After bypassing the cyborg comments he makes some pretty profound statements that Google should be a “good assistant,” “understand the context,” and “synthesize information.” But more importantly he goes on to say that Google should be able to handle difficult syntax not just by data or knowledge but towards analysis and wisdom. Now what does that mean?

Quick Algorithm Recap

In the famous words of Hitch “You can’t know where you’re going until you know where you’ve been,” so to get a better understanding of the future lets back up a few years and look at what Google has done with previous algorithm updates. I am only going to hit on the high points, but if you want to go further I would recommend referencing SEO Moz’s Algorithm History.

• Florida Update – November 2003
• Paid Links – October 2007
• Rel Canonical – February 2009
• Social Signals – December 2010
• Panda – February 2011
• Google Authorship – June 2011
• Penguin – April 2012
• Knowledge Graph – May 2012
• EMD Update – September 2012

Many of the previous algorithm updates and iterations listed were aimed to dismantle spam, technical manipulation, and improving their infrastructure. It took over a decade of progress before Google was even able to begin to tackle the context issue.

Google Authorship and the Knowledge Graph implementation was the catalyst to bring data together in a sensible format. The Knowledge Graph pulls data from reliable sources to show images, descriptions, background information, people involved, and other related information while Google Authorship connects content with a specific author. The Knowledge Graph is even more sophisticated than it would appear at first glance. Bill Slawski at SEO by the Sea has uncovered that the information in knowledge graphs can be dynamic depending on what users are searching for, so not all knowledge graphs are created equal.

Back to the Present

So what does Matt Cutts mean when he says that search will be going toward analysis and wisdom? The simple answer is Google wants to answer every single question the user has on the very first try and if possible before the user even asks the question.

In an article in the Guardian, Google’s CEO Larry Page said that they are trying to reduce every possible friction between the user, their thoughts, and the information they want to find. He even mentions brain implants to answer questions at the time a thought originates. Maybe Larry and Matt are in cahoots to make us all cyborgs. But I digress…

In order for Google to get to the point where they can answer every possible question a couple of things have to occur. They need to have access to a lot of data and a way to relationally put it together. Part of the data gathering process has already been explained above with Google Authorship and the Knowledge Graph, but lets continue going down the rabbit trail on more sources they are using to get data.

First they have Google Analytics which is installed on millions of websites. Have you ever wondered why Google Analytics is free for up to 10 million pageviews a month? It is the amount of data that is now at their disposal. Google makes it very easy for you to share your data with them. When you’re setting up a Google Analytics account, they have conveniently pre-checked all the data sharing settings for you even though they are technically optional. This data allows them to understand user behavior for individual websites but more importantly for different verticals.

Let’s not forget that Google has been fighting for more of the web browser market share.  But why would they create a web browser when there was so much competition when they launched? The answer is simple. Data. Mike King has even presented his case that Chrome is actually Google Bot in disguise. It makes sense if you think about it. Through Chrome, Google can easily follow user behavior even if they never use Google Search.  If the webmaster decided not to share their data through Google Analytics, Google can still know page load times, duration on a page, or any other user behavior metric. Chrome can find websites that the regular Google Bot might miss as long as the user types the domain directly into the browser. No more hiding from the search giant!

(And if that wasn’t enough)

Google would have been the second largest Internet Service Provider based on its infrastructure a year ago.  That is if back then they offered that as a service. Fast forward a year and Google has already established a foothold in Kansas, Missouri, Texas, and Utah for its own broadband service called Google Fiber. Becoming an ISP elevates Google to a completely different level in gathering user data. Now they have the power to track information beyond websites. Just like analytics they are giving away Internet access up to 5Mbps for at least 7 years! Who would say “No” to saving $30 on their Internet bill? Please don’t be surprised. They already have the infrastructure in place and spent a billion dollars on its infrastructure last quarter. What matters to them is the data they will have at their disposal. Google’s reach now goes beyond the web browser and can now know what songs you like to listen to on Pandora or Spotify, messages sent through programs such as Skype or Trillian, files being transferred through Dropbox and the new Adobe Creative Suite, and the list can go on. Anything that can be sent over the Internet can now be tracked. Google Bot is transforming like Optimus Prime.

I won’t even start with the new Google Maps, Google Glasses, Google+, or the largest email network in the world called Gmail…

Back to the Future

When does all this information gathering stop? Google is hoarding companies like there is about to be a capitalism apocalypse, but the stockpile keeps adding more potential ways to get data. It wouldn’t surprise me if Google continues to extend its reach outside of the digital realm.

Think about it. After setting itself up as an ISP, it will be one step away from being a legitimate competitor in cable services. Then not only would Google know that you “Like” The Big Bang Theory, but it will be able to know exactly how much you like it. Do you watch it every time it comes on, or do you watch the first 10 minutes of it before you change the channel to the local news? Maybe you are just an occasional Wednesday night viewer. Before you know it Google TV will offer personalized TV ads. It won’t be hard. All they will have to do is match their personalized online data with the cable account. No other company would have enough information to compete. Google’s only threat will be being classified as a monopoly by the U.S. government. But then again with all this potential information being stored by one company I am surprised not more people are following the road of CISPA through Congress.

The once linear algorithm of links and pagerank is going to evolve. It’s becoming more dynamic due to artificial intelligence. Wil Reynolds has even seen this machine learning in action. Google recognizes his acronym #RCS as Real Company Stuff though the acronym was only created a few months ago. I guarantee that was not done manually. The improvements in their algorithms have come from acquisitions like DNNresearch Inc which was a machine learning company discovered through its award program. These acquisitions along with their own AI research is beginning to create a paradigm shift in how concepts appear to be connected.

One thing is for certain the search experience will become much more personalized than it is already when Google has more data to sift through. It will be the assistant that doesn’t need keywords. Soon the days of the lopsided algorithm that currently consist of who has the most authorative backlinks will begin to be a thing of the past.

Love what you read? Hate what you read? Either way I want to hear from you in the comments below.

When done consistently and correctly, quality content will improve search engine rankings, drive new traffic to websites and nurture leads into customers for years to come. Below are 10 tips so that you can start creating killer social content with a WOW factor that gets you found!

Follow Industry News

Keep up with information relevant to your industry. Setting up RSS feeds, subscribing to industry newsletters and setting up Google Alerts on branded and non-branded keywords are all ways to keep up with news relevant to your industry. You can take these industry articles and create social content with your own spin that identifies trends your clients would be interested in reading and learning how it will affect them. For example, I might create a series of blog posts covering recent Google algorithm updates to teach potential clients about the changing needs and challenges of content marketing and SEO for their business.

