One of the most frustrating experiences for a marketer is seeing a great product or service that is marketed incorrectly.  In this case, “incorrectly” may mean choosing the wrong target audience, choosing the wrong methods to reach that target audience, building creative that doesn’t resonate with that target audience, or a host of other mishaps.

Perhaps even more frustrating is watching a great product or service flop from a marketing standpoint not because of a weak marketing strategy, but rather due to the absence of a person or firm in the role of Marketing General Contractor.

Let me illustrate the need for a Marketing General Contractor using a situation I ran into a bit over a year ago.  I was approached by a medium-sized national sales organization that had grown to around 75 employees in 10 offices throughout the US.  The President of the organization had determined that it was time to “turn on the lead generation hose” with the help of the company’s first national marketing campaign.  With 90% of the company’s employees in sales roles, the President had to look outside for help in building the marketing campaign.  Here’s how she attacked the situation:

• Hired a branding firm to help redesign the company logo and printed collateral.
• Hired a web design and development firm to help redesign the company website.
• Hired an SEO consultant to handle the optimization of the new website.
• Hired a PPC firm to launch local search marketing campaigns for each office.
• Hired a public relations firm to tell the company growth story to the media.
• Hired an email marketing vendor to create and deliver a monthly email newsletter.
• Hired a copywriter to create and write posts for the new company blog.
• Hired a consultant to place print advertising in selected local markets.

On the surface, that looks fine, right?  After all, it’s become pretty commonplace for companies to hire different specialists for different roles. 

The President called me after dealing with these vendors, agencies and consultants for 3 months, and here were some of the complaints:

• I can’t get these agencies and vendors to communicate with each other on a regular basis.
• All the creative looks different – the site doesn’t look like the collateral, the collateral doesn’t look like the blog, the blog doesn’t look like the print advertising.
• I don’t have time for all the conference calls, reviews, and approvals.
• Everyone is asking for a larger share of the budget.
• I don’t understand the fee structures – the PPC firm wants to charge on percentage of spend, the SEO guy wants to charge hourly, and the email marketing vendors charges one rate for creative, another rate for delivery, and yet another rate for reporting.

I listened for a while, and then asked a very simple question:  Who built the plan and who is managing the execution of that plan?

She didn’t hesitate at all.  She built the plan, and was relying on the marketing coordinator she hired 3 months ago to help pull it all together.  She figured these outside agencies and consultants would help build and execute the plan as well. 

This was the answer I was afraid of.  The President of the company and a junior level marketing coordinator were responsible for launching a $250,000 marketing campaign that included a complete marketing makeover and the management of 6 – 10 outside vendors. 

This is a great example of a company making marketing far more complicated than it has to be.  These guys figured the best way to maximize every marketing dollar was to make sure they hired specialists and addressed as many marketing vehicles as possible.  To use a sports analogy, there was only one problem with this strategy: the team owner, the batboy, and a bunch of talented but overpaid players were trying to win ball games without a coach or a general manager. 

Your Marketing General Contractor may be your VP Marketing.  Or your Director of Marketing.  Perhaps an outsourced CMO type.  Maybe a short-term consultant that helps you develop the plan, select the right vendors, and manage the project/process.  Whoever it is, this person should be one of the most organized people in your company.

Don’t make the mistake that this organization made.  Get your Marketing General Contractor in place before you start building the roster. 

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

A blog is a great way to add to what you do online; regardless of if you are approaching this as a company, an individual or a group.  We’re often asked by people what elements a good blog should have.  The easiest answer of course is great content — Write well and be interesting.  Without that, the rest of the items contained in this post are fairly useless.  You can have all the functionality in the world but if you don’t write well and aren’t interesting it probably won’t matter.

So, let’s presume you’re covering those bases.  Now, what are some of the key elements a blog should have to make it more useful?  Below is a list of 9 simple features your blog should have – feel free to add your own suggestions in our comments section:

1).  Have an Easy to find RSS Button – This one seems like it would be a no-brainer, but you would be surprised how many people miss this.  Even better, make it easy for people to subscribe via email as well, notifying them via email when a new post is up.

2). Implement Analytics – Again, this one is on the can’t miss list, and again I’m constantly surprised by how many miss.  Adding in Analytics will let you easily get a deeper view into your blog’s activity.  How many folks are coming to your blog, where they are coming from, what they are reading and how long they stay?  Maybe you’ll find out certain topics are more interesting than others and write about them more. Maybe that post you thought stunk got you more visitors than any other.

3). Display Categories – By categorizing posts and showing those categories you allow visitors to easily find content related to what they are interested in.

