Brogan, Slim and Vaynerchuk do a stellar job utilizing social media to generate leads, grow their brands and serve an engaged online audience. In addition, they will also speak at InfusionCon 2012 in April. They also adopt a few common tactics to generate leads and business value from social media – and you should be doing it, too!

1. Provide meaningful content to their audience on a regular basis.

These three marketing thought leaders hustle around the clock creating content. Whether if it’s from an airplane, a coffee shop, a conference or at peace in their home-office. They find their groove and they stay in touch with their audience. The virtual umbilical cord to their fans is filled with great ideas, personality and humanity.

Examples:
Gary Vaynerchuk shooting a video from 30,000 feet in the air
Chris Brogan dropping helpful tips exclusively on Google Plus
Pam Slim sharing small business advice others aren’t talking about on her blog.

2. They capture leads on their website, 24/7.

If these speakers had to manually enter every single business card into their database, they would need to have a full-time person just to do that. They chose an alternative – collecting leads from their website, growing their loyal audience. When people opt-in, they are giving permission to hear from them, including blog posts, learning more about their businesses, booking speaking engagements and more.

Examples:

Gary Vaynerchuk asks his audience to be Vee-I-P's with email addresses.

Pam Slim Uses Infusionsoft to Collect Leads from her Website

Chris Brogan makes the ask right on his homepage.

3. They go where the people (and new opportunities) are.

Today, online users don’t stick to only one medium for news and information. They are found on many different social networks and digest information differently – on their terms. Brogan, Slim and Vaynerchuk do a great job of being accessible, sharing killer content and being personable across many social networks at the same time. One thing is clear – while they publish and interact on many social networks, they build value in securing their own email list.

Examples: YouTube, Google Plus, Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr.

These tactics to generate business value from social media are no secret. You don’t need to be an expert to truly implement them and do great. It boils down to this: provide quality content, a relevant offer and great timing. To make all that really function smoothly and give you the ability to scale, it’s ideal to have an all-in-one sales and marketing system that collects all the leads, warms them up, keeps them happy and so you can generate revenue. When that system in place firing on all eight cylinders, they can dedicate time to interact with their contacts on a personalized, focus basis without breaking a sweat.

Want to meet them in person? Attend InfusionCon during April 2-4! They’d love to hear how you’re crushing it and growing your business. Register now to lock in a great deal!

Creating the perfect landing page may be the least of your worries as a small business. Your business greatly depends on your ability to get new customers. You might rely heavily on outbound marketing tactics like trade shows or direct mail. With a well-crafted landing page, it will help you make the most of your prospect’s time and drive them to take action utilizing inbound marketing techniques.

Today at 11AM PST, we’ll have a free webinar designed to help make your next landing page rock!

Your website can be become a breeding ground for new customers, drawing in potential buyers with great content that has a specific message and a call to action. This is where landing pages come in to play.

No matter what kind of business you are in, building a landing page where you direct targeted traffic is essential to attract new business. Once that traffic has arrived at the page, you can use compelling headlines and interesting copy to lure them in and get them interested in your message. Then, you can ask them to give you their information so you can email them a few coupons or call them about a complementary consultation.

You work hard on your site and not only do you just want people consuming your content, you want them to feel essentially obligated to say yes to offering up their info. There is a reason why marketers have fallen in love with landing pages – it’s because they convert traffic into leads.

For lead generation to work, you have to make sure you are following the proper steps to build an effective landing page that gets conversions. Don’t let potential customers who find you online slip through the cracks.

This Thursday, Amy Rushia, Infusionsoft’s Lead Generation Manager, will be presenting a webinar that will show you several actionable steps you can do now to create a landing page that converts.

During this webinar, Amy will talk about:

• Seven ingredients you need to create the perfect landing page
• A few examples of good, bad and ugly landing pages
• Online resources you can use when creating your landing page

Register for this webinar now and join Amy on February 9 at 11AM PST for her live presentation.

Also, check out this new infographic we created on landing pages: 7 Ingredients to Create the Perfect Landing Page

You may have noticed our new look this week. We have a new logo and a new color palette representing the Infusionsoft brand. We’re excited to have a fresh new face representing our brand identity. Here’s a look at our process and thinking behind the logo and brand image change.

