Marketing Trenches

At least a few times a week, we find ourselves talking to a company about search engine strategies.  Often, the conversation starts with something along the lines of:

“I really just need some SEO to get people to my website, do you do that?”

Usually, that then evolves into a discussion about the company’s overall business objectives and how we can fit this into a search strategy –- with an explanation of the difference between pay per click vs. organic listings as a key piece of that.

While we have talked about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in this space a number of times before, what I want to focus on this time is how to determine which keywords and phrases to target.

And, a way to get the right keywords that is so simple, and so obvious, and yet most companies don’t even consider.

But, first, let’s back up a bit for a quick high level snapshot of how search engines rank your site.

In simple terms, there are 2 main components to the way the search engines rank you.  The first is on page, meaning what is on your site and how the search engines read your content, structure, tags and titles.  This is a key piece in having the engines understand who you are and what you do.  You address this through ensuring your site is using the right titles, tags and other key content pieces.  The second piece is credibility, which is determined by the volume of credible links to your site from other websites.   Google and other search engines look at these as a “vote” for you, causing your site to be found more and have more credibility.  You address this through building quality links, utilizing techniques such as articles and widgets to gain links that drive both search engines and people to your site.

With that background in mind, where do you start?  Often we find we are working with a client in a very search competitive industry who just launched a new website or is lagging behind their competition form a search standpoint.

The key here if you want to make an impact is to go into it with the right approach.  First, acknowledge that to move the needle you will need a bit of time, particularly if  your site is relatively new, has only a couple of links to it or does not have a large density of content.  So, one of the things you will want to do to improve your natural search opportunities is work on these along with getting your website titled, tagged and optimized on page and then continuing to build credible relevant links on a monthly basis that increase your organic ranking.

To do this right way you will want to make sure you are choosing the right keywords for your optimization.  Since SEO is a long term undertaking with incremental improvement, you’ll want to make sure you target the right words when you start that effort — otherwise you could use a whole lot of energy optimizing around your worst prospects rather than your best.

So, while you want to target the natural search listings with the optimization, in order to make sure you get it right we often will recommend starting with a limited pay per click campaign as a research bed.  We’ll do this to determine which keywords convert to leads or sales rather than just which ones our gut intuitively tells us will perform.  We do this as a limited test to make sure we build the data to understand which keywords are converting to leads and then use those as the keywords we target from an SEO perspective.

For example, let’s say your company sells the ever popular widget (how did somebody miss out on patenting this item that was so popular in algebra class?).  Before you undertake a long term search engine optimization it’s critical to know which terms aren’t just getting people to your website, but converting to leads or sales for those widgets.  Maybe terms like “large widget” perform better than “small widget” or “imported widget” or “cogs” or “sprockets” — By running all of these in a test PPC campaign  we can get some actionable data on which are the right terms to optimize around and then undertake that optimization, rather than just jumping in blindly.  Sure, you may say, you have web analytics and they show you who comes to the website and how they got there.  But, keep in mind they are only showing you part of the story — the people that got there not the ones that didn’t.  By testing different keywords we can then benchmark success and roll those keywords into a more effective SEO plan.

Now, instead of spending all of your effort investing in optimizing against the keywords you think might work, you are building actionable data for a more informed optimization and only paying on a per visitor basis.  And, sell more widgets, or cogs, or sprockets — or whatever it is you do.

About the Author: Will Davis is Managing Partner of Right Source Marketing.  Don’t hesitate to drop Will a comment on this post.  Follow Will on Twitter for more commentary like this.

Content is king from a marketing standpoint - now more than ever.  Can you really market anything without some form of content?  Think about it for a second.  Review every marketing vehicle you use, and try to identify one that doesn’t involve some form of content production.

If content is king, then what is the king’s most important weapon?  Another easy answer.  Writing.  And it’s not even close.

Writing is one of the most undervalued pieces of the marketing puzzle.

Let’s do a quick review of some marketing vehicles and how poor writing impacts each:

• Press Release: Don’t even write it if you’re not going to do it professionally.  Journalists and your consumer/business audience will stop reading when they hit the first piece of evidence of poor writing.

