SmartMarket Media Blog

Hello to all of my blog subscribers through e-mail, RSS or whatever your fancy. The point is you are here and you are reading this after there hasn’t been much activity here for several months.

The reason for that is that I am no longer with SmartMarket Media. My business partner Heather Riley and I decided to amicably part ways working together under the SmartMarket Media name. Heather is going to focus the brand more on film and long-form video production and I am going to continue working on short form online marketing video and animation production through Adelie Studios – my other company I’ve had in operation since 1999. The Adelie Studios blog focuses on all of the issues I tackled here concerning online video marketing. So if you liked what I had to say here, consider subscribing to my new blog so we can continue the conversation.

Thanks to everyone who commented, discussed and added value to this blog through your conversation. I look forward to hopefully having more conversations with you and wish you all the best for health, wealth and happiness, not necessarily in that order, and I look forward to hearing from you soon!

HubSpot’s free marketing tool, Website Grader, recently graded its 1 millionth website…and its still counting. The number is staggering and reminds me of how HubSpot is becoming the online marketing equivalent of McDonalds with millions and millions served…I mean that in the most flattering sense.

Forget the “Super Size Me” fast food obesity issues…I mean the real roots of how Ray Kroc founded McDonalds. He gave people a simple eating place with popular food, low prices, friendly service and no waiting. His concept completely revolutionized the food service industry.

Website Grader was the Cambridge Massachusetts HubSpot’s first free diagnostic tool, launched in February of 2007.  It measures the inbound marketing effectiveness of a website measuring website traffic, social media, blog, SEO and other marketing tidbits and provides a score (on a scale of zero to 100) based on these factors.  It also provides great advice on how the website can be improved from a marketing perspective and helps people understand how their site is faring against their competition.

The tool was initially created as a way to build buzz and traffic to market their inbound marketing software so when people evaluated their website using Website Grader, they might decide they needed some help. It was a simple and passive way for potential customers to enter their sales cycle.

To build buzz around Website Grader, Dharmesh Shah and his team at HubSpot promoted the free tool on the company blog and utilized social media and the blogosphere to drive traffic to the site. They posted messages in discussion forums, submitted the site to social media Web sites like Delicious, Digg and StumbleUpon, and commented on other applicable blogs with a link suggesting Website Grader as a tool people might like to try.

Today, Website Grader continues to be a valuable tool for HubSpot, potential customers, small to midsized businesses and marketers alike. They have also added other tools to grade people’s Twitter and Facebook engagement as well as tons of free webinars and a free weekly marketing podcast called HubSpot TV that talks about the weekly news regarding online marketing in a fun and informative way.

All of these tools, webinars, podcasts, etc. are all free and all of their efforts are engaging potential leads to check out their product lines. HubSpot has seen the way people are interacting online and is completely revolutionizing the way marketing is done online because of it. Website Grader was the first step on that path. I love to use Website Grader as an example of successful viral marketing when I give seminars and presentations.

So kudos to HubSpot and Website Grader for topping a million websites graded, I hope they are able to grade millions and millions more. Their revolutionary approach to inbound marketing is changing the way businesses are marketing online the same way McDonalds completely changed the entire fast food industry. Is it coincidence that Mike Volpe, the Vice President of Inbound Marketing at HubSpot is obsessed with the McRib? I think not.

Recent Posts:

Online Video Driving Automotive Industry Recovery

Increasing Donations Using Video & E-Mail Marketing

How Stanford University increased alumni donations.

Seeing how I’ve already talked about how integrating video in your email marketing can increase your click throughs by 175% I thought I’d profile another success story I read about online. Much of the information on this is exerpted from a great blog post by Tyler Willis for MediaPost called “When Juggernauts Collide: Email Marketing Meets Video Marketing” Here are the highlights of what I found most interesting from his post.

“Recent grads are far more likely to give a valid email address than a number (93% of the captive population vs. 38%), meaning that email marketing gives Stanford a better and more widespread ability to connect.”

Snail mail and “dialing-for-dollars” are incredibly inefficient ways to connect with new grads. Namely because direct mail is assumed to be junk mail by most recipients and you only get a response of about 2% (if you are lucky). Phone calling on the other hand is incredibly interruptive, who knows what the end user was doing or what you interrupted them from doing. Email is passive and can be opened or read when the end user is ready to read or respond to it.

Scott Jahnke, the Director of Student and Young Alumni Development, explains why he chose to combine email AND video as part of Stanford’s new alumni drive “Technology gives us the ability to do so much more than just text. How then, can we most effectively tell our story to thousands of people and inspire them to give? I believe that a combination of using email AND video to answer our three questions (why are we asking you for a gift, what is going to change if you give, and how will our organization make that change happen) is the so-called ’secret sauce.”

“At Stanford, the Young Alumni office produced several inspiring videos of students who had directly benefited from alumni contributions and attached a clear call-to-action to the end of each video, delivered via a Flash overlay that asked viewers to donate.”

This was key, by providing this call to action they were able to easily and effectively drive their alumni to take the steps they wanted them to take. Without a call-to-action, online video doesn’t effectively do it’s job.

“Calling out these videos, and providing a direct link to them in four out of five emails sent during Stanford’s fall campaign, helped increase gifts by 23% over the previous year’s fall campaign.”

This is a great first result and if they continue to refine their approach will probably become even more efficient. Couple this with the fact that they probably dramatically reduced their printing and postage costs from their direct mail campaign and/or their costs if they hired current students to do the telemarketing as part of a work study program. How does that affect their operational costs? Does it make their alumni gifts go longer.

If one of the most respected universities in the United States was able to buck the old trend of typical alumni gift campaigns and get these kind of outstanding results, what could combining the online marketing super powers of email marketing and online video do for your business or non-profit?