Marketing Trenches

Search marketing is one of the great tools in a marketer’s arsenal.  We help our clients with search and find it’s often one of their most effective lead generation vehicles.  That being said, I’m going to take a few minutes and pick on pay per click search here because, in so many cases, businesses are getting sold on paid search as a “full marketing solution” — and they’re believing it.  In these cases the reality is it’s usually being sold by salespeople disguised as marketers who only really look at the media side of marketing (Yeah, you know who you are!), and not all the other facets.

I could have chosen social media, broadcast or a host of other channels - it’s not this specific channel that I have an issue with as much as the focus on any one channel as some sort of magic bullet.  But, for some reason we see this in the search channel far more than any of the others.  Likely this is because the ability to so directly track — spend to searches to clicks to leads/sales to CPA — creates such a clean picture that it’s tough to argue against continuing to feed that success until it’s maxed out.  And once maxed out then, and only then only then, moving on to another channel.

The problem with that single channel focus, however, is it is incredibly risky.  Not Shaun White, Half-Pipe X-Games Cool risky but Russian Roulette Foolish risky.  The reason is simple - all of your eggs are now firmly placed in one basket.  And we all know the rest of that cliché.  And we all also know this - the marketing landscape is constantly changing, and now more rapidly than ever before.

So, maybe paid search is knocking it out of the park for you today, but what happens if Google adjusts the rules of AdWords again?  Or when Yahoo and Bing unify their platform in the near future with their deal now having cleared the biggest regulatory hurdles?  Or with just the fact that the amount of competitors you’ll find in paid search now looks to be far greater than even 2 or 3 years ago with later adopters coming to the table, the growth of automated platforms, locally focused management tools and a host of other reasons.  By now you can certainly see where I’m going with this.  It’s incredibly likely that no matter your industry, there isn’t just one magic bullet but an integrated mix of tactics.

Rather than getting sold on pouring everything you have into paid search, the better move is to diversify your tactics.  As Mike often says, think of your marketing approach like a stock portfolio.  By investing in and testing multiple channels, and adjusting based on which ones succeed and fail, you’ll have multiple sources of leads/sales and not be exposed to the risk of just one channel.  Certainly include paid search in the mix, but don’t make it your only ingredient.  Because that doesn’t make you X-Games Cool, it makes you Russian Roulette Crazy.

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 @willdavis on Twitter for more commentary like this.

Whether you live in the Baltimore/Washington area like we do, or have only heard about it on the news, everyone knows we’ve been hit here by record snowfalls.  I saw yesterday that Baltimore just passed Syracuse NY for first place as the snowiest city in the U.S. this winter.

While technology has allowed me to continue working on just about everything I would in a normal day, some of the down time “snowed in” got me thinking about how people might use some of that down time to address items on the “marketing list” (you know, that list some people never quite get to).

With that mind, I went back through some of our posts to highlight 5 pretty tangible and actionable items you can think about, evaluate and improve right away.  And while I tried to avoid the “clip show” format — Didn’t you always hate when sitcoms did those episodes that were just recycled material? – It did seem to work best in this format.

So here you go – 5 Marketing Fixes for a Snowy Week.

1). Fix Your Core Messaging:

We all know how important it is to have a clear and consistent message – But do you have a messaging problem?

Your Marketing Message in 30 Seconds

2). Diversify Lead Generation:

In an ideal world, you are managing multiple buckets of leads, each bringing a different volume, a different quality, and a different set of metrics.  But are you putting all your eggs in one basket?

Buckets of Leads

3). Convert More Visitors to Leads:

Make sure you are getting the most from your online visitors.  Tune up your contact forms and landing pages by looking at 5 common problems.

Better Contact Forms = More Prospects

4). Improve Your Search Marketing:

Writing ad copy for pay-per-click ads, particularly for Google AdWords, is an extremely challenging task.  Are you getting the most from your paid search campaigns?

The Most Challenging Copywriting Job in the World

5). Update Your Website:

Your company may have all kinds of exciting things going on - new customers, partners, upcoming events, etc.  But if from the viewpoint of the random website visitor, you’re not doing much lately it may not be worth taking the next step to get in touch.

Keeping the Newsroom Fresh

Implementing these 5 fixes will help you to upgrade your marketing — And give you a reason to avoid that snow shovel.

