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 Marketing And Your Online Brand

Jody Raines, social media tools

Social Media tools and your online brand

Your website is only a part of your online campaign for online branding. Granted,an optimized website is the most important component of your online marketing strategy, however even with the most glorious and well thought-out website, you may be missing huge opportunities to support your product, champion your brand and connect with your customers and prospects.

Social media marketing was a “buzzword” that we started to discuss a several years ago.   You may also have heard the terminology “new marketing” or “online marketing” or even “inbound marketing”.  The concept is to create an optimized online presence to help your customers find you and your business.  A lot of the social media “guru’ types talked about “engagement” and there was much nodding of heads.  But the reality is that there is very little engagement happening, even today, because so many companies have opted to run automated campaigns.

I’m not against all automation, but it just does not work for every organization in every situation. Especially in times of high national tension, when the focus is on an earthquake or superstorm, having an automated message about sunny skies is a real disconnect with your audience. The worst thing you can to is have your customers disengage, opt out, and disconnect.   Now, those wonderful social channels have worked against you.

If I had to pick one word to describe the best practices for social media marketing, that word would be responsive.  Not only are we striving for responsive design in websites, but we also should be responsive to our audience and to the societal and cultural changes around us.  If you are responsive, you are creating content that is relevant and that has true appeal to your targeted customers.

A responsive website is one that fluidly re-conforms to the device it is being viewed on.  Newer websites are being created that have this feature built in.  Some of the older websites have both a desktop version and a mobile version.  Without getting too technical, what you want to be sure to do is to present the version that is best viewed on the device that the viewer is using at the time they visit your site.  It makes perfect sense, right?

One of my biggest frustrations is one of the news alert services that I use that sends me a link to an article that I want to read.  When I click on the link, I’m taken to a general page that may or may not contain the article.   Eventually, I stop clicking on the link and ignore the alert.  I may even unsubscribe from the alert.  This is no different than putting the wrong terminology or advertising or teaser to an article, then sending the reader to a site that is so general, they get turned off. Social media is an awesome tool to drive traffic to your site – just be sure that the link is truly the target of the tweet or Facebook post.  Otherwise, you will lose customers.

When it comes to internet branding and social media optimization, the rules for marketing have changed, and without a social media presence, you will be a dinosaur.  Customers are searching and researching using the Internet. There is an entire generation that is growing up in a world where using Google is second nature to find answers.  The changes that search engines have gone through are taken in stride, and adopted readily.   To be sure that your online brand is being appropriately represented in today’s informational society means you have to be relevent and  you have to be present. That includes social media.   The old excuse that your customers don’t use social media is becoming tired and inaccurate.  Your customers use social media, and they use it every day. They may be checking their email first thing in the morning, which includes their Facebook statuses and their friend’s updates.  The way we communicate is much more fluid, more rapid and most likely, online.

Be aware of derogatory messages about your brand and be responsive.   Don’t hide from critical reviews, but address them with equally positive reviews from your customers.

Social media marketing, is first social, second media, and third marketing.  Keeping this in perspective will go a long way to your successful online branding and internet marketing campaign.

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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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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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Social Media Marketing And Inbound Marketing Trends For 2014

Social Media Trends, Social Marketing TrendsWant your online marketing to be a Knock Out?

Internet marketing trends continue to evolve and as we enter the new calendar year we evaluate what the Internet marketing trends will be, and what the impact will be on social media marketing or inbound marketing.  Some of the changes we are tracking will have great impact on the way we communicate using the Internet.

