesn’t, if only because they were born and raised with it.

Wildfire’s office is located on a glittering campus in Silicon Valley, where the glass-plated buildings rise up in hues of blue and green against a cloudless summer sky. It’s new and spacious and strangely reminiscent of Oracle’s mega-campus not too far away; as it turns out, the building is the most corporate thing about the company.

Once inside the building, you could be in any college common area. A neon sign proclaims that the shop is open. Gangs of youngsters in flip-flops saunter around the open spaces filled with pirate flags and huge vinyl sunshades in the shape of leaves. Memes and inside jokes pepper the visual paraphernalia; for reasons I can’t fathom, one scruffy salesman is making his over-the-phone pitch while wearing a cartoonish hat in the shape of a wolf’s head. There’s a small bar, staffed only by a cardboard cutout of Dos Equis’ Most Interesting Man in the World, and within minutes of of stepping into the world of Wildfire, I’m invited to participate in an upcoming game of beer pong.

Ransom, the co-founder and CEO, takes a deep breath and says, “It’s a pretty young team.”

Ransom is fairly young, herself. Her hair is sun-streaked, and her face has a healthy glow one doesn’t usually associate with tech startup CEOs. When she speaks, she is direct and confident, as befits a Harvard MBA.

Right now, she’s particularly confident about the state of social media marketing, despite Facebook’s shaky IPO and GM’s public pull-out of ads on the social network.

“The only indication has been GM,” she said, stating that with most other Facebook advertisers, “we haven’t seen that at all. … I really divorce the IPO from social media marketing. It has little or nothing to do with marketers, and I haven’t seen any other major advertisers make the same announcements. We’ve actually seen the opposite.”

And all that adds up to more social marketing all the time, everywhere we go online. Ransom and her cohorts are convinced they can make such marketing both less annoying for consumers and more profitable for brands by targeting carefully and messaging judiciously.

Early days, even now

Facebook in its relatively early days was the primordial soup for Ransom’s company’s genesis. In an unstructured, Wild-West environment, Ransom and her co-founder came up with a way for brands to play and profit using the social network. They built simple Facebook apps for sweepstakes and contests, then used those apps as a template for their clients to create campaigns.

During those early days, Ransom tells me, she recognized that Facebook interactions were more important than Facebook ads on their own.

As social networks were founded and grew up, Wildfire started building tools for the newer sites, as well. Of course, Twitter is huge for Wildfire, since, as Ransom says, “It’s a great mechanism for having conversations.

“More than Facebook, it’s been a great channel for getting messages out and a customer support channel,” she says. “That may change over time, depending on the directions Twitter heads in. Brands may be able to provide retrospective content.”

Ransom notes that Google+ has similar opportunities for brands, but it doesn’t yet have the same richness of content when compared to Facebook. It also doesn’t yet bring a critical mass of highly engaged, mainstream users or a full suite of APIs for the marketing and analytics crowd.

“Pinterest is a really interesting one,” she continued. “It’s a delicate balance that brands and the social networks are playing.” Ransom notes that while on most networks, brands risk overwhelming users with promotional content, “The funny thing about Pinterest is, there’s not that tension. People come there to look at products, and they don’t care if it came from Joe Schmo or the Gap,” she said.

“So it’s easier for Pinterest to have a good realtionship with brands and to really commercialize it without offending consumers.”

But again, Ransom said, the site isn’t giving out all the APIs that companies like hers would want. “We have some Pinterest tools,” she says, “a way to display a Pinterest gallery on Facebook.” But what Wildfire and other marketers really want are APIs to gather more analytics, develop richer campaigns, and create better-branded pages. “We anticipate that the APIs for that will come,” she says. “But have you been to their office? It’s tiny, there’s like 30 people there. It’s incredible what they’re doing with a really small team.”

With age comes standards

Aside from wishing for more APIs, Ransom dreams of a world in which social marketing is held to some real standards — real metrics around performance and real expectations from networks, brands, and consumer groups.

“In the offline world, [measurement] is still hard,” she says. “It’s hard to prove it … because it’s kind of a lot like TV. How can you prove that TV sells product? Over time, studies and standards have showed what it means to get a view on TV. Social media is still so young, we haven’t got those standards yet.”

The CEO tells me the social web as an industry that lives and dies by brands’ marketing budgets, is slowly moving toward an industry standard for measurement.”What is a relationship worth in social media?” she asks. “There are research agencies that can help us agree on the right metrics there, and frankly, the social media networks should be, too.”

Filed under: social, VentureBeat

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Before consumers buy from you, they must know, like, and trust you. Moving along that continuum takes time and patience. In today’s snug economic times, earning enough trust to get someone to crack open their wallet or company checkbook is no small feat.

That’s why we’re such big proponents of the drip marketing strategy. The logic behind the strategy is simple: Because you can’t know when someone is going to be ready to buy, you want to have a recurring presence in their world, so you’re always top of mind.

To sustain a drip strategy with the goal of moving someone along the know/like/trust continuum, you need to mindful of the following.

Plan carefully

Drop marketing is not really a “by the seat of your pants” sort of tactic. You want your efforts to be a seamless flow of information, contact, and relationship building. That’s not something you want to make up as you go. Think of your drip marketing efforts as an elaborately choreographed dance. You need to know the steps before you get on the dance floor.

Know how to respond to “What’s in it for me?”

No consumer is going to let you keep buzzing about if you don’t offer something of value. Today, everyone is asking, “What’s in it for me?” Your efforts need to be focused on consumers’ needs, not on your features and benefits. If you talk about yourself too much, consumers will tune you out, unsubscribe, unlike you, or disconnect the line.  Give consumers valuable content, and they’ll never ask you to leave.

Have 110% consistency

Your ultimate goal is that consumers trust you. You do what you say you’re going to do. You deliver the goods. Which is why your monthly newsletter needs to arrive every month. Why your webinars shouldn’t get canceled at the last minute. Why your print ads should all tie together.

Remember that a little is a lot

The goal is to be a regular presence, so customers don’t forget you. Your goal is not to be their ever-present companion, so every time they turn around—there you are! The beautiful thing about a drip strategy is that a little goes a long way. If you consistently execute on three or four tactics, that’s plenty. You want to be memorable, not annoying.

Don’t broadcast

Drip marketing is not a stage for you from which to shout out all your messages. Drip marketing is a way to stimulate conversation. Ask questions. Offer Q&A options. Be human. No one is going to trust a company or person if they don’t believe they have a relationship with them. While the system may be automated, the relationship can’t be.

Wondering what makes a good drip marketing tactic? Think about adding some of these into your mix.

• Newsletters (electronic or print)
• Podcasts
• Webinars
• Facebook Fan Page updates
• A “lunch and learn” series
• LinkedIn Group (participating or moderating)
• Radio show (Internet or traditional)
• A book club focused on your area of expertise
• A smart phone app
• Direct mail series (3-D or flat pieces)
• Whitepapers or free reports
• A how-to video series

That’s just scratching the surface. Remember: A little goes a long way. Don’t bite off more than you can consistently deliver at a quality level you’ll be proud to produce. Do a few of the above activities well—and the results will quickly make the time and discipline to do it right worth the effort.