Jody Raines

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3 Key Tips For Internet Branding

Online branding agency, Jody RainesBranding is a business marketing campaign necessity.  Having a brand helps clients and prospects remember your company’s name and services and forms a comfortable association between your product and offer.  In an increasingly competitive market, utilizing branding techniques builds a dependable and trustworthy identity for your company, one that your customers and potential customers will rely upon when making a choice of product or service.

Understanding how to create a brand or identity utilizing Internet marketing strategy is important for businesses to compete in today’s new media marketplace.  While creating a website that proves well in the search engine rankings is great, it’s not the only mechanism or tool a marketer must have to build an effective marketing campaign that drives conversions.  Even the best seo will understand that if there is a disconnect between the keywords and the Internet presence,  you may have all the traffic to your site that you need, but conversions won’t happen.

I recently was asked to do SEO for a a company that was concerned because they are not getting sales.  An evaluation of the online assets revealed that the company’s website had good traffic, and they were ranking for keywords that were appropriate.  So, why weren’t they getting sales?  Frankly, it’s because the branding was a disconnect with the customer’s expectations.

If you are offering a product that is handcrafted and upscale, you should pick appropriate colors versus offering a product that’s popular and young.  With the handcrafted item, colors that are rich and luxurious like ivory and burgundy and sage would be appropriate.  With a youthful, popularly priced product, go for the brights.  In either case, the message and the look and feel should match to create a powerful brand message.
Here are 3 key aspects to branding in today’s marketing:

  1. Branding your website is the important first step. Understanding who your customer is and what their preferences are is important to identifying how to brand your website.  Especially if your color palette is inconsistent with customer expectations, you’ll find out pretty quickly that you’ve made a mistake.   Not only is color critical, it’s also important to create a user interface that reflects what your customer is searching for more than what you feel you want to present to the customer.  Having a website that’s all about “us” versus all about “you” is a common mistake. however having a unique graphic design, graphic logo, color theme and a smart targeted message will differentiate your company from the competition.
  2. Branding your Social Media is key to business engagement.  Recognizing your brand when connecting with social media reinforces your company message and identity.  Just having a Twitter account with the default icon is enough to inspire a lack of trust by potential customers.  You should brand all of your social media accounts to match the look and feel of your website consistently.  Facebook business pages, Google+ business pages and your Twitter profile are all part of a cultivated business brand that inspires trust and conveys branded messaging that is mutually reinforcing.  Utilizing social media also enables you to identify customer issues and react to them quickly – creating a rapport between you and your customers that wasn’t achievable before social media became a popular marketing tool.
  3. Branding your business blog is important for developing credibility and authority.  The difference between a blog and static pages on the website is that the blog is a great way to position yourself as a thought leader and build content dynamically for your website.  The blog is used to answer questions and pose helpful ideas as opposed to selling your product or service.  Branding your blog to complement your website is an important approach to creating a brand identity.  Branding your company blog helps to establish your your business’ reputation as a valuable source of information.

Whether you are a small business or an enterprise, your marketing strategy is important, and now with the power of Internet marketing, it’s critical that all components work in unison to build brand recognition.  What is your branding strategy?  Have you identified who your customer is and what their persona is?  How do you know that your marketing is working together to create a powerful brand?  Is it?

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Social Media Tips: How Much Time Should I Spend on Social Media?

Clients who have accepted the fact that Twitter and Facebook andsocial media marketing, how much time for social media Linkedin are great for business, have asked me how much time they should devote to social media marketing.  It’s a valid question, and one that has more than one answer.

It depends on what your goals are and what you hope to achieve.  Keep in mind that Google has admitted that social media clout is one of the ingredients in their search engine ranking formula, and having your message tweeted by others can briefly have your website listed as number one on Google.

The Internet is a dynamic environment and the old days of optimizing a website and then leaving it for a year just don’t work any longer.  We no longer can say the Internet is changing daily or even hourly –  the content is changing every second as more and more people add to the information that is available online.

If you are not adding your business or brand information to the mix, then it’s tantamount to everyone taking a step forward, and you are standing in the same place.  Even though you didn’t move, you wound up behind everyone else!

So, the first step to determining how much time you should spend on social media marketing is to determine what your goals should be.  What do you hope to achieve using social media?  Are you using social media as a broadcast device?  If so, I can already tell you, it doesn’t matter how much time you spend, you are using it wrong!