Monitor and Engage in Social Conversations

Social media conversations are a reflection of your brand. Therefore, it’s important that you monitor and engage with your audience to humanize your brand and let them know you care about them and their needs. Tools such as Hootsuite and TweetDeck can help you manage, monitor and measure your social content marketing effectiveness. Below is an example of engaging social content in Twitter from Celsius, a healthy energy drink company. This is a great example of a company engaging with a customer, making this person feel important which in turn humanizes the brand.

Recruit a Social Content Creation Team

Gone are the days when content is just written by CEOs and managers. Everyone in your company can write social content around their individual areas of expertise. Create an editorial content calendar that maps out who writes what and when. An editorial calendar really keeps things organized and lays out your content strategy and plans. My area of expertise is SEO and content marketing, so I contribute blog content around topics such as how social media affects SEO results and Pinterest marketing tips. You could have your sales staff create a short video series on how best to choose the products and services you sell. You might even post Q&A with some of your customers like IT business and consulting services firm Tribridge did and how they benefit from your products and/or services.

Keep a Social Content Backlog

When it comes to writing, sometimes you just feel tapped out for ideas. Or maybe you have an idea or concept but don’t know how to put it into words at the moment. Keeping a content backlog helps to save your ideas so that you can come back to them at a later time and write then. Keep bullet lists, product reviews, videos, photos, how-to guides and interviews in your backlog so you can write more social content pieces at a later date.

Repurpose Content

It’s perfectly alright to take content you’ve written in the past and republish it as a fresh, new piece. It saves time, resources and provides an updated spin on a topic. Add a short video and provide updated content to an old whitepaper. Use questions taken from a webinar or presentation to put together an eBook. Turn videos into blog posts or a blog post series. Turn one piece of social content into as many formats as possible – turn a whitepaper into a YouTube video, a shortened Slideshare presentation, a blog post series, a webinar. The possibilities are endless!

Take Your Video Camera Everywhere

Creating interesting and fun videos is simple to do and not as labor intensive as in the past. Smart phones are equipped with video cameras. Regular cameras come with video now as well. Take your smart phone or video camera to an upcoming tradeshow or industry conference and conduct mini interviews with thought leaders or people that stop by your booth. Ask them to give you a top 10 list of anything relevant to your industry and post these videos to your website after the tradeshow or conference. Video content can then become a blog post or blog series, an eBook, whitepaper…well, you get the picture. Supply chain software company Kinaxis does an excellent job of producing videos on a variety of topics, including those at their User Conference.

Conduct Online Surveys and Original Research

Have you thought about conducting online polls, customer satisfaction surveys, market research surveys, questionnaires, or customer job satisfaction surveys that can then be turned into blog posts or other social content? A tool like SurveyMonkey offers free and paid services where you can quickly and easily create surveys about interesting topics for your customers. Take the answers and trends and create blog posts, tweets, Pinterest photos, Facebook posts, press releases and more. These surveys can create lasting buzz and brand awareness for your company as people search for answers to questions you’ve posed in your surveys.

Create “Best-Of” Features Blog Posts

I love lists. Most people love lists. Therefore, it’s not a bad idea to create social content about the “Top” list, “Best-Of” list, “Year in Review” or “What’s Next”  in 2013 or 2014 list. Consider doing list-type content every quarter which can help boost your readership, leads, strategic website KPIs and conversions. After attending an industry conference, write a blog post listing the key take-aways from that conference. Check out an example of this here: 71 Key Marketing Take Aways from Bend WebCam 2012. Organize your “Best-Of” blog posts into an eBook toward the end of the year. Make a list of your top products and/or services this year. Create a “Best Videos to Watch” blog post. List-type content can definitely help you stand out in the crowd.

Look Outside Your Industry and Audience

In today’s digital age, we are now more connected that ever, even outside of our niche industries and audiences. Take a recent well-known situation or crisis and write a blog post that ties into the theme of that situation. For example, our top dog CEO at Find and Convert, Bernie Borges, recently wrote a blog post on how the Tampa Bay Times is embracing digital disruption in the newspaper industry. We’re not in the newspaper industry, but he went out and tied the current state of newspaper readership to the digital age.

Write Content that Never Goes Out-of-Date

In addition to writing real-time, relevant content, consider writing content that never goes out-of-date. It’s important to write content that is timeless and has a long shelf life. This social content will always remain useful to your audience most likely for years to come. Some ideas for timeless content include how-to articles that solve challenges, tips for saving time and money and motivational articles that can help your target audience do something new or approach a problem with a new outlook on how to solve it.

There you have it. Content plays a key role in laying the foundation for your inbound marketing strategy. Produce social content that WOWs your readers and you can enjoy SEO results, social media engagement and lead nurturing that turns your prospects into customers. I hope you find these 10 tips helpful in creating content that gets you found. Have any other WOW tips to add to this list? I would love to hear them from you!

In order for most businesses to create a lot of high quality content, employee participation is necessary. I’ve said many times, no marketing department is big enough to produce all the content it needs. Additionally, consider that in most businesses the marketing team is not comprised of domain experts.

Here’s what Forrester Research says on this topic: “Today’s B2B buyer will find three pieces of content about a vendor for every one piece that marketing can publish or sales can deliver. They are finding this content in an ever-expanding number and variety of channels.” Read the full article here.

The way I see it, there are two primary methods to harness employee involvement in a social business. One involves a carrot and one involves a stick.

The Stick

You could mandate employees to contribute content. Revise the company policy to require employees who meet a domain expert criteria to contribute original content. Non-compliance with this policy could be cause for termination. If you’re going to take this approach, my recommendation is to provide employees ample resources to fulfill their obligation. For example, the marketing team should deliver a well planned communication plan explaining the virtues of a content marketing strategy to the business. Ideally, the CEO should have a hand in this plan with an endorsement of the strategy. This communication plan should serve to inspire employees to participate in the content production process by offering them choices of topics and content formats.

The marketing team should publish an editorial calendar with topics where employees can “sign up” to contribute content. Most importantly, the marketing team should provide an easy-to-comply-with process that allows content production to be painless to the employee. For example, offer to interview employees with a video camera so the interview will be recorded, edited and produced into high quality content by the marketing team. The marketing team should repurpose the video into other content formats such as a white paper or blog post. By allowing the employee to painlessly share her domain expertise through an interview format, you take away the heavy lifting from the employee. The result can be high quality content from domain experts. This approach mitigates the biggest objections from employees who are asked to contribute content: “I don’t have time,” or “I hate to write.”

The Carrot

The carrot approach does not threaten employees with termination if they don’t comply with company policy; “thou shalt contribute content.” Rather, this approach provides employees considerable recognition and reward for their contribution. The same methods described above can be used for the production of content. The difference is that psychology plays a much bigger role. Rather than requiring employees to contribute, you inspire employees so that they want to contribute for the recognition they receive and the sense of contribution to the overall good of the business. Such recognition can bolster their morale, their ego and even their resume. Don’t hesitate to promote the positive impact on the employee’s resume. When you implement programs that help an employee build their career currency, their loyalty to the employer strengthens considerably. Employees talk among themselves about many aspects of their employment. The carrot approach to content marketing participation fuels positive word of mouth for your brand. The improved loyalty also helps in your recruiting efforts.