• Website: You know that rule, the one that says you have 10-15 seconds to capture a visitor’s attention and convince them to dive further into the site?  You know what can expedite that departure time?  Poor writing.

• SEO: Writing is far more important for SEO than most “experts” are willing to admit.  Here’s one simple reason.  Let’s say you rank #1 on an important keyword, but your meta description tag (the one that smart people read to determine whether your site is relevant to the topic) is too long, which is often the case.  Fewer clicks.  Fewer leads.  Decreased ROI from that SEO effort.

Let’s check out an example.  When I search on “copywriting” on Google, here are two description tags associated with top 10 results:

Tag #1: “Copywriting advice for bloggers and online marketers.”

In case you’re wondering, this is an effective description tag, which happens to belong to a very popular marketing blog.  No surprise.

Tag #2: “Blues icon BB King was once asked how he found his heart-warming, bone-chilling sound. It’s simple, he said. I only steal from the best. After.”

This may lead me to a very cool article or blog post, but doesn’t matter.  I’m not clicking because I don’t understand how this description is relevant to my search query.

Read the rest of this entry »

For many folks active in Social Media, and even those that aren’t, inevitably you hear people ask about the ROI. Why are people spending time blogging, Tweeting, Facebooking when it’s just a fad that doesn’t help our business?

And then earlier this week everyone was abuzz with news that Dell announced it has surpassed 3 million in sales from its Dell Outlet Twitter account. And the masses rejoiced - a tangible ROI number we can say came directly from Social Media activities. NOW our company MUST do this everyone started to think.
But wait; is your company really very much like Dell? I would argue that chances are it isn’t at all like Dell, so this number may not mean much to you at all. Chances are also that you can’t convince the folks at the top to agree with Zappos CEO Tony Hseih, who recently tweeted his take:

Twittering is like hugging. Just bc it’s hard to measure ROI doesn’t mean there isn’t value there.

My guess is your organization lies somewhere between the two - but there is still a way to prove the value a smart social media strategy can have for your company.

Marshall Kirkpatrick writes a great article on this at ReadWriteWeb which I couldn’t agree with more. While applauding Dell’s success, he also uncovers 4 better examples of quantifying ROI that may make more sense in your organization. I encourage you to read the whole article, but here’s a quick snapshot of the key point:

That Dell has made $3m from Twitter links is cool, and it’s a good arrow to have in your social media advocacy quiver, but here are a number of examples we think better capture both the bottom line and some of the soft benefits of conversation. Joe Cothrel, Chief Community Officer at enterprise online community vendor Lithium, gathered these numbers in 2007 and we included them among other resources in the RWW Community Management Guide.

In working with a lot of mid-sized professional services firms, we often hear the following statement from the Marketing Director or Partner in charge of marketing:

No one in our office, including myself, understands Twitter.  Can a professional services firm like ours use Twitter effectively, and what are the benefits?

First of all, the answer is yes in almost all cases.  Professional services firms should be using Twitter in some form or fashion.  Even if you think Twitter is a fad of some sort, it’s not going away anytime soon and the audience(s) you want to have conversations with are likely lurking on Twitter somewhere.  There’s almost no downside to trying Twitter, other than someone on your internal or external staff spending a bit of time listening, learning, following and finally tweeting.

Here are five relatively simple ways that a professional services firm can use Twitter:

1. Expand the distribution of your content or thought leadership material.

Almost every professional services firm already has content.  Some even have good content.  A few have great content.

For instance, my financial advisor puts out a simple yet solid “State of the Markets” newsletter and posts it on the firm’s website.  This type newsletter is an ideal piece to share with your Twitter followers.  Blog posts, new white papers, interesting articles, links to podcasts…these all work as well.  As long as you’re sharing with folks that have chosen to follow you and you’re not “spamming” your followers with irrelevant messages every 5 minutes, you’re in good shape.

If nothing else, you gain additional distribution for your content.  Can that be a bad thing?

2. Break company or client news.

Twitter breaks news faster than most sources and contains a built-in distribution list - your followers.  Use it to announce a new partnership.  Use it to tell folks about a new office location.  Use it to remind followers about an upcoming event.  You don’t always need a press release to break some news.