  1. Semantic Search Yields Improved Results. The world of Google and search changed with the introduction of Hummingbird and the birth of semantic search.  What this means is that search is more intelligent and adaptive.  The old days of matching specific keywords for “optimized search” results are hopefully dead.  Long live the new SEO and semantic search results.  With a more intelligent and personalized result, the old days of ‘gaming’ the search engines are hopefully over.  A new dawn of improved search results will dictate that websites become more serious about improved and helpful content.  If the information is simply ‘marketing pablum’ with keywords sprinkled through the text, it will no longer garner top placement or search engine rankings.
  2. Mobile’s Influence On Responsive Web Design And Marketing. It still amazes me when I am searching for a company or service or product on my mobile device and the result is difficult to read or evaluate.  More and more, mobile has become the way we find what we are looking for, and if your website is not mobile enabled, you will be knocked out of the game.  Google Webmaster Tools even offers some best practices for mobile websites.  This past Holiday season, statistics show that over 25% of online purchasing was done on a mobile device.  With the increasing number of transactions and searches being performed on mobile devices, mobile responsive web design will be a huge factor for online marketing success moving forward.
  3. Social Video, Real Time Increase In Offers And Adoption.  Google+ was revolutionary with the Hangout and Hangouts On Air platforms. Integrating with YouTube (the #2 search engine) makes G+ Hangouts an important tool for 2014 and beyond.  Many traditionally audio podcasts have made the transition to video.   In fact, video production and embedding have become relatively easy.  There are tremendous advances in editing software that makes video production more attainable for the general population.   Apple has proven that you can use an iPhone as an all in one video capture and editing platform for creating surprisingly professional results.
  4. Wearable Technology And The Dick Tracy Era. Wearing your heart on a sleeve will take a back seat to wearing your phone on your wrist.  Jewelers who lamented the fact that no one wears watches any more are now excited about trends in wristwear that incorporate technology.  Whether it’s a watch that monitors your phone messages or records video or monitors your exercise, the way that we will communicate in the future is making great changes.  Google glass has had it’s blips and false starts, but generally its an exciting new technology.  At $1500 a pop, people have to wait to get an invitation to even line up to purchase the device.  Seems a bit expensive to have glasses that take pictures or record video, and perhaps the early adopters are reluctant to share the Emperor’s clothing scenario, but it’s definitely a trend to watch.
  5. Business Networking Expanded.  In the age of Linkedin, Quora, Google Plus and other networks that have a business edge, the importance of business networking, both online and in person has been escalated.  No longer can a company grow without a network of evangelists.  Brand evangelists will do the job of spreading the word better and faster and with greater credibility than the company can through advertising or other methods.
  6. Consolidation of Social Platforms. As social media platforms evolve, there is a tendency for them to become more and more similar.  When LinkedIn and Facebook added a Twitter-like stream, then when Twitter added a new improved Facebook-like wall the fuzzy differentiation became even more diffuse.  As Google+ and Facebook vie for social dominance with the newer entries like Pinterest and Jelly, the delineation will become blurred, and the fast pace of absorbing the newer, successful social channels will increase.  The good news is that the same skills for engagement and sharing social content that have helped to develop associations in the past will continue to be important, and those who have mastered the ability to identify and connect with influencers will continue to have success.
  7. Analytical Information Gains Importance. Does your social media program work?  How would you know.  Identifying measurable goals then finding a way to determine progress towards those goals will be the lifeblood of any social media program.  If a company is involved in social media, it’s not to say that every tweet or post or like has to be a contrived part of a plan, however the messaging and momentum should be consistent, especially in organizations where there could be more than one voice for the company.
  8. Sharing is the New SEO.  While Facebook celebrates its tenth birthday, social media and the era of engagement and sharing has blossomed and in some cases, social sharing has greater credibility than the old formula for inbound links.  The age of semantic marketing, of creating content that is meaningful and not just a mish mosh of keywords has begun.  For your web presence to be important, you must contribute and those contributions must be recognized by third parties. To the extent that you are tweeting or “liking” or “plussing” or being Best Call To Action Ideastweeted, liked or plussed, that is the way your authority and web presence will grow.
  9. Demands for Privacy Escalate. (The Downfall of Big Data).  Eric Snowden may have brought new focus to this issue, but it was there before the NSA backlash began.  In fact, there have been waves of people proclaiming loudly that they are leaving Facebook due to concerns about privacy, only to be  lured back and lulled into ambivalence by the comforting presence of their peers.  Just because other people are doing it, does not make it save and more and more the call for the opportunity to hide or block information has become louder and more strident.
  10. Accountability Of Individuals. (Reductions in Cyber threats, anonymous trolls, spam) Recently Google made a rather bold change in they way comments on YouTube videos are posted.  The comments are linked to a Google account and appear on Google+.  The anonymous troll who used to post derogatory and inflammatory comments is limited to a greater extent than ever before.  Whether the individual tries to obscure his or her identity or creates pseudonyms, the fact is that this is getting harder and more difficult than ever before.  Perhaps by making individuals accountable for their actions and words, we can begin to put a stop to cyber threats and online harassment.  Then again, if the person is truly “off their rocker”,  its evident by their posts.  Well, more appropriately clear to everyone except the perpetrator… The good news is that the public is demanding great accountability of organizations and individuals, and decrying those cowards who troll the Internet with the intent to do harm.

Have you identified additional trends? I’d love to hear about them and learn your thoughts – please share you ideas with whether you agree (or disagree) with these trends, and also whether you feel that there are even greater waves of change coming?

Giving the One, Two Punch to Improve Web Marketing Communications.

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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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