6onlineHubspot‘s 50 page „Online Marketing Opportunity Report: Social Media, Blog, and Search Engine“ provides marketers not only with a three step process of evaluating online marketing opportunities with special focus on social, but also an appendix with a detailed “Keyword Opportunity Analysis” for over twenty keywords.

Do you wonder if it is worth the effort to start a Twitter account or a Facebook page? It can be difficult to know if it is worth the time and money to expand the online marketing for your business and even tougher to figure out where the conversation is happening.

HubSpot has gathered exciting data and developed measurement methods to help you answer these important marketing questions.

Step 1 - Determine where the conversation is happening for your industry

Where is the online activity for your industry? Is it focused in search engines, blogs or social media? To find out, Hubspot used a proprietary algorithm to analyze 33 keywords that describe some common industries.

The results are summarized in the following graph, thus, find the industry that best matches your own.

onlineact1Do not simply look for the most active area for your industry and conclude that the optimal place to market is the most active space. As with many things in life, it is possible that great benefits can be accrued by following the less travelled path.

Be as specific as you can – variation exists within industries

HubSpot explored some groupings by larger categories of industries of the above chart and found there can still be significant differences within larger industry groups. The takeaway is that it is important to be as specific as possible when defining your industry.

Next, Hubspot continued their analysis of relative online activity by examining the breakdown of social media. For this analysis, they looked at the top four social media channels for marketers: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube. Looking across the same 33 industries, the following graph breaks out the relative activity for each keyword.

Using the social media data, we can start to understand which channels are being used most actively for each industry.

Step 2 - Measure the detailed activity and competition

Is the activity enough to make a difference to your business, and can you get mindshare? Now that you have identified the industry most relevant to your business and you understand the basic activity levels, go one layer deeper into the data. To do this, perform the keyword research you would do for any search engine optimization program, but expand your search to look at blogs and social media. That means to measure the absolute activity levels (similar to the number of queries per month in search engines) and the level of competition (how hard it will be to gain mindshare).

Hubspot gathered this data for all of the 33 industries presented in this ebook and summarized it in the appendix and even provides examples and an explanation of how to interpret the information, too.

Step 3 – Formulate a marketing strategy for each channel

Hubspot_Opportunity_1aUnderstanding how to formulate a strategy around this data is the most important section of this ebook. Interpreting activity levels and competition incorrectly can lead to misguided online marketing strategies.

For example: Just because LinkedIn activity is low for a particular keyword does not mean you should avoid marketing on LinkedIn. It may mean just the opposite.

Here is a step-by-step guidance on how to create a winning marketing strategy:

Twitter strategy

High levels of activity and competition are not necessarily bad things on Twitter. To a certain extent, they will limit your ability to spread your message until you gain authority, but in many ways it is an encouraging sign of interest. Look for activity and competition and then just start tweeting.

Facebook strategy

It is likely that you have potential customers on Facebook regardless of your business type. Find keywords that have activity high enough to be meaningful to your business so that you can use the right messaging when talking about your company and its products or services. Monitor the level of competition to determine the effort you will need to invest to differentiate your business. Facebook will provide you the eyeballs if you use the right communication, and the right offer will allow you to stand out from the competition.

LinkedIn strategy

Use activity and competition levels to determine whether it is best to start a new group or engage an existing LinkedIn Group or LinkedIn Answers.

YouTube strategy

There are two primary ways people will find a video that you post on YouTube: through form of a search or through viral sharing of the video. These two mechanisms fundamentally drive the strategic decisions around marketing on YouTube. If you can’t ensure that your video will rank for relevant searches, either reframe the content or try to go viral.

Take Action: Additional Resources to Become an Expert

Recognizing if there is opportunity for your business to market online is critical for building an effective online marketing strategy. Too many businesses cling to ineffective outbound marketing techniques because that is what they have done in the past (regardless of success). Diving into online marketing with no direction can also be a disaster. Fundamentally understanding online activity levels and competition for each potential marketing channel is critical to developing a robust strategy.

We aim at providing you with just the key information from the report here, so if you are interested in further details, please download the complete report at www.hubspot.com.

By MediaBUZZ