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@willdavis on Twitter for more commentary like this.

I was speaking with a few colleagues the other day about the different benefits of social media as a whole, and blogging in particular.  The folks in the room had varying levels of social media involvement, from no involvement at all to heavy involvement.  Each of us discussed what we hope to get out of social media, why we blog or might consider it, and how businesses can benefit from blogging.  The discussion went on for some time, covering the wide ranging benefits from SEO opportunities to more frequent customer touch points and everything in between.  After a while, it quieted down a bit and somebody asked me if they had missed anything on the list.

Skip the First Meeting

While our blog serves many purposes, one of them I hadn’t heard mentioned by the group was one of the things that I find most useful.  Having a well planned blog and social media presence, with what we hope is interesting and insightful content, allows us to Skip the First Meeting.

So what do I mean when I say Skip the First Meeting?  Unfortunately, despite how well you may try to vet things ahead of time, inevitably in our business you run into an opportunity that 5 minutes into that first meeting, after you’ve sniffed each other and gotten a bit more of a sense of your businesses –  you both know isn’t a fit.  You don’t think alike, you don’t value the same things, really whatever those components may be.  Of course generally by this time somebody has ordered food, or driven out of their way, or fired up a PowerPoint or laser lights show, or something else entirely, and it’s too late to do anything but spend the next 45-60 minutes or more there despite you each knowing this isn’t going to work out.

Now, we often head this meeting off at the pass.  We’ll send a contact or prospect a link to our blog ahead of time, and also encourage them to connect with and follow us on social networks, and ask them to read through these pieces ahead of time before scheduling that first get together.  By doing this, we make much more efficient use of their time and ours.  We try to convey the idea here that we want to be involved in strategy and planning and believe in taking a holistic view of marketing, and that shines through in our posts.

When we discover the poor fit, we each save ourselves the time of an unproductive meeting where we just won’t be a fit for each other (although sometimes we do miss those laser light shows).  And just as importantly, for those that could be a fit, we’ve fast forwarded over the glossy part of the first meeting and are digging right into the important and meaningful parts that are usually saved for a second meeting.

So while there are probably 100s of reasons to blog and to get involved in social media, if it works for your business you may want to try to Skip the First Meeting.

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 @willdavis on Twitter for more commentary like this.

Whenever a conversation starts around the topic of social media, inevitably I find a number of people that immediately question the value and want to see some ROI numbers before getting involved.  We’ve talked about both sides of this discussion before in many posts, most notably Businesses: Stay Away From Social Media If You Meet The Following Criteria and Social Media: Justify Your Love With the Right ROI Approach.

Just today I came across this research in B to B magazine, which seems to once again prove some value to social media activity, particular as it relates to search

Social media searchers seek out ‘lower funnel’ terms

Internet users exposed to brands via social networks subsequently search for “lower funnel” terms associated with those brands, indicating a higher propensity to convert, according to new study.

The study, “The Influenced: Social Media, Search and the Interplay of Consideration and Consumption”-conducted by digital marketing company comScore and social media agency M80-found Internet users exposed to a brand in a social media setting were 1.7 times more likely to later search for that brand using keywords associated with a high level of loyalty and propensity to buy, compared with searchers not engaged with social media.

The study also showed a 50% increase in paid search click-through rates when Internet users were exposed first to social media mentioning a brand. The online survey, which drew 2,000 respondents, was conducted from May through July.

One of the basic tenets of branding is to build recognition and loyalty.  And, whether online or off, we’ve known for a long time now that building a strong brand can feed search engine success.  Social media is just one more place where that can happen, and as the study above proves, the payoff can be big.

So, what should you do about it?  I think there are 2 key takeaways:

1). If you have waited to develop a social media strategy until you have had the justification, this might just be it.

Note: Throwing it to the intern to figure out is not a strategy.  While that person may help you to execute on a strategy, the strategy itself shouldn’t come from someone rental companies don’t trust enough to rent a car to for four more years.  Social media should have a  role consistent with your overall marketing plan.

2). If your social media activities are generating more highly qualified searches, make sure you are maximizing your ability to be found there.

Do everything you can from a Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing perspective to ensure those highly qualified searchers will find you.  We know they will be out there looking and you need to maximize your opportunities to capture these high value searchers.

