This post comes from our Inbound Marketing Channel sponsor, HubSpot.

In marketing, we talk a lot about personalization. Get to know your leads, provide them with materials that will help solve their specific problems, always strive for relevance. Well, this all seems easier said than done. You have a whole list of prospects – are you really supposed to get to know each one of them before you send out an email? Well, not exactly. But there are some things you can do, even with a massive list, to make your marketing more personal.

In a recent Forbes article called The 7 Pillars of Connecting with Absolutely Anyone, Scott Dinsmore explains that “Personal relationships run the world,” and lists seven simple ways to build strong connections with others. Not surprisingly, there’s a great parallel between Dinsmore’s suggestions for making friends and the best techniques for personalizing your marketing. Let’s take a look at his list:

This guest blog post comes via HubSpot. It is written by Donald Nosek, VP of Strategy for ymarketing, a data-driven, digital marketing agency specializing in inbound marketing, and a VAR for HubSpot.

So what can the greatest outbound marketing event of the year teach inbound marketers? As we did last year, we’ve looked at key social media markers (http://www.ymarketing.com/2012-Super-Bowl-Social-Brand-Scoreboard-Rep ort) to determine what impact Super Bowl commercials have on the social media efforts of the brands who advertised.

What makes the following five lessons significant to inbound marketers is that the conclusions are statistically based.

Marketing is undergoing a major change. Inbound marketing and the shift to online is forcing marketers make changes to their marketing infrastructure.  This means a reduction in agency design fees and trade publication advertisements in favor of marketing software to boost lead generation and lead management.

Marketing Automation tools should be part or a larger inbound marketing tools set. When looking specifically at marketing automation features, marketers should keep these five key features top of mind.

5 Essential Features Of A Marketing Automation Platform

1. Click Tracking – It may seem simple but one of the core functions of a great marketing automation system is click tracking. As a marketer you need to understand the click-through rate for the links in your marketing automation campaigns. More importantly you need the conversion events attributed to marketing automation campaigns if they triggered the conversion as oppose to another source like direct traffic.  

Changing how you segment your leads using marketing automation could make a great impact on the success of your campaigns. There’s no reason to limit yourself to information from form fields, when the best information you have is about the behavior of your leads and the actions that they’ve taken. Specifically, segmentation gives you the opportunity to target more closely and effectively, and send them unique messages. Here are five creative ways to segment your leads:

1. Social Behavior – Some people prefer to interact with a company socially, through your Twitter presence, Facebook, and more. Consider creating a campaign that targets those people with the goal of having them revisit your website.

For a full hour of ground-breaking social media science, data and myth busting, be sure to register for HubSpot’s Science of Social Media webinar. HubSpot is the sponsor of Marketing Pilgrim’s Inbound Marketing channel.

It’s easy to get sucked into soft-focus, touchy-feely social media advice. Stuff like “engage in the conversation,” “hug your followers,” and “have a personality.” And it’s often not easy to disagree with myths like these, since they “seem right” and nobody wants to be the guy that says “punch your customers in the face.”

The same thing was happening with medical advice centuries ago. “Common sense” approaches to health care led to things like magical tonics and bleeding. Not only did these things often not work, but much of the time they actually did more harm than good.

The world of marketing in general is changing at such a rapid pace that many feel that success is defined as being able to just keep pace. Innovation and change are part of life but the real life application of innovations and changes are not always the result.

The concept of inbound marketing has been one of the seminal changes that have hit marketers right between the eyes in recent years. As marketers, we historically live in a push advertising world, which is content with putting advertising messages in places that are thought to be where prospects and customers congregate thus hopefully catching them at the right moment so they can make a decision for a product or service. Essentially marketing that is pushed upon the consumer is just as reliant on luck and chance as it is skill. Not much to bank ROI arguments on, huh?

Almost by default marketers are being forced to look at the world from the inbound marketing point of view and it is has not been the smoothest transition for many especially at the top levels.

A recent Forbes Insights report (which is free here) states:

In a business environment increasingly dominated by metrics, measurements, and data-driven decision-making, marketing executives find themselves under more scrutiny than ever. Less emphasis is being placed on branding – the traditional realm of the CMO – and more on customer acquisition, conversion, and retention. While top-level marketers agree that the proliferation of customer and campaign data is helping, not hindering, their efforts to produce ROI, many are at risk of falling behind as expectations and tactics are evolving at a breakneck pace.