Another approach is to start out with the stick approach and over a span of time transition to the carrot approach. Once employees beging to enjoy recognition for their content among their peers and even within industry circles, they understand the value of personal branding. Even more remarkable is the appreciation by the employee for the opportunity to build their personal brand under the umbrella of the corporate brand. I call this the halo effect.

The Content Marketing End Game

Reaching your target consumer and earning their trust is influenced less by the brand’s ability to engage him. Rather, it is influenced more by P2P content marketing. In people-to-people content marketing real people who work for a brand engage with real people who might be a customer, a prospective future customer, influencer or future employee. Considering that the C suite is not likely to double or triple the marketing department’s staff size, the only option to produce the content needed to reach target customers is to tap into the inherent assets in the employee population. Personally, I prefer the carrot approach. But, each company is unique. Whichever method works best in your business the important thing is that you recognize the authenticity of P2P content marketing and the economics of leveraging the content marketing potential of employees.

Whether managing PPC marketing yourself or hiring an agency, before you start spending money advertising on search engines, carefully consider what you are trying to achieve.

Of course everyone wants sales but unless you are running an e-commerce site where visitors can buy from you right then and there, you should ask yourself what you expect in return for your PPC marketing investment. Look at how you advertise today, consider what works and what doesn’t and then think about how can you carry a successful sales model into a place where you get to advertise directly to prospects who are already interested in what you are selling.

Let’s review a few basics of Search Engine Pay per Click marketing.

1. PPC provides any company the opportunity to place ads in front of businesses and individual consumers based upon specific search queries.
2. It is a pay-to-play bidding platform that rewards companies who are willing to pay more and/or dedicate more time with better ad placement and performance.
3. Ads positioned at the top of the search results page perform better than ads appearing elsewhere.
4. When an ad is displayed on the screen for a person who uses a search engine to type a search query, it is called an impression. Impressions are free but in order to get them you must be willing to pay  more than your competitor.
5. Pay per click… you only pay when someone clicks on your ad.
6. What you pay is determined by a number of factors including what your competitors are willing to pay, how well your ad is written, how relevant your ad is, how well your landing page performs and how successful your ad is.
7. As with all web based marketing, you need a good website. The more informative, relevant, compelling and encouraging your website is for your target audience the better your PPC marketing will perform.

What should my PPC marketing goal be?

This question is important because without a goal, you cannot measure whether your PPC marketing investment is working for you. Over the years, I have created thousands of campaigns for customers and although the goals may be similar, they are never exactly the same for each campaign. Every business need is unique. Every marketing goal should be unique your business needs.

Is your goal to increase sales, get more leads or expand your brand?

If you answered yes (don’t worry, everyone does) you are partly right, but you need more specificity. Lofty goals are great, but in the real world success more often comes from setting goals that are realistic, achievable and measurable. Are you capable of running a four minute mile? What about a marathon? Although most people could never run a four minute mile (the unrealistic goal), most people could finish a marathon if they were willing to make the investment in time, resources, dedication and perseverance. The same holds true for PPC marketing. Just like dedicating yourself to running a marathon, dedicate yourself to investing the time it takes to set goals, learn what works for your unique business and adjust your goals as you move ahead.

What are some examples?

What is your goal when advertising? Is it to put your ad in front of people who are in your market and are in need of your services to pick up the phone and call you? What about setting a goal for the number of people you want calling or when you want them to call? Do you put a value on each call? Do you break it down by the type of service they are interested in?

Each business will have their own unique set of PPC goals. Some example search engine PPC goals are:

1. Track when someone clicks on an ad and completes a lead form.
2. Keep the cost per conversion from PPC less than $25 each.
3. PPC should drive 15 new leads per month from my website’s contact form.
4. PPC should get us 50 call leads per month.
5. With a small budget, the average cost per click (CPC) cannot exceed $5
6. My website is not doing well in some organic search results and I want to be sure my business is listed on the first page of Google for those search terms.
7. Average PPC visitor time on the website is more than the time spent by organic site visitors.
8. Maintain visibility in search engines along with my key competitors.
9. Be easily discovered in search engines for a variety of relevant keywords.
10. Target mobile users only.

What if I fail to achieve my goal(s)?

In life, people often fail in achieving their goal because they look at how far they have to go instead of looking at how far they have come. PPC marketing is both an art and a science. You may not be successful the first time but unlike offline marketing activities you have the option to stop what you are doing, change direction, change your goal or simply pause your campaigns while you consider your next move.

Don’t let the fear of failing stop you from reaching your PPC marketing destination. Don’t be afraid to set specific goals because you might fail. And don’t give up if you do fail. Learn from your failure, reset your goals and keep moving forward.

Keep moving forward!

PPC marketing can be like casting a net. Sometimes success comes from using a fishing pole and catching one fish at a time. In other words, the more specific your PPC goals are with campaigns that align with them, the better your results will be.  Be sure to contact us if you would like to learn more or subscribe to our blog to get the next post in my series, measuring PPC success.

Facebook is Maturing for Users and for Advertisers

Several members of the Find and Convert team recently attended the Social Fresh EAST Conference here in Tampa. We all came away with a lot of food for thought but the key takeaway that is still ringing in my ears, something we heard from more than one speaker at Social Fresh, is that Facebook has matured. It’s true! Since the release of Graph Search in January, Facebook has released several powerful new tools that give marketers new and exciting ways to reach hyper-targeted audiences with relevant, effective content like never before.

Facebook’s Audience has Matured

According to SocialBakers, the age of the average Facebook user, 29.53 in 2010, is now 30.11. But anecdotally, we know that teenagers have moved on to channels like Instagram, Kik, and Vine while older adults are warming up to social media and discovering Facebook. So, in terms of audience, we can say Facebook has “matured” and there is clear evidence that older users may be more likely to click through to an ad.

Facebook has Matured

Many Facebook users feared changes that would come when the company went public. For a while, it seemed as though Facebook wasn’t entirely sure where it was going. For anyone paying attention recently, however, Facebook seems to have found some direction. There are still grumblings about changes to the user experience and new types of advertising but the still-active users don’t seem to be giving up on Facebook quite yet. They’re talking about the changes…but they’re staying on Facebook to do it!

Facebook Advertising has Matured

As Facebook itself has matured from the wild, young start up to a large corporate entity employing over 4,600 people and responsible to its shareholders, they’re almost tripping over themselves to improve the user experience for business users as well. While there is a real danger in relying too heavily on Facebook advertising, neglecting engagement and undervaluing the power of organic reach, the tremendous potential Facebook now presents for advertisers cannot be ignored.