One of the things I look at when I evaluate how my client is using social media marketing – and this is a great way to determine whether that so-called “expert” really knows what he or she is doing – is to see if there is a broadcast mentality to what they are sharing, or whether there is true engagement.  I have seen these ‘experts’ with the same message sent multiple times. That’s enough to recognize that they obviously do not understand how to use social media and therefore, I wouldn’t waste any money or time investing in having them help set up a campaign.

Automated programs also are a waste of time.  That’s the same as calling and hoping to get a live person, and then become frustrated with not being able to reach a person. They can actually cause more harm than good in a social media program, and any ‘expert’ who is advocating automating should be burned at the stake!

So, how do you manage your social media and how much time should you invest?

Just as organic optimization takes time, so does your social media program. If done correctly, it will stand the test of time.  Just like “black hat” SEO techniques can have a short upsurge then have dire consequences, so can these ‘quick win’ social media plans.

So, with that being said, here is my recipe for a general social media program:

1. Post a blog at least once a week. Twice a week if possible.

2. Link your blog to your Facebook business page and Twitter and Linkedin profiles.

3. On a daily basis, check into Twitter and send out Tweets for fifteen minutes.  You can break that into three five minute intervals during the day.  You’d be surprised how much useful information you can obtain in those five minutes.

4. Post a question or observation on Facebook on a daily basis.  Ask for input or feedback on a topical issue.  Encourage interaction.  This may take another ten minutes.

5. Daily, review your Linkedin messages and respond. This may take another 5 minutes.

So, all told, excluding the time you took to write your blog, your entire social media program may take thirty minutes a day.  Of course you can spend more time if you’d like.

There are tools that can make monitoring your social media much easier, and we will address these tools in a  future post.

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How much time do you take for your social media program? Where do you focus your social media efforts?  Have you seen an increase in sales based upon your social media efforts?

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10 Tips For Choosing The Best Domain Name For Your Website

Selecting a domain name

Social Media Marketing is a great tool for optimizing your web presence. It’s all about getting discovered.

Whats in a name?

With so many new startup companies in need of a website, I am often asked what makes a good domain name.  There is no right or wrong answer, however there are some considerations that help make a good decision when selecting the URL.

The trials and tribulations of choosing a domain name.

One of the first tasks to determine what your domain name should be is to name the company.  Sometimes this helps select the domain name.  Sometimes it just creates another variable that should be considered.

How important is the domain name for SEO?  

It’s very important and affects brand, memorability as well as impact the website’s ability to soar quickly in the search engines.

10 Tips (Considerations) For Choosing The Domain Name:

1. Use keywords for search engine optimization

It’s a great exercise to do keyword research before picking a domain.  Keyword research is more than just making a list of words you ‘think’ customers may use… it’s an exercise that should be done with a keyword tool.  One free tool that’s great is Googles keyword tool, and another is the Google wonder wheel. Both of these suggest alternatives, and the Google keyword tool also gives an idea how many monthly searches are performed for each word or phrase.

2. Make it easy 

Don’t be too clever or over-think your domain name. If it’s easy to be confused you can bet your customers will be.  Spell things correctly.

3. Dot com first choice

Although there are many other options, .com is still the number one choice for a domain.  If the .com is not available, second choice is .net.  You may want to also buy additional domains to protect your name, such as .info, .co, .me, .us, .biz.  Remember that com is typically for a commercial entity, and .org is typically for an organization.

4. Consider the alphabet 

If you start your company name or your domain with a ‘Z’, don’t expect to come up first in an alphabetical listing.   If you want to come up first, you may want to start with a number, which will come up before any of the alphabet.  Of course, it’s not asa easy for customers to understand.  An example of considering the alphabet is AAA. or creating a domain such as 1-A.com.

5. Avoid Copyright

Especially when it comes to slogans or using a phrase or name that may already be copyrighted, it’s best to avoid using one of these for a domain name.

6. Avoid number for words, slang

It may seem cool or cute to use a letter instead of a word, but it gets lost in translation when sharing your domain name with someone.  If you insist on using ‘2’ instead of ‘to’ and ‘4’ instead of ‘for’ you may want to buy the domain with the number spelled out and 301 it to your domain.

7. Identifies what you do

Don’t try to hide what you do with a clever name.  The easier it is for a customer to identify that you can serve his or her needs, the better your Internet investment will be.  Coming up with a cool name for your company, like (www.sunsweptgroup.com) aka SunSwept Group, does not help customers to find you.