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.

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.

In Tuesday’s 5 Marketing Misconceptions That Need to Change post, Will covered some of the misguided statements we hear from clients.  If I only had a nickel for every time we hear those types of statements….

In the spirit of fairness, I am determined to defend the marketers who make these types of statements.  Here’s what Will left out - often times these misguided comments originate from an agency, consultant or service provider that the company has put its trust in.  So let’s look for some warning signs. 

If you hear your agency, consultant or service provider make any of these five statements, consider running.

1.) Hi, I’m Mike from XXX National Directory/Search/Ad Network Company, and I am a Marketing Consultant with the company.  I am here to help you build your marketing plan.

RUN! FAST! Nothing against these folks (really), but selling Yellow Pages or even a “boxed” pay-per-click solution does not make you a marketing consultant.  It makes you someone that is trying to sell Yellow Pages or a “boxed” pay-per-click solution.  There’s nothing wrong with selling.  God knows we all do it in some form or fashion, but please don’t try to mislead people by calling yourself a marketing consultant.

Clarification: If you are in fact interesting in purchasing what essentially amounts to an advertising package, by all means engage with these folks.  Just don’t expect to get any marketing strategy advice out of them.

2.) If you choose us for your SEO project, we can guarantee multiple top 10 rankings on your targeted keywords.

I thought these people had gone away, but it appears they’re back in full force.  And I can’t blame clients for listening.  When someone tells you they can guarantee results, it’s hard to ignore.

That being said, let’s all say this together:  SEO is not a quick fix, set it and forget it solution for driving traffic .  The best SEO strategies I’ve seen involve a long-term commitment to the creation of relevant content, building that content in multiple formats, and finding multiple distribution channels for that content.

I am guessing there are companies that make an SEO guarantee and do follow through on it.  I am also guessing that those guarantees are made on keywords like “patent attorneys that also handle divorce cases in reston virginia”.

3.) You really can’t afford to wait on addressing social media.  We should build out your presence on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter right away.

Stop.  Please.  We all realize that social media is important, even though it’s getting a bit crowded.  Like anything else though, you shouldn’t build anything if it doesn’t fit into a more strategic plan. 

Some of these groups will bait you with the promise of thousands of Twitter followers, Facebook friends, or LinkedIn connections overnight.  Great.  Go ahead and recruit thousands of followers, all of whom could care less about your message.  They’re following you because they’re trolling for followers as well.  And the followers/friends/connections you do want?  You’ll turn them off quick with the hundreds of meaningless updates you’ll have to post to accumulate all the meaningless followers.

Build a social media strategy.  Make sure it ties back to your overall marketing strategy.  Then join, listen, learn, and eventually execute.  It’s that simple.

And one more thing, and I know this will be painful for some “social media gurus” to hear.  Social media is NOT a necessity, nor is it necessarily effective, for every business and business category.

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When I explain our business to people, I immediately get hit with questions.  And I love questions — it shows people are paying attention, interested and engaged (or at least somewhat good at pretending to be).  So questions are always good.  Sometimes what I hear, though, is somebody really looking for us to confirm a myth for them.  A few of those questions seem to come up time and time again and are easy to spot.  Here my Top 5 right now:

1). Why should we be on Twitter?  I don’t care what you had for breakfast.

Well sure, I don’t care what I had for breakfast either, or probably what anyone else had for breakfast.  Just like any other communications or content channel, there are folks using this channel well and some using it not so well.  We have already published a few posts on good ways you might use Twitter already (Read more on Measuring Social Media ROI, and on Five Ways Professional Services Firms Can Use Twitter) so I won’t go into detail here again.  But, just keep in mind most of the same people who think Twitter is about telling people what you had for breakfast thought bloggers were just a bunch of people living in their parents’ basement and would never have an impact.

2). I should just put my whole marketing budget in PPC search, that will be my most effective marketing right?

Maybe – but it really depends on your marketing objectives, industry, goals, products, services, and everything else.  PPC Search is great for many businesses, but it usually isn’t a magic bullet, but rather part of an overall plan.  Often we find PPC is a testing ground for a more informed Search Engine Optimization (Read more on The Obvious Yet Underused Way to Build an SEO Program)  and that we run the two together, or that PPC search doesn’t meet your goals.  My advice – Never put all your eggs in one basket.