And by all means, don’t forget about your clients.  Assuming you’ve built up a nice client community, your followers may want to hear about each other’s news.  You may even end up connecting two clients that didn’t know they were part of the same community or industry.

3. Build the personal brands of your partners or executives

In most professional services firms, the partners or executives in the firm represent not only the face of the firm but also serve as the primary thought leaders.  After all, people come to professional services firms for counsel in a specific area, an area that your partners or executives are likely well-versed in.

Create Twitter accounts for the partners in your firm if you have to, and prepare a one-sheeter on how they should use Twitter.  Hell, go as far as providing example tweets that they might post.  Teach them how to find people to follow and how to attract followers.  Then let ‘em loose.

4. Connect with like-minded people or companies.

This is the most obvious one.  It’s what Twitter is built for.  By sharing your content and viewpoints and allowing others to share with you, you will discover prospective clients, partners, employees, investors…the list goes on and on.  Be yourself, either as a firm or as an individual that is part of that firm, and you’ll end up connecting with people you’d otherwise never meet.

5. Find new business.

I am leaving this for last as the firms or individuals that set out to use Twitter exclusively for this purpose usually end up annoying their followers and even non-followers.  That being said, talk to anyone that has used Twitter in an honest, sharing way for an extended period of time and they will tell you about a new client or partnership that was initiated, nurtured or otherwise influenced via Twitter.

Twitter is not Facebook.  I mention that because some professional services firms tend to lump social media properties together.  I can understand a professional services firm deciding to stay away from any organized Facebook activity.  Twitter, on the other hand, is worth a spin.

While the headline of this recent B to B Magazine article didn’t surprise me, the candidness behind the underlying metrics did:

Study: Small companies can’t track campaign ROI, fail to qualify leads

While I won’t reprint the full article, here two key pieces struck me:

Nearly 63% of small-business marketers say they can’t track the return on investment of their marketing programs and point to poor feedback from sales regarding the status of leads as a prime culprit, according to a new study by the Sales Lead Management Association.

The study was based on an online survey that polled 140 marketers primarily from small companies—77% of the companies had 24 or fewer employees, and none had more than 250. It concluded that too many of these types of organizations operate within isolated silos, and have not found a way to align the objectives of sales and marketing.

So, it’s certainly not news that sales and marketing could be better aligned in many companies.  And even the numbers didn’t shock me when I thought about it.  What really surprised me was how candid the respondents were in acknowledging their failures.

The part I really want to know about is the next step – how many of these respondents, having acknowledged the problem, are going to find a way to change this?

In my experience, many of these same folks will run out, implement a tool and expect it to serve as a magic bullet to solve these problems.  Don’t get me wrong — I am a huge advocate of tools and having tracking and analytics in place are critical to most everything we do.  However, in this case the problem usually isn’t just about implementing a tool, it’s also about ensuring that sales and marketing are on the same page and have the strategies right – the people, policies, procedures and accountability in place to make these tools work.  Otherwise, you just have another tool you aren’t using right.

If your company isn’t doing this right, what is it costing you?  I wonder how many of those 63% will change?  I wonder how many of those 63% will be around in 3 years?

Everyone loves startups.  We love the passion displayed by the founders.  We love the seemingly irrational loyalty demonstrated by the first few employees.  We love when the media declares startup X as the “next big thing”.  We love when angel investors or venture capitalists make bold predictions about the company’s potential share of a given market.  Simply put, we love the underdog.

Yet startups fail - often.  We rarely get to hear the failure stories directly from the founders.  I completely understand.  Very few want to admit failure, and even less want to discuss their failure publicly.  That’s why I appreciate this blog post from Mark Goldenson on VentureBeat. 

There are a lot of great nuggets included in this post, but for the sake of brevity (and relevancy to this blog) I’ll include one excerpt:

5. Marketing requires constant expertise. The main failure of PlayCafe was marketing. Dev and I came from PayPal, a strongly viral product at a company almost hostile to marketing. Our efforts in SEO, SEM, virality, platforms, PR, and partnerships weren’t terrible, but drawing users to a live event requires constant, skillful work.

Like creating content, I no longer think marketing is something smart novices can figure out part-time. As the web gets super-saturated, marketing is the difference-maker, and it’s too deep a skill to leave to amateurs.