8. Pros and cons of hyphens

Hyphens are a great way to get a domain name that has already been taken without the hyphens, and the irony is that it does help search engines figure out what the words are in your domain.  The con is that it’s difficult to convey that you have hyphens in your domain name.  The pro is SEO.  If you can buy both the hyphenated as well as the non-hyphenated name, that’s your best option.

9. Singular or plural

Again, since domain names are relatively inexpensive, I’d suggest buying both the singular as well as the plural version of your domain, just in case someone types it into the search engines incorrectly.  For the small investment, it’s a simple solution.  You can direct the less desired name to the more desired url so they both ‘get you there’!

10. Branding, memorable, unique

Whatever you decide to use for your domain name, it has to be something that you are proud of and that you feel will represent your company and brand the way you want it to be perceived.  Names that sounds like everyone else tend to fade into the background.  The old days of acronyms and using letters just doesn’t seem to work as well in today’s environment of search engine optimization and being found.

FREE Website analysisWhether you elect to use your company name or be creative and use a unique spelling, it’s important to do so understanding the pros and cons, and making an educated decision.

What were some of the concerns you had when creating your domain? If you ignored the advice above, what was your rationale?  Please share your thoughts and comments.

WebMarCom is an Internet strategy and Web Marketing Communications Agency based in South Jersey and Philadelphia.

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Social Media Marketing Tips: How To Optimize Your Blog

Social media marketing and website optimization are dependentBlogging social media upon adding content on an ongoing basis. Business blogging is a part of social media marketing where you can add dynamic keyword-rich content to a website.  Assuming that the blog is part of the website, the blog can be a forum to express ideas, philosophies and share information.

Understanding the power of a blog includes making the commitment to use the blog in a way that it adds value to the website.  Simply having a blog that is dormant does not add interest or value.

Many businesses make the mistake of having a blog, but then underutilize it.  Here are three key blogging best practices that can help power your blog and help to optimize it’s value to your Internet marketing program and your website:

1. Blog often.

If you have a blog and you aren’t adding to it, it’s not really a blog.  Blogs are meant to be living, breathing and dynamic content for your website.  If you haven’t yet made the commitment, you really should blog at least once a week.  Obviously if you can blog more, then you have more opportunities to connect with a potential customer.

2. Use keywords.

If you write for your blog without considering keywords in your content, you are missing a huge opportunity.  Determing which keywords are effective and then weaving them into your articles can help your blog be discovered in Google searches.  Using the Google keyword tool is a free way to evaluate keywords.  Another trick is to use Google Analytics to evaluate how people are finding your website in order to focus on those topics.

3. Don’t sell.

Blogs add the  most value to the website, when they complement the site, but are not sales oriented.  Don’t make the mistake of using your blog just to pitch your products.  Share information, thoughts, lists, ideas on topics that could potentially be of interest to your customers. By sharing information, you position yourself as an expert and a go-to source.

If you follow these best practices for blogging, be sure to stick to them. Like starting an exercise program or a diet, it’s only as effective as your commitment.

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Redesigning The Home Page? 8 Common Website Mistakes To Avoid

Home page redesign, website redesignRedesigning the Website Homepage can result in greatly improved conversions when done well.  The first trick is finding a website designer who understands inbound marketing.    The process should begin with an evaluation of your existing online marketing campaign as well as your website to ensure that all  components work together in an effective and coordinated way.

What, you don’t have an online marketing strategy?  

The parts of an online campaign are critical to assuring your ongoing brand development and business success.  Not only is your website the foundation, it is also the most important asset because it is the one online asset that you have almost complete control over.  Unlike any social networking channel online, the website content is added or changed under your own direction.  Other than the search engine, such as Google, introducing new algorithms, your website is the mainstay of your online marketing program.   Even with those changes,  if you are following Google Best Practices, you will never be hurt by an algorithm change.

What’s wrong with the website?

If you don’t know how your website is performing, you won’t know how to fix it.  Without any analytics, you are operating in the dark.  Having a track record to improve gives you a benchmark.  If you don’t know what is going on with your site, if you have no clue how many visits you have on a monthly, daily, weekly basis, how will you know if your site is performing?  One fundamental mistake many web designers make is to look only at the aesthetics of the site without understanding whether it is effective.