The previous Infusionsoft logo served us well for the last five years. The red, black and gray showed our serious side and gave some credibility to a fast-growing little startup that made innovative web-based software to help small businesses automate their sales and marketing.

This is the Infusionsoft logo we used for the past five years:

(2007 - 2012)

We’re still growing fast, but Infusionsoft isn’t a little startup any more. Now we’re growing into a bigger industry leader with our popular all-in-one sales and marketing software. Our products, services, partner community are all maturing quickly. A far cry from five guys in a small office, we now have over 200 employees and we serve an increasingly diverse market of small businesses from around the world.

Our brand image needed to reflect these changes and better represent who we are and where we are going.

Several months ago when we decided to make the logo change, we didn’t just jump in by exploring new design ideas and trying out colors. The visual change was the last part of a strategic process where we clarified our market positioning focus, brand personality and our business vision, including our purpose, core values and mission. This was not an easy or quick process, but it has been absolutely key to our own success and continued growth.

What remains unchanged is our focus on helping small businesses succeed as they grow up to our all-in-one sales and marketing system, from the hodgepodge of individual tools they’re currently using to manage their marketing, sales and ecommerce. We’re redefining small business CRM with a unified approach to sales in marketing software that helps small businesses get more customers, grow their sales and save time.

Once we had the strategic foundation, we worked with an experienced design agency to express our strategy, personality and vision in a logo mark and brand identity. This is always a fun process and it took a while to find the right logo mark, color scheme and overall brand look that fit us the best.

I’m proud to introduce the new Infusionsoft logo:

The new logo mark is simple, strong and modern. We have created some separation between “Infusion” and “soft” to make it easier to understand and digest, since our name is a longer word with a mouthful of letters and can sometimes be difficult to take in at first glance.

The new green color reflects the growth and energy that our solution brings to our customers. It’s a distinctive color in our industry that will help set us apart and create a unique, recognizable visual brand. Compared to our black, red and gray colors resembling old, we love the new bright green color and new palette of complementary colors reflecting new.

We hope you like it, too. If you used our old logo previously, you can download our updated brand kit here so you can use the latest version of our logo.

We didn’t only update the logo and colors, we have a revised corporate vision including our strategic mission, core values and more. Our CEO and Co-founder, Clate Mask, shares that update in his blog post.

If you’ve followed Infusionsoft for any period of time, you know we’re huge proponents of culture. Our culture is an incredible competitive advantage for us, enabling us to hire the best people who make a great impact on our customers and the company. We have been named one of the best companies to work for in Arizona for six straight years. And last year, we were named #15 on the list of Best Companies to Work for in America.

I am frequently asked what we do to create such an incredible culture. In fact, I just got off the phone with a reporter doing a story on us. Her main question: “How have you created such a great place to work?”

The answer: it’s all about our Vision.

I capitalize the word Vision because it means something specific to us here at Infusionsoft. Our Vision is comprised of our Purpose, our Core Values and our Mission. We hire to the Vision and we fire to the Vision. Our Vision is the linchpin of our company, and once we created the Vision over five years ago, the company began to excel.

Today, we are refining our Vision. Are we changing the Vision? Absolutely not! We are simplifying the Vision and re-articulating it in words that are easier for everyone to understand, whether you’re inside or outside of Infusionsoft. I want to take a minute and explain the refinement and the reasoning for it.

Until now, we’ve had a Dream, Vision, Purpose and Mission. Each of those components was a long sentence that required some explaining. But the essence of the “DVPM,” as we call it, is our Purpose (why we exist) and our Mission (what we’re up to). All of our employees memorize our DVPM. And we had to do a lot of explaining to people outside the building (“why are there four different sentences?” and “can you boil it all down for me?”).

So, this refinement is about simplifying the Purpose and Mission and getting to the very heart of why we do what we do. Our newly stated Purpose is:

“To Help Small Businesses Succeed.”