An exception is inherently viral ideas, especially one-to-many virality, where normal use of your product reaches new users, not “word-of-mouth” viral that requires users to advocate you. With inherent virality, a barely adequate product might suffice, though even then marketing should accelerate growth. Next time we’ll raise enough to hire a marketing expert early.

Hallelujah!  I’ve always found some irony in the fact that the average startup lacks marketing talent or expertise, and yet that is often the category that the founders and first employees try to learn and execute on their own.

A little bit of advice for startups with regards to marketing:

• Spend less time trying to learn marketing.
• Spend more time evaluating and hiring the appropriate employees, contractors or agencies to help you execute your marketing programs.
• Spend the time and money to make sure you get some marketing strategy advice, not just advice on building advertising campaigns.
• Ask the person that helps you build marketing strategy to identify experts - not generalists - for each component of the marketing strategy.
• Don’t take flyers on “can’t miss” advertising programs without consulting someone with marketing expertise that can provide realistic expectations for any marketing program.

Inherently viral concepts that grow largely based on word-of-mouth are extremely rare.  I’ve seen 4-5 in my career.  Follow Mark’s advice.  Find a marketing expert to help you out, but do spend the time to find the right marketing expert.

This post really isn’t meant as a commentary on the past, present and future value of social media properties, although the title may indicate that.  If anything, what I am trying to do may even be a bit selfish – I’d like to explain my use of social media properties and figure out if other people, particularly businesspeople, are experiencing the same trend that I am experiencing.

Let’s address the current kings of social media: LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

Before anyone gets all riled up, I recognize that each of the properties above is very, very different – different audiences, different usage and different business models.  That being said, I happen to use all three and many folks I do business with do as well, hence the whole thought process that lead me to this post.

Let’s start with LinkedIn , the property I started using first.  LinkedIn is a business networking property, plain and simple.  Most people to use it to connect with other professionals.  Perhaps some use it for personal (non-business) purposes, but I certainly don’t.  Here’s my history with LinkedIn:

• Started using it sometime in 2003.
• Used it initially to connect with other professionals and expand my business network.
• When I reached a certain comfort level – call it 100 contacts or so – I began using it as a prospecting and lead generation tool for my business.
• On the flip side, also used it to find providers/vendors for my business, so it worked both ways for me.
• Used LinkedIn Answers in a limited manner to answer questions “in my wheelhouse” and also to ask questions to my network.
• At some point between 2007 – present, it feels as if the world discovered LinkedIn.
• LinkedIn began to feel overcrowded, became far less useful for me, and now I pay very little attention other than a daily login to make sure I am not missing something important.

Let’s move on to Facebook .  Facebook represents the opposite of LinkedIn for me.  I use it almost exclusively for social/personal purposes, although I suppose there are tangential business benefits.  I don’t mean to indicate that there aren’t substantial direct business benefits – there absolutely are for those who are smart about reaching their target audiences without ruining the Facebook experience.  Here’s my history with Facebook:

• Started using it sometime in 2008, maybe late 2007.
• Used it initially to just connect with old friends and colleagues.
• When I reached a certain comfort level – call it 3 months in – I actually posted an occasional status update and photos.
• At some point in late 2008/early 2009, the world seemed to discover Facebook.
• Facebook began to feel overcrowded, became far less entertaining and useful for me, and while I do log in frequently, I am far more focused on how my clients can use Facebook than how I can use it for personal purposes.

Read the rest of this entry »

I just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell’s latest piece in The New Yorker, How David Beats Goliath: When Underdogs Break the Rules.  To no surprise he has once again hit the nail on the head.  Through both research data and elegant examples as varied to include the eponymous Biblical tale, 12 year old girls basketball, World War I’s Lawrence of Arabia and Digger Phelps’s Fordham Rams upsetting Dr. J’s UMass team, Gladwell reveals and reinforces his key point — When underdogs choose not to play by Goliath’s rules, they win…even when everything we think we know about power says they shouldn’t.  The article is a great read.