If you don’t know anything about the types of visits you have, how many there are, what your bounce rate is  or why your visitors are leaving, you should absolutely install tracking to assure that you have this information.   Tracking can be done using Google Analytics, which is a wonderful (and free) tool, or can be accomplished by installing one of a number of software solutions including Moz (formerly SEOmoz), Hubspot, Raventools, etc.

Why Change The HOME Page Of Your Website?

The goal of a website redesign should be to improve your conversions.  That is the to improve the website in such a way as to appeal more appropriately to the audience who is interested in your services.  To do this, you will need to be able to be found, by the right prospects or potential customers for the right reasons.

Improving the design of your HOME page goes beyond the “look and feel” of the website.  It’s making the HOME page the doorway to the information that your customers are seeking.

Some companies decide to “redesign due organizational change”.  In the case of an aquisition or merger,  redesign may be necessary to re-brand the “new” emerging entity.   The HUGE mistake that is typically made is to hire a web development company to do a new website, and in the process they are blowing up both the pre-existing sites and starting from scratch.  The new site has no authority, no credibility and no inbound links.  The old URLs which may have been out there for years are sometimes discarded,  and are then available to be picked up by a offshore scavenger who will build a site to take advantage of whatever SEO juice is left, and then re-direct those visitors, potentially to your competition!   Why not salvage the domain, the goodwill, the existing “SEO juice”, to redirect to the newly branded website?   Apparently there are  “web designers” or “website developers” who do not have a clue what destruction they have done by creating the new, beautiful website, and as the business owner, you are relying upon their expertise.

Don’t make these mistakes.   Before moving to a new website design, be sure your web developer is following these best practices by avoiding these 8 website design or website redesign mistakes.  :

  1. Indexable content.  Having a beautiful website with complex graphic design may make the CEO very happy.  Unfortunately, many of the beautiful website designs are not created with SEO in mind.  If you see pictures that include words, this is not the same as a search engine sees it.  In fact, you can read ‘content’ that is a picture.  Search engines cannot.  I had one client who did not understand why her website was not ranking for her most important keyword until I pointed out to her that most of the instances of her keyword were in a graphic form.  Another new client came to me with a recently re-designed website that has zero authority.  The company had been around for over ten years, but in creating the new design, the principals had decided to use an acronym as the new URL.  Unfortunately, no one realized to redirect the old URL and no mention of the old company name was even on the page!  This certainly does not help clients find the website, but also, it just threw away all of the old sites authority.   The bottom line, make sure your website is indexible and that your keywords are content, not images.
  2. Keywords.   One of the most critical things that I work with for my clients are discovering the best keywords for their product or service.  By keywords, it’s important to forgo the jargon and figure out what words your customers and prospects use to find you.  Believe it or not, while it’s noble to assume that you can educate an audience to discovering what you mean when you have created or coined a new phrase… you probably do not have enough money in your marketing budget to make that make sense.  It makes marketing so much easier and organic to use the phrases your customer’s use to refer to what you do.  Also, ask your sales team what is imporatnt to your customers.  If you can address what a prospect is searching, you are more likely to show up in that prospect’s search results.  Ditch that jargon!
  3. Load time.  Beautiful images are nice, but if the file is too large, the site load time is longer.  Not only does Google penalize long load times, your customer is unlikely to hang out and wait to see the magnificence that your web designer has created.  Nope.  In this day and age of instant everything, we (your audience) want to see what we want to see when we want to see it.  We are not waiting. If your site takes too long to load because its too graphic heavy, we are on to your competitor’s site.  Don’t expect loyalty from a web search.
  4. Clean message. By clean message, what I mean is that your HOME page is not cluttered and confusing.  It should be clean.  In print advertising we used to refer to the ‘clean’ness as “white space”.  There is no need to create multiple images that fight for a viewer’s attention.  To the contrary, the site should have a clear idea before its created as to where the viewers eye should travel and what makes sense for that visual message.  If your site is too busy and disorganized, you are not sharing a clean message.
  5. Clear message.  Now that we have discussed the visual path, let’s make sure that the message that a visitor to our website can absorb.  Don’t make the message obtuse or too clever – if you do, your visitor will hop away to the next website just as quickly.  I worked with one client who insisted that they wanted their website to look like a whiteboard and they spent a lot of time and money to have the visual elements designed for that theme.  What was missing was the message of what they actually do.  They are a printing company, and if you dig, you can find that out.  Of course, that was a huge challenge to overcome by optimizing the content.  The message ideally should be obvious when someone lands on your site as to what you offer and what you do.  If it’s not, go back to the drawing board and rethink your concept. Don’t try to be overly cute. It just doesn’t work.
  6. Contact info.  One of the biggest mistakes I see is when contact information is buried in a website on the contact page. Sure, it’s a great place to have your contact information, but why not feature a good way to contact you on every page of your website.  One of the most effective websites I have worked on has a contact us box on everypage that is coded to indicate what page the lead came from.  This website has hundreds of leads on an ongoing basis.   Understanding that you should not make someone work through multiple clicks to get in touch is critical to conversions.
  7. Clear Call To Action.  So now your website can be discovered, you have a remarkable design that is indexible for the righ keywords, and traffic is through the roof!  You are still not done.  High traffic to your website does not necessarily correlate into business in your cash register.  You must build a clear, call-to-action that suggests what the next steps should be for your prospect.
  8. Branding.  Above all, keep in mind that every piece of your marketing campaign including your website should reflect appropriate branding messages.  Whether your brand is identifiable by color, font, graphic identity, cutting humor, be sure to be consistent across all platforms, including and especially your website.  If you have inconsistent collateral, you are wasting an opportunity to share and reinforce your branding identity.   By having all the pieces of the puzzle work in unison, you are reinforcing the message and increasing the potential for your message to be identified easily.   Use the same font, logo, colors and messaging across all social media platforms as well as your website, print collateral and any brochures or advertising that you do.  Keep the tone of all the collateral consistent as well and your marketing dollars will work harder for you.
What mistakes have you seen in website or homepage redesign?  Are you considering a refresh and would like some advise?  Give us a call or share your experience…