There are really three ways to advertise on Facebook:
• On the page with promoted posts and offers;
• In the Ads Manager with ads, sponsored stories, and promoted page posts;
• In the Power Editor with mobile ads, advanced targeting, and testing options.

Crawling and Walking

On-page ad creation gives the page manager very few options. You can specify a budget to reach users who already like your page and their friends. Unless your target audience truly includes anyone in the world, I do not recommend promoting or “boosting” posts from your page.

With the Ads Manager tool, you can target your ads to people in certain geographic locations and those with precise interests aligned with your product. This can be a valuable tool to reach more people with your advertising.

Let’s Run With Power Editor!

To really take advantage of the powerful targeting opportunities Facebook offers to advertisers, you’ll want to get familiar with the Power Editor tool! The Power Editor is an app available only when you are using Facebook with Chrome as your internet browser.

Power Editor is not simple or overly user-friendly but, when you know what you can do with it, you might find it worth your time to hunt down a couple of good tutorials or even to solicit professional help to access these tools. It’s that exciting!

Mobile Ads for Mobile Users

The number of users accessing Facebook on a mobile device surpassed the number of users accessing Facebook from a desktop device for the first time in 2013. Using the Power Editor, you can target these mobile users with content that will appear in the newsfeed along with the other updates from their friends and pages. The impact of news feed ads is considerably greater than ads displayed in the right panel for desktop users. Many people have become increasingly conditioned to ignore the right side display advertising area.

Data Driven Marketing

To help your content compete with that of friends and family in the newsfeed, the Power Editor allows you to hyper-target your ads to be shown only to users who will likely find it very personally relevant. Facebook has partnered with leading data technology companies to give Facebook advertisers access to a treasure trove of data about the OFFLINE buying habits and interest of users.

In addition to targeting users in their local area, a small family owned pet store, for example, can target their ads just to people who live in their zip code AND own dogs! This is incredibly valuable for a small business or any business that would prefer not to show their ads to tens of thousands or millions of people who have no likely affinity to their product.

Ad Testing

Only in the Power Editor can advertisers create Facebook posts without publishing them to their business page. This gives you the opportunity to create two similar ads with differing imaging or verbiage and test a small initial audience to see which ad has the best response rate. This assures the advertiser that when you publish the better performing post, and put advertising dollars behind it to reach a greater audience, you know that you are promoting content that your audience is more likely to perform well.

The opportunity for advertisers on this grown-up, mature Facebook is very exciting. The most relevant, targeted, cutting-edge advertising can never replace person-to-person engagement that takes place when a brand embraces being a social business. With the proper groundwork laid, Facebook advertising can be a powerful boost to your social media efforts. If you are going to spend advertising dollars on Facebook, let’s be sure you are taking advantage of the free tools available and to get the most for every ad dollar spent. Share your Facebook advertising experiences with us below.

But how do you develop a solid audience-centric content strategy for the digital age?

Persona Analysis

It begins with a well-defined persona analysis plan…When Find and Convert engages a new client, we do the prerequisite discovery that any respectable digital marketing agency delivers. Before we dive into keyword research though, we begin with an in-depth collaborative persona analysis process to discover direct and indirect audiences that actually live in our client’s digital journey. The objective is to discover highly relevant yet sometimes indirect keywords that are significant to the way in which our clients solve their customer’s needs, and then integrate them into the content across digital assets.

Often times, our clients have a clear perception of their buyers. The objective of the persona analysis is to look beyond the most obvious audiences and discover related verticals that are relevant to the buying journey.  And to keep the discovery smooth and focused, we unveil the process in steps.

Step One: Identifying Groups

Groups consist of a number of related audience silos relevant to a business. Sometimes groups are as simple as buyers, indirect influencers and promoters.

But for most businesses, it is rarely that simple. Let’s take a look at ACME manufacturing as an example. ACME sells a variety of LEED-approved widgets used in residential and commercial construction sold through big box stores and through other distribution channels. Their ultimate buyers are consumers, construction firms and distributors. However, are the buyers always the decision makers? While it is possible, more likely the buying process is greatly influenced through additional channels and influencers not directly related to ACME. Identifying the need for the widget may require creating awareness of its existence to the architect, sub-contractor, designer or other influencers that have nothing to do with the actual purchase. So how do you get discovered when your target audience may not yet be aware that you offer the perfect solution to their needs? In order to be discovered, you need to be found through quality, informational content in highly relevant searches and communities.

A more accurate grouping of this example may look something like this as your target customer and the primary influencers or decision makers may be in loosely related or even completely unrelated communities and interests on the web:

Step 2: The Breakdown

Once everyone has agreed on the roles and who belongs in each group, we break down the groups further into specific sections. In this persona example, we created four sections. One for each silo that we will examine in closer detail:

• End-users/Buyers
• Decision-Makers
• Influencers
• Promoters

Step 3: Identifying Audience Needs

Once we have established roles within each group, we unveil Step 3. We ask our clients to remove themselves from the equation by not thinking about their company, their products or their services. Instead, we ask them to think of themselves in each role and focus on the individual needs, the pain points and the problems that may require a solution. When then ask them to identify the pain points for each type of role. We do this for each of the groups within each identified silo.

Step 4: Identifying Company Solutions

As a digital agency that is deeply passionate about meeting our clients’ needs (my apologies if that sounds a little advertorial), this is usually the rewarding ah-ha moment for us and our client. Pre-conceived ideas on messaging begin to take a right turn as often times, additional audience-centric messaging opportunities emerge.

Step 5: Keyword Free Association

Before we can identify relevant messaging or content valuable to your audience and how they will discover your content, we need to free associate words and simple phrases in each group that pertain to those pain points and solutions. We do this using one-to-three word phrases.

Step 6: Keyword Research

Now keyword research can begin. Out of the thousands of keywords and variations that Google will suggest as you begin researching the word associations you have discovered, a pattern will begin to emerge in identifying keywords relevant to your audiences, your services and products that are pertinent to your content marketing goals. These root keywords or themes will often fall into one of three types of messaging: Brand-centric, industry-centric and audience-centric.

Why Identifying Brand, Industry and Audience-Centric Keywords Are Important

Our primary objective in this exercise is to define an audience-centric content strategy. Understanding the relationship between themes that are advertorial, industry informational and highly relevant to your targeted audience’s interests will help you stay focused. You’ll be empowered to create and deliver highly relevant content that is eagerly discovered and consumed by your direct and indirect target audiences through social and search behaviors. Identifying the most relevant keywords into three segments forms a topic strategy for your website, blogging content and other digital assets within your content marketing strategy.

Please share with us via comments below any ideas you have developing your own content strategy that helps your social and writing team deliver valuable content to your audience’s interests.