4). Provide Easy Access to Archives – Let visitors look at post posts easily, by month/year, popularity, most commented, or another way that may be interesting to your audience

5). Add Commenting Functionality – Blogs are intended to be social, let others have a say and foster an environment for conversation

6).  Include a Social Bookmarking Tool – Make it easy for readers to share information through their social bookmarking tools and networks.  Tools such as AddThis and ShareThis are a couple easy to use popular ones, there are many others as well.

7). Provide a Search Feature – Everybody loves to search

8). Include a Blogroll – What’s a blogroll?  By providing a section with links to other interesting/relevant blogs you help your visitors find more useful content, as well as help out fellow bloggers.

9). Include Imagery – With all due respect to Jack Nicholson “All text and no pictures make blog a dull boy.”

If you follow these simple steps you’ll find your blog is a lot more useful for visitors, and for you.

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

About two months ago, I put together a post on the five ways professional services firms should use Twitter.  From a readership standpoint, that post represents one of the all-time top five posts on Marketing Trenches.  More importantly, we received a number of emails from professional services types praising the content and asking for more.

If it’s more you want, it’s more we’ll give.  This time, we’ll address search engine optimization, also known as SEO, and the common mistakes that professional services firms make in an attempt to address this area.

One quick note: While these mistakes are pretty typical in the professional services arena, most of these are universal mistakes that any type of organization can make.  You’ll just have to trust me on that, as I’ve seen some pretty poor SEO efforts.

That being said, here are some of the most common areas in which professional services firms falter with regards to SEO:

1. Setting unrealistic goals for SEO with regards to rankings, timing and business impact.

As we’ve said before in this blog, SEO is a necessary tactic for just about every professional services firm.  Your firm will not, however, be able to secure a top 10 ranking on a keyword like “tax attorney” without a focused, long-term SEO strategy.  Your firm will also not be able to secure any type of top 10 rankings, with the exception of true long tail keywords, for at least 3-6 months.  And SEO, generally speaking, will not turn around the fortunes of a professional services firm.

SEO is necessary, but it should be a component of a larger marketing strategy, and not THE marketing strategy.

2. Assuming that SEO work can be done in-house entirely.

Let me clarify something quickly.  SEO work can be done in-house, but only if your professional services firm falls into one of these categories:

• You have a legitimate SEO expert on staff.  This is highly unlikely in most professional services firms that aren’t in the marketing category.
• You have someone on staff that can write well, code well, understands SEO basics and is willing to put in the significant time required to learn advanced SEO tactics and to put in the actual work required to execute those tactics.
• You have someone on staff that possesses some of the qualities above and is working in parallel with an external SEO expert to implement your firm’s SEO program.

If your firm doesn’t fall into one of those categories, consider hiring a company that knows what they’re doing.  Just be careful about your evaluation of these firms, as for every legit SEO firm you will run into a snake oil salesman or two.

3. Ignoring off-page SEO.

Not long ago, on-page SEO was considered the blocking and tackling component of SEO, and off-page SEO was considered “advanced”.  Not anymore.  If your SEO effort stops at putting up some meta tags and walking away, don’t count on any significant SEO success.

4. Not taking advantage of existing content in the form of web pages, video, pdfs, press releases, etc.

Once again, let me remind you that content is king for marketing.  If you have it – and most professional services firms have it in abundance – and you’re not using it for SEO purposes, you’re missing the boat.  Why would you NOT use content you’ve already produced if it’s going to improve your chances of achieving your SEO goals?

5. Downplaying the SEO value of blogging.

The blog post you are reading right now will be read by more people, and eventually rank higher in the search engines, than 80% of the pages on our primary corporate website.  There are a variety of reasons for that, but it should serve as a clear illustration for why you should not ignore blogging as a major factor in search engine optimization and overall marketing success.

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A colleague of mine often says “Your website should be as good as your best salesperson” – which for many organizations is easier said than done.  Those of you who read this blog regularly know we always advocate looking at your overall marketing strategy, your web marketing strategy as a set of that, and your website itself as a piece of that.

In addition to looking at the big picture, sometimes it helps to slice off a few clear and actionable improvements you can take.  Some organizations have never done all 3 of the steps outlined below, while for others this is a chance to get back to basics and make sure you haven’t lost site of these 3 keys.  Here’s 3 key steps you can do to make your web presence work harder.

1). Take an Honest Look at Your Search Presence

We all know that search engines play a huge role in the web — In fact, 80% of online session start with a search  engine (via  PC Magazine).  So, even if you are doing everything you can to get the word out on your brand and website in other media, if you don’t have a significant presence in search you may be sunk.  Since search is where people go first when they go online, you need an effective search strategy — both paid and organic — to make sure that you will be found.  So take an honest look at your search presence, look with a keen eye and really re-evaluate everything.  Once you ahve done that and reformulated your strategy (or confirmed it was right all along), start working on keyword testing in paid search and SEO (learn more in a  previous post The Obvious Yet Underused Way to Build an SEO Program) and continue to monitor and adjust as you go, utilizing your analytics systems as a guide for what’s working and what isn’t.