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SEO And Business Marketing – How To Optimize Your Website

Optimize website for search“How do I optimize my website for keywords and Google search?”

This is one of the most frequent questions I hear when I do public speaking on Internet marketing.

The falacy with optimizing for search is that “search” is not a customer.  While it’s great (and certainly an ego stroke) to rank high in the search engines for keyword phrases (that you think are important) the reality is that keyword searches are not necessarily synonymous with customers.

One of the biggest mistakes small businesses make with their websites is thinking that they can figure out what keywords their customers are going to use.  There are metrics that tell us what phrases and words are more popular than others… but this is not always the solution that we used to think it was.  Here’s a quick example.  We live in a area near Philadelphia, but really it’s South Jersey.  It can be referred to as the Delaware Valley which encompasses an area that could be construed to include the Philadelphia metro.  The reality is that customers don’t refer to themselves as living in the Delaware Valley, even though media does.  I had a customer who had a telecom business who insisted that was where their service area was.  It wasn’t until we started to divide the “Delaware Valley” into the smaller geographic areas, and referring to them as Montgomery County, Doylestown, Cherry Hill or Philly (versus Philadelphia) and using these phrases in our web content that we started to see results.  Zip codes are also important if you have a business that services a very distinct geography.

But optimizing for your customer is a different process than optimizing for search, although by doing the first, you will succeed at the second.

What do you need to know to optimize for your customer?  Well first, you need to know what your product is.  Not what your product is to you but what your product is for your customer.  A big mistake that many small business owners make it attempting to select their own keywords.  This is a mistake because you are referring to your products and what you do by the terminology you use, which may be inconsistent with what your customer calls it.

When describing what your offer is, it’s ok to use several ways to describe it.   There may be customers who refer to your product in different ways.  Where you don’t want to use different phrases or looks is when referring to your brand.  There is only one company that I know of that gets away with a ton of different treatments of its brand, and yet is incredibly recognizable, and that is Harley Davidson.  You see their logo played with in many different fonts, sizes and even colors.  If you had a marketing budget the size of Harley Davidson, you may want to play with your image that way, however, most companies pick a logo and brand identity, then reinforce it every where.  If you take out your business card, any brochures  you produce and put them in front of your computer screen, you logo should appear the same on all.

So, ask your customers – what is it that you are searching for when you look for what we sell.  You may be surprised.  Understanding what appeals to your current customers may not be what you thought you were selling.   I spoke with one gent who thought he sold office furniture… and he paid someone to optimize his website for terms related to office furniture.  That’s not what he was selling at all  – he sells office planning and he is experienced in putting together efficient space for a new office.  If you like the plan, he can spec and get excellent pricing on the office furniture, but he has no showroom and he is not competitive if you only want to buy a chair.