I pinched myself when I was recently invited by the Tampa Bay Lightning to be the Social Captain for a game. The opportunity for me to combine my love of hockey and my favorite NHL team with social media is up there with a day at the beach. 

The Tampa Bay Lightning hockey club anoints a Social Captain for each game. The social captain is a fan that is asked to share their social media chops with their friends before and during a game. The fan is provided entry into the game, given a behind-the-scenes tour prior to the game, meeting some VIPs along the way and is provided prizes and give aways to promote during the game through Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Fans in attendance follow along through hasthtags such as #TBLightning, #BoltsSocial and #LightningStrikes. I got to meet Dave Andreychuk, the captain of the Lightning in 2004, when they won the Stanley Cup (featured in the image above). That was a huge thrill for me!

Harness The Influence of Passionate Fans

The Social Captain is a fan. There is no monetary compensation to the fan. The compensation is an awesome fan experience along with some exposure to the fan base. I must admit that I prepped for the experience by studying the website and Twitter stream to be prepared for questions from other fans. It’s almost as if I considered myself an employee representing the brand, even if for just one game. I truly wanted to be capable of representing the brand well…Imagine how powerful it would be to have customers with this much passion for your brand eagerly desiring to evangelize your brand?

Social Captain In Other Industries

This experience inspired me to imagine how a social business might apply the Social Captain concept in other industries outside the sports industry. Consider applying this concept in these possible ways:

Social Captain in Manufacturing

Find a customer who has demonstrated loyalty and passion for your product. Offer to shoot a video of your customer using your product in his or her natural setting. Allow the customer to be totally authentic in telling their story. Don’t script it. Alternatively, provide one of your products as a gift or loaner and invite the customer to tell their story experience on their own through their social channels. 

Social Captain in Retail

Select one or more employees who embody your brand. Empower the employee to capture their experience serving customers through photos, video, tweeting and live blogging. If possible, provide a writer who can create live blog content accompanied by video. Run this program on a weekly or monthly basis with consistently used hashtags and don’t be surprised to see employees competing for their chance to be your social captain brand ambassador.

Social Captain in Services

There are many possibilities for a Social Captain in a services businesses depending on whether your service business is B2C or B2B. If you’re a B2C service business, you can directly emulate the Tampa Bay Lightning’s Social Captain concept. For B2B service businesses, identify a loyal client with subject matter expertise and invite him or her to be a guest blogger or regular contributor of content on a relevant subject.  Additionally, consider the approaches described in the retail and manufacturing industry above. 

Social Captain in Technology

Lots of potential here…Depending on the nature of your tech product, locate a power user whose savvy use of your product is impressive or innovative. Recruit these power users employing tactics described above. 

Four Factors in a Successful Social Captain Program

1. Must be authentic. Do not ask your Social Captain to be an advertisement. Allow him or her to be natural and creative. Don’t put them in a box.
2. Make the Social Captain feel special. Give him or her the red carpet treatment. Harness their passion for your brand. Show your appreciation for it. Give them a platform to be noticed. They’ll love you for it.
3. Promote the Social Captain concept to create buzz and inspiration to attract ambassadors among your loyal customers.
4. Describe clearly the criteria for someone to be a Social Captain. You may notice some complaining because you didn’t select them. If you communicate the selection process clearly, your community will support you.

The experience I had as the Social Captain for the Tampa Bay Lightning was a blast. This organization does everything first class. Their employees are trained to strive for 100% customer satisfaction.  So, it’s no surprise their Social Captain program is first class. In the future, I expect the Social Captain concept to be adopted by other social businesses who recognize the power of brand ambassadors among loyal customers. These are the companies that understand what it means to be a true social business.

Most SEO experts are very skilled at optimizing website pages and blog posts using hyperlinks and anchor text. But just how knowledgeable are they when it comes to social media playing a part in search results? Social media has become a major piece of the overall SEO puzzle. Shares, likes, follows, and +1′s are all known to positively impact overall SEO results for a website and blog.

With both being so connected, it’s important to consider how social media impacts SEO results. With all the Google and Bing algorithm updates over the past year, things have really changed. Search engines have incorporated social content into their search results now more than ever. It’s important that marketers adjust their strategies to match the changing nature of search in order to positively affect SEO results in the long run.

Even with all the recent search algorithm updates we’ve seen take place recently, the social search playing field still hasn’t been completely defined yet. However, one of the key takeaways from the early actions of Google, Bing, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook is that as marketers, we need to synchronize our social media strategy and our SEO strategy. Below are some ways you can do this.

• Make sure your social media and SEO tools are integrated.
• Leverage a blog with built-in social sharing buttons for all blog posts, not just your main home page.
• Create content that is shareable by people that are relevant to you so it has potential to appear across several social channels.
• Update your company social media profiles with relevant keyword-rich content, but don’t go overboard with keywords.
• Make your top keywords more social – zero in on several of your most desirable keywords and find creative ways to make content for those keywords more shareable across social outposts.
• Find, get to know and nurture influencers who consistently share your content. Make a list of them. Knowing your influencers can help expand your reach online and ultimately increase the rate at which your content gets found and shared online.
• Don’t forget Google+, especially with Google’s increasing use of Author Rank in its algorithm. It’s important to optimize your Google+ page and regularly share content on it. When the largest search engine in the world created Google+ and integrates its content into search results, you know it’s worth being a part of your overall social media/SEO strategy.

Social Media + SEO Live Happily Ever After

Even with the increasing role of social media in SEO results, the most important tip to remember is that you must create quality, relevant content for your target audience. Search has changed quite a bit in the last year with all these algorithm updates. But creating high quality content always remains the top priority.

If you’re creating useful content that is SEO friendly, it is more likely to be noticed and shared. The connection between social and search should be a natural extension through content that is relevant and can be trusted as authoritative. This drives both your social media and search marketing strategies to live happily ever after…

Marketers unfamiliar with the virtues of content marketing must be living in a cave. With more marketers jumping on the content marketing bandwagon how does a brand get noticed? In other words, how do you create signal rather than noise with your content? Following are seven (7) content formats that will rock your content marketing strategy.

Company Blog

I believe most companies in any industry can benefit from a well executed blog. The secret to a productive blog is to get subject matter experts to write relevant blog content with Google Authorship attribution. The most successful blogs are strong in educational content that span several topics. Know your audience and write for each audience segment focused on the basics of what, where, why and how of your offerings. Create a blog content calendar with assignments to bloggers and stick to it. 