In the marketing world we see this with our clients every day, with underdogs triumphing over their own Goliath.  Disruptive startups that change things  - like Google changed the web — rather than those that mashup and wait for the quick sale.    Established businesses that decide TODAY is the day to do something different and throw out the old rules, like King Gillette giving away free razors so many years ago or Radiohead, Trent Reznor, and other bands that understand the value of no cost audience building.  

So, if your organization is a “David” (or a “Lawrence” or “Digger”) what’s your plan to break the rules today?

There’s never been an easier time to be an expert. Just about any piece of information you could ever want is available through an Internet connection, a browser and just a few clicks. You can quickly set up a blog, a small website, and a LinkedIn profile and you too can look like an expert. I’m surprised there isn’t an expert kit yet that includes these elements in nicely designed box. You can even take it to the next level and respond in all sorts of LinkedIn Answers. Maybe this makes you really look like an expert.

So what’s to keep everyone from running around as self-proclaimed experts? I had a conversation with a few colleagues last week and we all agreed it is the transparency the web provides. While it’s become easier than ever to become an expert, it’s also become easier than ever to realize when the Emperor’s New Clothes aren’t quite right. When the “Social Media Expert” has a blog hat hasn’t been touched in a year, isn’t on Twitter and can’t point you to clear success stories; When the agency that “specializes in online advertising” goes blank when you ask about ad servers; or when the web design shop that “specializes in user experience” has a 2 minute flash intro on the front of their website. These are just a few examples most of us have seen before.

In the discussion, one of my colleagues mentioned how he explained to his family why he posts certain things on Twitter - despite being longtime business owners they didn’t understand why he would share those aspects of his business successes and challenges. His answer was simple: if I’m transparent I never have to remember which version of a story I told some people and which version I told others. In his case, he is a true expert and that expertise combined with the transparency that validates it has led him to business success.

First, let me make something clear: I am not anti-ad agency. There are some very good ones out there, some of which Right Source Marketing does business with.

I am, however, anti-ad agency when it comes to agencies that fall into the following categories:

• Agencies that have simply not adapted to new media, and fail to acknowledge the growth and power of interactive vehicles at every turn. Thankfully, there’s not a whole lot of these left, but some are still out there and I have no idea how they’re surviving.
• Agencies that claim that they have a new interactive department, interactive expertise, and interactive services, all led by…the same guy/gal that was fighting the idea that interactive was important a year ago.
• The “gotta plant our flag somewhere, we’ll call ourselves an interactive agency” agencies. It would be unfair to provide a blanket profile of these types, but some typical characteristics include below-market pricing for below-market services, all with a complete lack of strategic guidance.

So what will the agency of the future look like? Sean Carton , in his recent ClickZ column , does a fantastic job of articulating what should, will, and already is happening to agencies – at least those that pay attention to what will provide clients with real value with regards to strategy and services. Here are a couple of excerpts - enjoy:

The full-service monolithic agency model worked fine in a world where there were four major broadcast networks, large-scale radio networks, and a couple daily newspapers per town. It doesn’t work when you have to deal with dozens of media channels that change on a nearly daily basis. New technologies pop up (social networking, Twitter, online video, etc.) and new skills and new thinking are needed to deal with them. Large organizations with large payrolls, hierarchical structures, and well-defined (and well-defended) areas of expertise can’t possibly hope to make any money when they have to staff themselves with a constantly expanding cast of experts to deal with new media challenges. Add to that a compensation model based on a world that’s long gone (retainers and media commissions) and the agency model we’ve all grown up with starts to look like a relic of the past. Turmoil in the industry provides proof.

So what to do? Simple: explode the idea of the monolithic agency. Get rid of the concept that only an agency that does everything can possibly create and manage large campaigns. Look for more flexible and fluid models that expand and contract as needed, bringing in new expertise when needed and ditching it when it’s not. Think distributed, not centralized. Think “collective,” not “company.”

So what’s the agency of the future going to look like? Probably a lot smaller and focused on strategy, account/project management, creative leadership (but not execution), and media strategy (but not planning and buying). Most agencies will revolve around these hubs if they’re honest with themselves. Agencies will exist to provide high-level strategic guidance that clients need in a media-chaotic environment. Agencies will expand or contract as needed or will explore radical solutions such as crowdsourcing to get work done for less money.