What is it you really do?  What is your competitive advantage. How can you stand out from the crowd and help your prospects find you?  That’s the real secret of search engine optimization. Once you understand why your customers want to work with you and do business with you, use their words to describe it, and you have a fairly strong foundation for building your SEO program.

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Jody Raines Shares Best Call To Action Ideas – WebMarCom (Web Marketing Communications)

Best Call To Action IdeasOne of the questions I hear frequently when doing Inbound Marketing is how to create compelling Call To Action offers. The concept of creating usable informative tools is not difficult, but can take some time to come up with offers that are enticing and interesting. It also takes understanding who your audience is, and where they are in the sales funnel.

Just like keywords, you can determine where you customer is in the buying process by the types of information that they are looking for. For example, if your prospect is downloading very general information, they are most likely in the initial states of their search. If they keyword search is more specific, or a long tail keyword, then the prospect is further along in his or her research and closer to the buying stage.

Having offers at all the stages of the sales funnel will help potential customers find you, and also give you insight and analysis into the process that your client goes through. You may find that there are commonalities with regard to the questions that are asked by your customers. By offering information that helps nurture the prospect, you are developing the lead and helping them become a customer.

There are many ways to create content for website visitors to download. Downloadable content  and offers that appeal to a target audience is a critical component of inbound marketing.

Creating a call to action is a way to help your prospects find answers to their questions, download valuable information (to them) and in doing so, self-identify as a potential customer or lead.  There are many ways to put information together for your prospects.  Here are a few of the the Best Call To Action ideas to enhance conversions:

  1. Whitepaper or eBook: You can also write a whitepaper or eBook from a previous research study or data set. Compile three (3) to five (5) blog posts that discussed similar topics and combine them into a whitepaper or eBook.
  2. Top 10 Industry Trends: Document the ten latest trends impacting your industry this year. Write a short summary on 10 new industry developments or write what you think will be the 10 biggest changes to your industry during the next year.
  3. How-To Guides: Create simple guides for your prospects to download and help them with a problem. For example, if you’re selling mortgages, create a guide to picking the right mortgage for you.
  4. Product Demo Video: Create a video that shows off all of your product’s features and benefits. At the end of the video give the lead an option to download a product tip sheet guide.
  5. Product Tip Sheet Guide: Create a product tip sheet guide that outlines how people could use your product or service to help them with their problem or need. For example, you’re selling backup software. Create a guide that outlines how people can use you’re backup software to decrease their backup costs and lower IT support time.
  6. Common Questions: Write down the 10 or 20 questions you most commonly hear and create a tip sheet or guide that answers each question.
  7. Checklist: Create a checklist of steps people could take to solve the problem that your product/service solves. For example, if you’re a moving service you could create a downloadable packing checklist.
  8. Case Studies: Show off your leading customers and share their success with future customer. Video record their testimonial for even more content and to build credibility. Offer the case study to be downloaded.
  9. LinkedIn Question and Answers: Go to LinkedIn Answers and find every question and answer that relates to your industry. Compile them together in an eBook format.
  10. PowerPoint Presentations: Use your PowerPoint presentations and turn them into compelling offers. Post the presentations on SlideShare and embed them into blog articles.
  11. Kits of Material: Compile some of your related eBooks, guides, tip sheets and blog articles into a compelling downloadable kit offer.
  12. Expert Interview Videos: Interview the experts at your company and have them answer common questions for prospects. Use the videos as a way to build credibility and a relationship with your leads
  13. Sales Team Materials: Work with your sales to determine what content they think quality prospects would like to download. This can really help you if you’re having a problem with creating

quality leads for your sales team.

The Golden Rule: Use each piece of content in at least four different ways. For example, you create a whitepaper and you promote the whitepaper by writing a series of blog articles, sending out a press release, using the whitepaper in lead nurturing emails, and adding it to your monthly newsletter

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What Is A Smart Marketing Goal? And How Do You Set Them?

smart marketing goalsInternet marketing without goals, or traditional marketing without goals is a crapshoot.  It’s throwing stuff at the wall and hoping it sticks, without a guide or way to measure whether you are effective or not.   One of my favorite expressions is the definition of insanity – you know doing the same thing over and over and hoping for a different result?  Well if that describes your marketing efforts, you should stop, take a deep breath and resolve that today is the day you are going to do something different to move the bar farward.

We used to refer to our marketing goals as Key Performance Metrics or KPI’s.   If you were rating your employees, you would put together a list of the metrics of what would constitute success in that role.  Why would business marketing be any different?  If you don’t set goals, then you have no idea whether you’ve made progress or not.