White Papers and E Books

Your customers want to be engaged with relevant information that makes their life better somehow. White papers and e-books offer the potential for you to conduct a non-monetary transaction with your audience. You provide an information-rich, high quality piece of content in return for the reader’s name, email address and sometimes more information. If you offer a series of white papers or e-books on a topic, you earn the right to ask the reader for incremental information about the person with each download, building a profile of the reader. In doing so, you create touch-points that can increasingly result in sales ready conversations with the reader or driving the reader to an online store if that’s your goal. If your white paper or e-book content truly delivers value (signal), that sales conversation might be very productive. Best of all, your sales team will only spend their time speaking with people who genuinely want to speak with them. 

Video

It’s 2013 and no marketer should exclude video from their content portfolio. When considering the type of content you should commit to video, use the same guidelines as advised for your blog. Once you get comfortable creating information-rich video content, you should also consider creating humorous video content. There are many examples of brands that effectively use humor in video content including HubSpot, Indium, Blendtec and Kinaxis to name just a few.  HubSpot is an awesome example because they also have their own digital TV show titled Marketing Update. Consider producing your own show as a content format.

Podcasts

A recent research report from Arbitron and Edison Research indicates that 1 in 3 Americans listen to online radio at least once a week. Online radio includes services such as Spotify and Pandora. Online radio also includes podcasts. If you’ve never visited a podcast directory, go to the iTunes podcast directory and download the Podcast app for your iPhone to subscribe to individual podcasts. Android users can likewise access podcasts from one of several Android podcast apps.  You may be surprised to learn that there are podcasts already available in your industry. And, if there aren’t many that represents an opportunity for your brand to capture an audience with a podcast. Podcast consumption is very popular among listeners while engaged in a variety of activities including walking the dog, working out at the gym, commuting on a bus or train and even while driving in a car. Consider creating a podcast show featuring one or more personalities who can cover relevant topics using this popular audio format.   

Infographics

We live in a visual world and infographics have become a popular way to tell a compelling story through a visual experience. Examples are all over the map. Just do a keyword search on any topic and add “infographic” in your keyword search. Two of many examples of compelling infographics include the value of likes for retailers and Crimson Hexagon’s memorial to 200 billion social media posts. To create an infographic start with creative thinking about facts your audience cares about. Then, turn your designer loose on your idea until you have an infographic that achieves your vision. Share your info graphic through all your relevant marketing channels. 

Slideshare

Slideshare is a content channel and a sleeping giant. Some marketers have discovered the power of Slideshare for content marketing and others don’t even know of its existence. Slideshare is an online channel where you can upload your PowerPoint and PDF files for public sharing in digital format. The key to Slideshare is to create a compelling piece of content with an interesting title slide that is attention grabbing in a thumbnail view. Be sure to include a call to action in your content. Upload your presentations and white papers to Slideshare and share the link through your online marketing channels. Think of Slideshare as the YouTube of non-video presentations and e-books.

LinkedIn

In addition to Slideshare, I am compelled to list one other social media channel as a content format. The reason is that LinkedIn is evolving into a content channel. It’s no surprise that LinkedIn acquired Slideshare last year. Each of the content formats listed above can be shared through LinkedIn. In addition to sharing your content on LinkedIn you can share other people’s content too. Shareable LinkedIn content comes from three sources: 1) people in your network, 2) LinkedIn Thought Leaders and 3) LinkedIn Today curated content. All you have to do is visit LinkedIn and find content that is relevant to your audience. Share this content with your network and they will thank you for it.

Of course there are other content formats you should consider including your website and your newsletter. This list of 7 content marketing formats represents a diverse mix that provides opportunity for you to learn which formats are most popular with your audience. A diversified mix of content formats maximize the chance of reaching your target audience across different channels, building a loyal community and producing leads or other desired outcomes.

Every marketer wants to open up the inbound marketing floodgates, or so they think. But, when you get down to doing inbound marketing what is tactical and what is strategic? This really begs the question: which inbound marketing tactics can you do relatively quickly and without too much effort versus those that require more effort but offer long term results potential?

Our parents taught us that anything worth doing is worth doing right. We were taught “if _____ was easy everyone would do it.” By no means am I suggesting that inbound marketing is easy. But, let’s look at some inbound marketing activities that might be considered tactical and those considered strategic.

Tactical Inbound Marketing

Pay-per-Click Advertising (PPC)

Some call this SEM. This involves setting up search marketing campaigns in Google Adwords or Bing whereby your ads are displayed for certain keywords for which you bid an amount you’re willing to pay each time someone clicks on your ad. Setting up one or two campaigns properly takes a matter of hours. Getting Google or Bing to approve them also takes hours. Generally within a day or two you can have a few PPC campaigns up and running. Some will argue that PPC is strategic. For those brands that make a serious commitment to PPC with ongoing monitoring and optimization it can be strategic. That said, PPC campaigns could be turned on and off based on need and budget.

Optimizing Current Your Website

Undergoing an “on page” optimization exercise of your existing website content is also tactical because it is focused on the existing content. Depending on the size of your website the effort may take days, or weeks or even months. The result may be improved discoverability of some of your website’s pages in search results, which could result in more traffic to your website.

One Way Social Media Publishing

I grit my teeth in even mentioning this because it is so opposite of what we advise all clients to do. But one tactical inbound marketing activity is to publish content (one way) through your social media channels with no human engagement. This one way social media publishing can serve to help spread your content in social channels, but it will have limited results other than to send a signal to the search engines that your content is on social media.

Inbound Marketing Strategy

I must admit I am much more comfortable talking about an inbound marketing strategy for the simple reason that by its very own nature the goal of it is to produce long term results that are sustainable, measurable and move the needle.  Ah…I feel better already….

Develop a Content Marketing Strategy

Remember that website optimization exercise I mentioned above? You will be much better off developing a content marketing strategy that results in writing more content for your website. But, not just any content for the sake of SEO. A sound content strategy considers the personas of your target audience, is based on sound keyword research, and it is written for humans, not search engines. Website content should be focused, rather than broad based. Website pages should offer the reader a relevant experience about a specific topic.  In addition to website content, a sound content strategy considers other mediums which may include webinars, video, white papers, e-books, podcasts, etc.

A Company Blog

A content strategy should always include a company blog. A company blog should serve to educate, enlighten or entertain your target audience. A blog is a big commitment, which is reason alone to consider this a strategic inbound marketing activity. Creating a blog calendar is strongly advised. Getting as many subject matter experts to contribute blog content is also advisable to any company blog. And, publishing blog content with consistency is also important to any company blog.

Inbound Marketing Conversion Strategies

Developing a sound content strategy is a worthwhile strategic inbound marketing effort. However, remember that the purpose of your content strategy is to attract the people you want to attract to your business. That’s why you need conversion strategies. Consider the calls to action offers that will entice people to register with you by name and email address so they may enter into your funnel. It is imperative that you set up nurturing rules in your funnel so that people will continue to engage with your brand as you nurture them with more relevant content and so that eventually a healthy percentage of them will become marketing qualified leads, which is your conversion strategy ultimate goal.