3). Why should we have our marketing team do anything with Social Media?  We have an intern here that can get us up to speed.

I seem to be hearing this one more and more often now.  While your intern may be ahead of you on the social media front because he/she has more friends than you do on Facebook, that doesn’t mean they are the right person to handle strategic marketing.  Having extra help in managing your online presences is great – indeed it can be time intensive — but make sure you have the right strategy and a plan in place that you can then engage people (including maybe the intern) in helping to execute.  And, like with anything else – Make sure you bring in the right help to generate that plan if you aren’t equipped to do it yourself.

4). Why would I use landing pages for our campaigns?  That’s why my website has a home page.

We’ve talked about when you should use a landing page vs. a microsite in more detail before (read Microsite or Landing Page?), but it’s important to understand a landing page can speak to a specific audience and ask for specific actions, while your home page by nature has to be much more general in nature.  Utilize landing pages for campaigns when appropriate rather than pushing everything to the home page and your conversion rates will increase.

5). I just need to reach a bunch of people, can’t I just buy an email list?

(Preparing for backlash from list brokers…awaiting angry emails…OK, let’s go)

In all my experience I have never seen a client have great success with a “bought” or “rented” list.  There are opportunities to engage folks via email, but where I have seen success is in mailing to those that have truly, clearly opted in to hear from you, and from placements in relevant emails that follow this same principle.  Your results may vary, but if nothing else you are tempting fate on a huge spam backlash, blacklisting, etc.  I think you are most likely to be successful with many other strategies and tactics before this one.

What are the misconceptions you run into most frequently?  Feel free to submit your own in our comments section below

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.

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.

Over the past 2-3 years we’ve seen an explosion in the number of software solutions that promise to automate corporate search engine marketing efforts, particularly in the category of pay-per-click search engine marketing.  These software solutions range from terrible to superb, but all have one thing in common: they can’t provide the level of service necessary to launch and consistently grow a successful search engine marketing campaign.

Some of the folks that peddle these solutions promote them as “turnkey” or “completely automated” or “self-optimizing”…ugh.  That’s just not true.  Don’t get me wrong here, you can use one of these solutions to launch your PPC campaign in as little as five minutes.  You may even experience some nice initial results, and see some “automatic optimization” of the campaign occuring in the first month or so.

However, you cannot use any of these automation platforms - by themselves - to achieve long-term success and constant improvement in your campaigns.  This isn’t like buying a Yellow Pages advertisement where your primary decision is whether to take the half-page ad or the quarter-page ad.  This isn’t a traditional media buy, where the goal may be to drive the most eyeballs at the lowest price using creative that reflects your company’s brand or offer in the most appropriate way.  Search engine marketing campaigns contain a whole lot more moving parts - landing page development, ad copywriting, conversion tracking, integration with web analytics and CRM systems, bid management…you get the point.

A good SEM campaign ties right back into the corporate marketing plan that every organization should have.  Can an automated solution interact with your Marketing Director to discuss which leads, from which keywords, are converting into sales?  Can an automated solution help you refine your SEM strategy?  Can an automated solution identify the slight nuances in keywords or keyword phrases that are only recognized by category experts?   No, no and no.

Search engine marketing is a service.  Software products are very helpful, and can and do help companies and agencies manage campaigns more efficiently.  They should not, however, be considered as stand alone solutions for your search engine marketing campaign management.

Had a discussion with a professional services firm today regarding a problem they’re experiencing.  The problem revolves around a very simple yet often overlooked page on the typical company website - the contact form.  This company recently redesigned their website, and while site traffic has been rising, their lead volume from these site contact forms has been declining.  As a matter of fact, the numbers from their web analytics package were pretty staggering - in the last month alone, 476 page views of the contact page, and only 3 form submissions.

While we looked under a bunch of rocks to rule out other problems, one look at the contact page told me everything I needed to know.  Here are the problems, and the prescribed medication:

Problem #1: The page is waaaay too crowded.  Lots of links, lots of imagery, lots of reasons to leave.

Solution #1: Treat someone sitting on your contact page like someone sitting at your cash register ready to make a purchase, except in this case remove the Snickers bars, the US Weekly and the Chapstick display.  Remove all clutter other than the essentials.

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