Ironically, many of the marketing agencies that spring into existance offer to help you with your social media profile or build you a website, without starting with the reasons  you need marketing in the first place – and that is – to generate business.  If you take it a step farther and start to evaluate your online business, you will see that it becomes even more important for your marketing to be held accountable to the metrics that you establish.   So, how does it happen that so many companies practice buckshot marketing and roll the dice instead of being laser focused on their goals?

I was recently consulting for a company that had a marketing crisis. They had an internal goal that a specific email campaign would be launched by a date certain.  They contacted me, and asked whether we could meet their goal.  Eager to help them, I assured them we could.  This was a mistake.  We got stuck in the tactics of getting an email campaign out the door and doing buckshot marketing, instead of defining what we hoped to achieve and then plotting the best course of action to achieve that goal.  The email went out, the results were OK, but to tell you t he truth, we got lucky.

Inbound marketing should be goal driven and a great way to remember how to define those goals is to use the Smart Marketing method.   S.M.A.R.T. is actually an acronym for remembering how to craft a goal that makes sense.   We want to be sure that our goals are:

  • Specific – The more specific the goal, the better we can define the process needed to achieve it.  Having a vague goal does not give you a target to shoot for.   The goal can target specific behaviors, such as visits, leads or customers, but there should be a target for the action.
  • Measurable – The number or percentage of improvement should be stated in the goal as well.  If the goal does not have a way to measure it, you won’t know how close you came or whether you achieved the goal or not.  It’s permissible to have a goal of 1 if you  are doing something you’ve never done before.   You may not know how many to anticipate, but when you have a history and benchmark to work from, you can set quantifiable results to be targeted.
  • Attainable – Just stating a number or a percentage increase is not helpful if that goal is not realistically achievable.
  • Relevent – If your goal is to increase traffic and the traffic does not lead to conversions, the question that raises is whether the goal of improving traffic was even relevent to the overall goal of driving conversions and sales.   If the goal cannot be correlated to something that is relevent for your business model, then it’s not a smart marketing goal.
  • Timely – for a goal to be a metric, you need to set a time frame.  Establishing a reasonable time frame based upon historical information will determine whether your goal is attainable.  Just having a goal without a deadline is not setting a standard for achievement.

The types of goals that would fit into the “smart marketing” metrics would include things like:

  • Improve site visits by 25% for the next quarter.
  • Increase leads by 10% over the next six months by adding 4 new call-to-action devices and improving landing pages.
  • Generate 3 new customers in the next thirty days for the new platform just released.

If you need help creating and defining goals, it’s sometimes helpful to evaluate your current metrics.  Often I have tremendous inspiration when working with clients and evaluating how their site is currently performing.   If we see that there are more visits than usual for certain keywords, or higher visits than normal, we then evaluate why that could be and that may lead to a new opportunity or goal.  Conversely, if we see the bounce rate on specific pages of the site is very high, we can then work to identify the cause of that bounce rate, and create new content that is better aligned with our customer’s expectations.

How do you create marketing goals?  How do you measure your progress towards achieving these goals.  Do you find goals to be helpful and motivational or demotivational?

 

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Twerking Or Smarketing? What’s Worse?

smarketing Twerking has officially been added to the Oxford Dictionary, thanks, in part to Mylie Cyrus’s exhibitionist performance during the MTV Video Music Awards.   Appparenty “twerk” is a verb, as in “to twerk”, which involves provacatively thrusting and grinding the hips in a squatting stance.   Personally, I find it to be a bit graceless and less-than-sexy, but I am also not a fan of Ms. Cyrus and found her dance to be pretty lame and other than being suggestive, pretty pathetic.

My understanding is the the term “twerking” was derived from Hip Hop, and may have been a variation of the phrase “working” it.

No one is immune from the “twerk smirk”…  And while it may have been bad, it’s “Breaking Bad” worthy.   Check out the looks of horror on Hank and Marie’s face as they watch Miley make a fool of herself…

So how is Twerking like Smarketing?  And what the heck is “smarketing“.

Smarketing seems to be one of those phrases that otherwise intelligent people have come up with to describe a unified sales and marketing approach.  To me, the term “smarketing” is like nails on a blackboard… It’s so annoying and it makes me grit my teeth when I hear pseudo marketers trying impress using this phrase.   Anyone who has been around more than ten minutes realizes that marketing and sales must absolutely work together to succeed, and if they miss that point, they are going to be left behind in the dust.