Becoming a Social Business

If a tactical approach to social media is one way publishing (not recommended), the antithesis is to become a social business. In a social business there are many subject matter experts actively and authentically engaging with your community on relevant topics that interest them through social channels. A social business isn’t constantly selling. In fact, it doesn’t view social engagement as merely as a marketing activity. A social business views this as how they interact with customers, prospective customers, influencers, employees and future employees. Such authentic engagement is part of the DNA of a social business.

Essentially the difference between tactical inbound marketing and an inbound marketing strategy is commitment. Tactical inbound marketing requires less commitment than an inbound marketing strategy. Tactical activities may yield results but they are not sustainable. An inbound marketing strategy is a lot of work, but the results are sustainable. Simply stated, an inbound marketing strategy is the way business works now. So, what choice does one truly have?

In one of our recent blog posts, we discussed how to select an SEO company for your business and how SEO companies are not one size fits all. But you may be asking yourself “Why even bother hiring an SEO company in the first place?” In today’s world, business executives tend to be more involved with the marketing department when it comes to digital marketing strategies since this increases opportunities to get found with the end goal of producing more quality leads and sales opportunities.

However, getting into the SEO world is not an easy task. Without the basic knowledge of what is involved it is extremely difficult to do it effectively. Not to mention that it is time-consuming if tackled on your own. This is why it’s best to hire a professional SEO agency instead of doing it on your own.

SEO Companies Beware

The pros and cons of doing search engine optimization on your own versus hiring outside SEO professionals can vary depending on your business’ needs, capabilities, budget and goals. As long as SEO is done well, either by you or a reliable SEO company, search engine optimization is by far one of the most effective ways of promoting your business, ultimately generating more leads and sales opportunities.

If you decide to do search engine optimization yourself consider that it takes a lot of time and effort to learn about how to properly optimize a website. SEO is an ongoing process that needs ongoing maintenance and management. If you do not know much about SEO best practices, you might be tempted to use techniques that are considered spam, gaining your business short-term instead of long-term and lasting SEO results.

Hiring a professional SEO company will help you maintain your focus on the core competency of your business. If you trust your SEO service provider they will become an extended part of your marketing team and help you to achieve the most out of your investment.

Prior to hiring outside SEO professionals, it’s important that you do research to ensure that you are choosing an SEO company with whom you’ll be comfortable. Beware of those that promise you top rankings and results quickly. In fact, run away from them fast. Those types of SEO companies usually implement a few search engine optimization techniques in one month and then do nothing to help improve results month after month. Bottom line: if the company you talk to does not emphasize the importance of producing quality content on an ongoing basis, they are NOT a professional SEO company. Sure, it will cost you some investment on the front end but it will be worthwhile in the long run when you reap benefits that are sustained over time. 

9 Questions to Ask in Your SEO Hiring Process

Once you have decided to hire an SEO service provider, it’s time to look around for the right one. A reliable company will have a good reputation and should have some industry presence. Ask other professionals and colleagues for referrals, visit popular SEO industry websites, contact site owners of websites you frequently visit for recommendations.

9 questions you should ask in your SEO hiring process:

• Do they use white hat (good) or black hat (bad) SEO techniques?
• What kind of SEO services do they offer?
• Can they provide qualified references?
• Do they respond back to you in a timely manner?
• How reliable are they?
• Do they have a reputation for quality customer service?
• Have they worked on other businesses similar to yours in scope and size?
• What’s their short term and long term cost?
• Do they fit within your budget?

The relationship you establish with your chosen SEO company should be a long-term one for not less than one year. So make sure you work with one that you trust and feel comfortable working with on an ongoing basis. I hope these tips help you understand why you might want to hire outside SEO experts and in your selection process to maximize a positive outcome.

If you are asking yourself this question then keep reading…

The first step is to start by searching for your product or service on Google, Yahoo and Bing. Look to see if your website is listed on the first page and if it is one of the first five websites shown. Don’t count the results that are in the pink or yellow boxes, or on the right side of the page because those are paid advertisements.

If your website is not listed on the first page, it’s time to consider starting a Pay-per-Click (PPC) advertising campaign.

Don’t react too quickly and dive right into building your own PPC campaign, do yourself a huge favor and spend some time doing a little homework. Just like hiring an accountant to manage your taxes, managing any type of online advertising campaign requires you to do some of the work, stay up to date with the latest news, be involved and be responsible for the decision making.

Before you start, you should be able to answer the following questions.

1. What is your goal?
2. How will you measure success?
3. Who & where are your targets?
4. What marketing messages do you use to reach your targets?
5. How much can you afford to spend each month?
6. How much time will you give yourself to learn?
7. How much time will you give yourself to manage?
8. Should you do it yourself or should you hire a PPC expert?

Of course, I usually recommend you find a PPC expert before doing it yourself. More often than not, I have seen business owners and marketing managers try to build and manage their own online advertising campaigns but end up failing. They don’t have enough time to learn the best practices and to stay up-to-date with the latest changes in pay-per-click advertising to get a return on their advertising investment. More often than not, reality falls short of their ambitions and they give up in a few months with nothing but a bad experience to reflect upon.

If you decide to hire a PPC expert, you will still need to answer these questions.  Although you don’t need all the answers before talking to the expert, the company you select should help guide you to the answers. If they don’t, hang up the phone and call someone else.

Over the next few weeks, I will be writing in more detail about what it takes to be successful in PPC marketing, in particular Google Adwords. Subscribe now to keep up to date with my PPC blog posts and other digital marketing articles from the team at Find and Convert.

Engaging a digital marketing agency can be the best decision you ever make…Or not…Before a business engages a digital marketing agency, it’s best to understand the ways that an agency can be hired to support your marketing goals. If you understand these options and the associated risks, you can improve your chances of making a good decision.

Digital Marketing Strategy & Plan of Action

If you’re new to digital marketing, the best place to start is to design a digital marketing strategy and plan of action. Think of this as a blueprint. And, think of your digital plan as a skyscraper. You wouldn’t build a skyscraper without a blueprint, would you?

A digital marketing strategy requires research and a lot of collaborative discussion between the agency and the client. Some of the research is focused on key competitors to gain valuable insights. Other elements of the research focus on developing a content strategy that meets the needs of each target audience. And yet other elements define the direction of your web assets including website architecture, blog format and selection of social marketing channels for community engagement and multi-touch communication strategy.

A digital marketing strategy deliverable is a detailed document summarized in visually compelling slides to communicate to the executives the key elements of the digital marketing strategy and plan of action which spans a minimum of 12 months.

Risks: A digital marketing strategy serves as your blueprint or foundation. Ignoring the strategy recommendations risks a wasted effort….Collaboration between the agency and the client is crucial, including the client’s IT resources. Lack of collaboration among all the stakeholders can sabotage the success of your digital marketing plan.