Simple as that. It’s what we’re born to do. It’s why we exist. It’s what we’ll be doing at Infusionsoft for the next 100 years or so.

Our new Mission is:

“To create and dominate the market of all-in-one sales and marketing software for small businesses, with 100,000 customers worldwide.”

We’ve got close to 9,000 customers today. Over the next few years, we’ll be working hard to take our amazing software to 100,000 customers.

Our Core Values, as formerly articulated, are Entrepreneurship, Authenticity, Integrity, Passion, Compassion and No Ego, No Fear. These Core Values dictate the way we operate as we passionately pursue our Purpose and Mission. But we found that we were always saying the same phrases when we explained what we mean by these Core Values. So, we decided to re-articulate our Core Values, shifting them from one-word Values to short phrases. Our newly stated Core Values are:

We empower entrepreneurs.

We listen, we care, we serve.

We do what we say we’ll do.

We practice open, real communication.

We face challenges with optimism.

We check our egos at the door.

We innovate and constantly improve.

We do the right thing.

We believe in people and their dreams.

I am thrilled with our revised Vision. The Purpose is why we do what we do. The Mission is what we’re up to for the next few years. And the Core Values are how we do what we do.  Combined, the Purpose, Mission and Core Values make up a powerful Vision that guides our company, attracts the best talent and creates a culture that is a distinct competitive advantage.

Read more about Infusionsoft’s new look from our Chief Marketing Officer, Greg Head.

I’m proud to share an update about a recent advancement to our email infrastructure. We now adopt a new technology called DMARC, which stands for “Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance.” It is a new and emerging email authentication protocol which helps both email senders and receivers prevent against domain spoofing and phishing.

DMARC provides a method for receivers to identify and take action against spoofing attempts, by utilizing the already widely-adopted authentication protocols of DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) and SPF (Sender Policy Framework). Since this new DMARC protocol does not require any new technologies (just requires DNS record updates) it makes this a promising tool to become widely adopted by both email senders and receivers.

Essentially, DMARC performs a check against both the SPF record as well as the DKIM of the sending domain and gives the recipient MTA (Message Transport Agent) the information it needs to perform action against a spoofed domain. Coupling these two authentication protocols makes it virtually impossible for a malicious sender to spoof a sender’s domain. While not completely bullet-proof on preventing against all kinds of spoofing, it does provide a reliable method against domain-specific phishing attacks. Infusionsoft has been utilizing both DKIM and SPF for many years, so adding DMARC was an easy decision as we continue to evolve and strengthen our email systems.

DMARC is useful to both senders and receivers because it safeguards against domain fraud as well as end-recipient consumer privacy protection. Meaning, large and popular senders can protect against domain and brand spoofing, while the large recipients (AOL, Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, et cetera) also benefit from ensuring their users are not receiving maliciously spoofed emails claiming to be from legitimate organizations in order to capture email addresses and other private and personal information. This technology has already received wide support from brands you trust including Google, Bank of America, PayPal, LinkedIn, Fidelity, Facebook and more.

DMARC is implemented by making an addition to the DNS (Domain Name System) TXT-type record for the given domain. Once a DNS has had time to propagate throughout the Internet, the receiving-side will pick up on this new DMARC addition and begin sending reports on potential spoofing attempts. This helps in identifying any abusive senders who would attempt to imitate your brand in order to compromise recipient privacy, which would only hurt your company branding and reputation.

Earlier this week, I had my team implement DMARC here at Infusionsoft. We are monitoring and testing this new technology. As the leading sales and marketing software for small businesses, Infusionsoft sends a lot of permission-based email on behalf of our customers. As an ESP (Email Service Provider), we will now better identify if and when our domain is being spoofed, and report such abusive practices accordingly. In short, DMARC is another tool in our email systems toolbox to help Infusionsoft’s email reputation and email deliverability stay strong.

P.S. Infusionsoft’s partner, Return Path has built a DMARC record creation tool which is available on their website. Additionally, by sending an email to checkmyauth@auth.returnpath.net, Return Path will send you a report back so you can see whether or not your email is authenticating with SPF/DKIM as well as whether or not your domain is ready to start using DMARC.