So is there some scientific explanation that can explain the Twerking and Smarketing phenomena?   It’s had to say,but apparently it may not be appropriate for anyone over the age of 25!

One thing is for sure, both “Smarketing” and “Twerking” can make you look, well, stupid!

smarketing twerking

 

 

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Top 5 Keyword Phrases For Best Practice Marketing Campaign Conversion

best practices keywordsSearch Engine Optimization gets traffic to your website.  Traffic is great, but it’s the conversions that become leads that are important. Marketing that converts is the best kind of marketing because you can prove a cause and effect and therefore determine a return on the marketing investment.

How do you know what the best marketing keyword phrases are, and how do you measure whether they are effective for your customer.  Believe it or not, sometimes “free” is a turnoff.  Using testing methods, you can create two seperate campaigns and test whether the word “free” or the word “complimentary” are more effective for your product.  I’ve had situations where customers will refuse something that is ‘free’ because they did not perceive the word ‘free’ to be credible.  Be sure that whatever keyword, phrase or positioning statement you are testing is believable and realistic for your brand.

Another client of mine was working on a campaign that said they were the ‘best’ at something that they had never offered.  This was a launch campaign.  Could they be the best?  It’s possible, but not probable and certainly not credible if they’ve never offered a service or product like that before.  So, before accepting that a word is terrific, consider your circumstance, your customer and your message, then evaluate whether the word or phrase is believeable.  Keep in mind that if you are promoting a sale, it should truly be a sale.  Several department stores got into hot water recently because they raised their prices, then promoted a percentage off savings.  When the “sale” was picked up by the media, it resulted in some very bad publicity for the retailers.  Especially because the marketplace is so competitive, losing credibility will result in lost revenue.  To the extent that the expose becomes viral, the resulting damage to reputation can become catastrophic.

Marketing ROI

The first key to creating a strong case for a specific keyword or keyword phrase is to understand what your marketing goals and objectives are, and establish a baseline, and lift goals.  If your CEO ever asks what the return is on his marketing investment, you should be prepared with each campaign – what the goals were, what the budget was, what the lift in sales or views or whatever the metric was and then you can calculate what the return in on the investment (ROI) would be for that effort.

As you track your marketing campaigns you will start to discover that there are certain ‘magic’ keywords that  evoke higher response rates than others.   If you do A/B testing, you can determine what words work and resonsate with your audience. The ability to continuously change, improve, enhance and evolve your content in order  to determine what works best is one of the coolest features of Inbound Marketing.  It’s similar to the way a supermarket uses a planogram to layout the store and test products at the end of an aisle.  You have the ability to manipulate words, color, photos and content to continuously improve results.

With multiple view over time, you will clearly see what  words work better than others…and what doesn’t work.  There are obviously best marketing practices and best keywords that drive conversions. Language that is tested and which resonates with your audience can be a key determinant  for inbound leads.  That includes not only quantity, but also quality of inbound leads.

Some of the best offers use what has been referred to as ‘magic phrases’ that generally are more likely to evoke a response than other phrases.  Testing these phrases is a great idea in a dynamic media like a website, social media campaign or email marketing campaign. This list of the top five keyword phrases is borrowed from the Direct Marketing industry, where the cost of printing and mailing postage has forced marketers to take a hard look at what works or what doesn’t work, and prove the return on investment for marketing expenses.

Magic phrases of direct marketing:
Some phrases and keywords will evoke greater response than others.  Here’s a short list of some of the most powerful phrases:

  1. FREE.  Yes, ‘free’ does work best.  Even if used in a way that seems redundant, such as “free gift” versus “gift”, using the word “Free” is a powerful tool for conversions.
  2. NO OBLIGATION.  When coupled with the word “Free”, this makes an offer more reassuring and less scary to jump into.
  3. LIMITED TIME.  Having a deadline for response creates a sense of immediacy.  Without a timed opportunity, the tendency may be to put the offer away to look at it more thoroughly later.  Giving a time ultimatum moves the importance to a more immediate review.
  4. NEW.  This is a great way to have people take another look.  Who doesn’t want to see what the new features are, especially if they liked or purchased before.
  5. ANNOUNCING. Another powerful motivator – people like to know that they are among the first to view something or to be int he know.  Using “announcing” triggers an early response mechanism.

What other words have you noticed that trigger action?  Are there words that you’ve used that you find important motivators?

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