2). Segment Your Audiences and Match Their Expectations

Too often we see campaigns where all visitors are sent to the same generic homepage, which may not speak to a segment’s particular needs.  One of the things we love about the web as marketers is it is trackable and customizable. So, for example, if you are a bank and know you have a prospect looking for CD rates, make sure you take them to a page about CDs.  If they are looking for mortgage refinancing make sure you take them to a page about refinancing, not new loans.  Utilize targeted landing pages and microsites in order to better match the prospect’s expectations and you’ll see much better results (see our previous post Microsite or Landing Page? to learn more on when to use landing pages and microsite ).  While these examples seem obvious, I’m constantly amazed by how many organizations aren’t doing them.  This feeds right back into #1, if you match your customers expectations when they come to your site, your campaigns — whether search, social media, print, or anything else — are just about guaranteed to perform better.

3). Optimize your Conversion Opportunities

So you’ve knocked down items 1 and 2 – what’s next?  Well, some people still think getting traffic to your website and getting a few leads is doing the whole job.  Getting visitors to your website is really just the first step, what we really want to do is convert those visitors by making them take your key actions.  That generally means converting them to leads by an activity such as filling out a form, converting them to customers by an activity such as an online purchase, or sometimes by an activity such as viewers of key information like using a retail locator to the nearest store.  By reviewing your analytics, you can develop a baseline for your conversion activity.  Then, begin to test different variables against this baseline, including copy approaches, offers, calls to action, imagery, landing pages, form fields and other variables.  By understanding and continually optimizing your conversion opportunities you’ll get much more value out of your marketing activities.

Whether you are new to online marketing or a seasoned veteran just circling back to make sure you are still doing the basics right, these 3 steps will make your web presence work harder.

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

At least two or three times a week I am asked the question, “Do we really need to develop a social media strategy?  Can we really benefit from participating?” 

70-80% of the time my answer is yes, as almost any business can benefit long-term from participating in social media the RIGHT way.  It occurred to me today, however, that I rarely document the occasions when I advise businesses to steer clear of social media. 

After looking through some meeting notes, here are some common reasons for a business to stay away from social media:

1.  Your company and/or management team does not believe in social media.

This is always a tough one to handle.  On the one hand, if everyone followed this rule then social media would be dead already, as most proponents start out as non-believers.  On the other hand, if you are supposed to be the champion of the program and you don’t even believe in the benefits of social media, you’ll never sell it internally and if you do, you’ll never execute with passion and consistency.

2.  You’re not willing to build even a simple strategy for social media, or you’re not willing to figure out how social media fits into broader marketing and organizational goals.

If you’ve been reading this blog long enough, I telegraphed this one for you.  Tactics without strategy will eventually fail.  Say it again.  Tactics without strategy will eventually fail. 

3.  Your business bases everything on strict cost-benefit analysis, and defined ROI is expected quickly.

Much of what you can expect to execute in the social media realm is going to be experimental initially.  Very few organizations have found a concrete way to tie social media investment directly to revenue increases or cost savings. 

If your CFO or Controller or even your VP of Marketing is going to treat an investment in social media like an investment in direct mail or pay-per-click search engine marketing, it’s probably not going to work out for you.

4.  You or those you report to are going to base social media success on the number of followers, friends or connections you accumulate.

Pet peeve alert! 

Unless you are representing a universal or nearly universal consumer product, stop counting followers, friends and connections.  Do the smart thing.  Identify a segment of the audience that you want to reach, and make the focus of your social media program reaching as many members of that segment as possible.  Rinse and repeat with the next segment.

If the focal point of your strategy is to accumulate as many friends, followers or connections as possible, you’ll fail in social media eventually.  Or you’ll become very annoying to your audience, and they’ll start tuning you out…which I suppose is the same thing as failing.

5.  Your company’s executive leadership and/or thought leaders aren’t part of the social media effort.

Certain types of social media are not inherently meant for corporate representation.  They were built for individual representation, with the obvious benefit of creating a platform from which you can share business interests and news.

Many companies abuse social media properties, and part of this abuse lies in the lack of participation from the real personalities that reflect the brand.  See Will’s recent post on Zappos excellence in marketing and customer service, and in particular the involvement of their CEO in all social media efforts, for an example of the way this should be done.

There are some Twitter business users with massive followings that remind me of Paris Hilton.  Never accomplished much, famous for being famous, annoying as hell to listen to…and then the clincher comes when I hear that they have interns or assistants representing them on Twitter.  That’s crap.  Plain and simple.  Ghostwriting is one thing, ghosttwittering is quite another.

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