In my last blog post, I wrote about a recent ebook from HubSpot called 11 Examples of Online Marketing Success. It was written by David Meerman Scott, who is a wonderful source of useful information, and this ebook is definitely useful. My favorite thing about it is the companies that are featured. While most of them are in very blah industries, their success stories are exciting and inspiring.
Here is what I learned from a manufacturer that used an optimized blog, a medical billing and EMR provider that used a viral video, and an author that used an audience-centric website to energize their online marketing efforts
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Search Rankings and Sales Improve With an Optimized Blog
Agilent Technologies, a company that manufactures and sells life sciences and chemical analysis tools and electronic tests and measurement tools (I know, super exciting stuff), was having a problem ranking for a specific keyword, signal integrity, even though they are in a very niche industry.
To fix this, their head of marketing decided to start blogging in a very thoughtful and targeted way. He didn’t create a company blog; instead, he created an industry blog based on signal integrity that was fully optimized for search: The blog domain is consistent with Web page titles and the content in each blog post. (Check yours to see if that’s true for your blog posts! In the top navigation bar, the name of your blog plus the title of the blog post should appear.)
Because they are publishing useful, relevant content and optimizing the blog with keywords for search, the blog is yielding great results. Agilent ranks high in search engines because of the blog, and the blog ranks on the first page of Google for signal integrity and is generating qualified leads. Just as awesome is the fact that journalists at industry publications are reading the blog and back-linking to it, which search engines reward.
The Power of One Viral Video
Producing just one video that is fun, creative, and engaging can have far-reaching results, as Nuesoft Technologies learned this past fall. Again, this is a company in a very un-sexy industry: they provide medical billing solutions and electronic medical records (EMR). Yawn.
But check out what they did: Their IT department produced and distributed a really funny parody video of Lady Gaga’s song Poker Face called Interface. Watch it! When I viewed it, they were just short of 8,000 views.
Their goal with the video was simple: increase online visibility within the industry. They got that, and a whole lot more: 3 of the most important industry blogs wrote about the video, and it was shared virally on Facebook, generating a lot of comments and likes. In an industry of 400 competitors, they are one of the very few who have taken video marketing to the next level. As a result, they now stand out in a very crowded marketplace.
Complete Website Overhaul Leads to Inbound Marketing Success
If your website is a static, brochure site that is not optimized for search and lacks engaging, useful content, keep reading! Victor Conshin wrote the number one book on gout (yes, gout) called Beating Gout: A Sufferer’s Guide to Living Pain Free. (I didn’t even know what gout was until I read this success story.) His original website was a huge failure, and not because the design was horrible (it was fine), but it was not ranked, very hard to find, and contained no interesting content. It was just a boring, product-focused brochure.
He completely redid his website to make it audience-focused. It is now optimized for search, answers gout FAQs, and provides the latest news in the food and drug industry. Traffic has doubled, and his bounce rate has gone down significantly, which means people are exploring his site beyond the home page. As a result, book sales have increased and the site now ranks on the first page of a Google search.
Image courtesy Flickr user Claudio Matsuoka (Creative Commons)
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Tags: blogging, Inbound Marketing, Marketing, seo, social media, Website, website redesign
Posted in Marketing, Search Marketing, Social Media, Thought Leadership, Web Design | 2 Comments »
