Inbound Marketing: Some Tips &Stats via Slideshare & Infographic

Inbound marketing is serious business and like any form of marketing things must be done right. I hope the information shared today can help you begin creating an effective inbound marketing campaign. Below we have two Slidehares and an infographic for you. The first Slideshare is by Marketo with tips on creating a better inbound [...]

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Did Pinterest Hurt Itself With The Redesign? [INFOGRAPHIC]

Posted on by Ryan Deiss in Marketing Tips, Social Media

I was a little skeptical when I heard that Pinterest was going to unveil an entirely new look during SXSW. People do a lot of stupid crap just to get a little SXSW juice.

It’s not that Pinterest’s design left no room for improvement, but come on… if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. I’m not a fan of messing with success, especially when you’ve got something that’s absolutely THRIVING…

BUT, hey, I can’t be right ALL the time… and in this case I’d be happy to be wrong.

That’s because I actually like using Pinterest and I think it’s the best social shopping platform yet.

Why Pinterest is Working

Like I wrote about earlier this month, we’re all “image-clickers” when we go online. For some weird reason, people just like to click on pretty pictures, even if they’re not clearly linked to anything, and ESPECIALLY on mobile devices.

Pinterest happens to be one of the platforms that best caters to this obsession. Or, as our own Social Media guru, Saman Kahn, puts it, “Pinterest is addictive, even if you don’t have an account. You can just click through other people’s profiles for hours.”

The Redesign

The new design is cleaner and minimalist– two things that almost always positive when it comes to web design. Personally, I like it.

The problem is that Pinterest’s visual layout IS its innovation, its USP. So, messing around with it is risky as heck.

Why take risks when there’s no real reward to capture? A little SXSW buzz isn’t worth potentially alienating your users, especially when you’re already growing exponentially…

Once again, don’t mess with what’s working like crazy!

The good news is that I don’t think Pinterest will see much backlash as a result of the changes.

While a LOT of Pinterest users were attached to the retro, non-Facebook feel of the old design… all of the important pieces are still there to keep people clicking.

Pinterest probably planned the SXSW unveiling 6 months ago, before the platform’s growth really started heading for that stratosphere. Still, they should have been more flexible and decided to put the brakes on any major overhauls once Pinterest became the hottest social platform of 2012.

Like we saw last summer with Netflix, major unnecessary changes can backfire big time. The big takeaway is don’t take on major risks without the potential for major rewards.

One Channel Rarely Kills Another [INFOGRAPHIC]

Posted on by Ryan Deiss in Email Marketing, Marketing Tips, Social Media

Whether we realize it or not, the one, single trend that ALL marketers are obsessing over is how quickly and effectively we can “change” human behavior.

No matter how hard Facebook tries, no matter how much of a genius Zuckerberg is, they can’t magically retrain users see Facebook as a shopping channel. That’s why they’re having major growing pains with f-commerce… There’s no refresh button inside of their users’ brains.

Google is facing a similar problem. It can get users to sign up for Google+, but it can’t train them to actually use it.

Imagine if Amazon launched a Twitter-esque micro blogging network tomorrow… would you actually use it? Probably not, right?

Established media channels their own organic identities. Even with Google or Facebook’s resources, they can’t actually change these identities overnight. It happens gradually… sometimes way too gradually.

For example, email has long been the marketing channel through which we receive shopping offers and purchasing information. Some gurus predicted that email would disappear as social media continued to grow… BUT it hasn’t happened. NOT AT ALL.

Instead, email has only become more important, as both a marketing vehicle and a go-between that alerts you about social media happenings. According to the awesome infographic below (hat tip eConsultancy), 73.4% of US mobile users received alert emails from Facebook in 2011… that’s a TON.

In fact, as a marketer, one of your major social media goals is to collect opt-ins. It’s kinda of funny, really.

Even though social media is incredibly addictive, and we’ve become extremely comfortable on these platforms — they still depend heavily on email for their monetization strategies. Just look at the graphic below and you can see just how critical email is to social media strategy for the foreseeable future…

Channels are slow to change because people like comfort and familiarity. Look, I’m right there with you. I’d rather get a receipt emailed to me than sent via Twitter or Facebook. Email is just comfortable.

That’s why its so interesting to watch a new social network like Pinterest thrive and drive revenues — right out of the gate.

The fact that Pinterest started with a blank slate has given them a HUGE advantage. As a social platform, it’s building engagement and driving shopping behaviors in a way that Facebook or Twitter could only dream of.

It’s a good thing to remember, not just in how you use online marketing channels, but for your own business. You train your customers/users on what they can expect from you from day one… changing it can be a slow and sometimes painful process.

Tags: email marketing, facebook, marketing channels, pinterest, social media

[Infographic] Inside The Brain of a Blogger

written by John Chow on February 29, 2012

My friends over at Infolinks have created a fun and unique illustration that peels back the veil to reveal what really goes on inside the brain of a blogger. Many issues and obstacles can overwhelm a beginning blogger, so Infolinks chose a fun, quirky format to show the reality in this playful, yet accurate Infographic.

There are so many things to consider when launching your own blog from what the actual blog will be about to how you will bring more traffic and monetize your blog. When you are just starting out, SEO and Social Media can be overwhelming as well. Infolinks hopes their infographic will break it all down for you.

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