Retainer Based

Whether or not you start out by engaging a digital marketing company to develop a strategic plan, one option that should be considered is to retain an agency as your Digital Agency of Record. A retainer based approach is an investment in a relationship that should have a long term perspective. At a minimum, this arrangement should have a 2 to 3 year outlook, even if the contract between the client and the agency is annual with mutual ability to terminate by the client or agency. A longer term perspective allows the agency to become intimately knowledgeable about the client’s business. Agency personnel can develop strong relationships with the client’s personnel, map out plans, execute them together, measure them and make revisions as the results warrant.

Risks: It’s very important to define the scope of a retainer based arrangement. The more clearly the scope is defined and mutually understood, the better for both parties. There should be a definition of how work is to be handled that is understood to be out of scope.

Campaign Design & Execution

If your digital marketing plan is in full swing you may be in need of digital campaign ideas and execution support. The digital agency you select should quickly learn your key message points and your target audience attributes. The digital agency should pitch creative campaign ideas to the client that align with the client’s goals and target audience. A collaborative approach is needed between the client and the agency to vet out campaign ideas and arrive at campaigns to implement. The campaign elements should then be fully documented in a creative brief (CB) that serves as the blueprint for the campaign. The CB should also spell out the budget for the campaign and who is responsible for each element of the campaign. Then, the campaign execution begins.

Risks: A campaign that is under budgeted or under resourced is doomed to fail….Members of the agency team and the client team must work well together. When egos clash, campaigns can fail…An agency should never predict that a campaign will be a smash hit.

Project Based

When a client has a short term need with an engagement that has a start and end date, this is a project. Digital examples of projects can include a website redesign, tactical search engine optimization, landing page design, email template design, banner design, email campaign management for a season, etc.

Risks: Agency selection for projects can be influenced by price. Sometimes, price driven selections don’t yield good results. Often the agency priced the project aggressively to win the project, but once they’re engaged, they may not be satisfied with the deal and they might assign junior staff to the project that yield sub-par results…When a client works consistently with one or more agencies on projects, the risk of sub-par work is greatly reduced due to the relationship building factor in a sustained business relationship. 

Coaching or Advisory

When a client needs the services of a digital marketing agency but their primary interest is to complement their internal staff with external advisors, this approach can be very effective. A good example is a client whose digital strategy is mature, but they seek to stay closely informed of new ideas, trends and digital marketing best practices. In this scenario the client retains a digital agency to provide advisory services with a human touch that complements the client’s consumption of online articles and research reports.

Risks: Perhaps the biggest risk in this scenario is when a client begins to expect more than advisory support from the digital agency. It’s important that the scope of the coaching service is clearly spelled out up front and well documented to avoid confusion down the road as to what it is expected from the digital agency.

Before you engage the services a digital marketing agency, consider your needs and the support of your stakeholders. These five distinct ways to engage a digital agency offer options that can suit most situations.

It has been said that no two SEO companies do it the same. While that’s probably true, SEO is somewhat like accounting (though much more interesting in my opinion) in that the rules of engagement are pretty well defined by Google. Like it or not, the only way to perform search engine optimization that gets results is to create SEO processes that work for the client and for the agency.

SEO Processes Must Benefit Our Agency

I begin with the simple truth that without standardized SEO processes, an inbound marketing company can easily spin its wheels resulting in wasted time and limited results for the client. The client wants to get a return on their investment as quickly as possible. If we’re not careful, a client can be like the tail wagging the dog. We must be steadfast in communicating to the client the processes that will be implemented in their SEO plan and why they work. I frequently use the “skyscraper” analogy whereby a vision, blueprint and strong foundation are needed to build a skyscraper. The same is true of a an SEO plan. Rock solid SEO processes benefit our agency through standardization and long term client satisfaction.

SEO PROCESSES Must Benefit Our Client

Every client wants to get results from their investment in SEO services. The temptation for an agency to cut corners and just focus on content or tweaking title tags can be great. Despite the seemingly low hanging fruit issues in a client’s website that may tempt quick, easy SEO “fixes” they will result in a bandaid outcome. Clients are like teenagers who say they don’t want their parents laying down the rules, when in fact that’s exactly what they want. Clients say they want quick results, but they really want long term results. No sensible client would sacrifice long results for short term results.

SEO Competitive Analysis

The first step in our process is to conduct an SEO competitive analysis. There are many benefits to studying competitors. We study two types of competitors. One competitor type we study is the business our client considers their day-to-say competitors in the market. Another type of competitor is what we refer to as “online competitors.” These are companies who enjoy a strong search marketing footprint for relevant keywords even if they are not true competitors. We devote more focus on those competitors who have a modest to strong digital footprint so we can learn what they do well. These insights can serve our client’s SEO plan well.

Persona Analysis

A parallel step in our SEO processes is to conduct a persona analysis. This is always an interesting exercise because often our client has not analyzed their customers as “personas.” A persona can be defined by a demographic such as a female baby boomer or by a title such as university professor. We strive to get detailed in the persona analysis to understand what makes each persona tick. Once you understand your personas really well, you are halfway to defining the content marketing strategy that is mission critical to any SEO strategy.

Keyword Strategy

Once we have completed a competitive analysis and a persona analysis, we’re ready to conduct keyword research. It’s important to have insights from the first two steps when conducting keyword research. Without those insights, conducting keyword research is out of context. The result will be a keyword strategy that will define how much content your website currently has that fits the SEO and how much new content is needed for the SEO plan.

Comprehensive SEO Processes

These SEO processes are three out of the five processes we’ve developed in our 10 years as an inbound marketing and SEO company. We are committed to these 5 SEO processes for the simple reason that they get results. Time and again, our clients learn valuable lessons about inbound marketing and SEO, which I regularly characterize as 90% science and 10% art.

To learn more about our SEO processes click that pretty orange button below.

LinkedIn is the preferred B2B social networking tool with more than 200 million users as of this date. LinkedIn is very useful for individuals through a personal profile and for businesses primarily through a company page. Too often though, there is a lack of integration between the individual and the business in a coordinated LinkedIn strategy. This lack of integrated marketing between the marketing team and employees who use LinkedIn is a big missed opportunity. One way to create a coordinated LinkedIn strategy is to prioritize training provided for individuals about robust features such as the three features I’ve highlighted in this post.

Following Companies

Company pages offer a great opportunity to gain insights into a company’s products/services, its people and its content through status updates. Search for companies under the Companies menu. Follow companies that interest you and visit your Companies stream frequently to follow the content they post. Observe who has “liked” their status updates. Observe who has posted comments. If you have something to add, post your own comment. Those who engage in company status updates will notice your engagement. Look for an authentic opportunity to explore further engagement through the activity in Company status updates.

Advanced Signal Search

Signal is a powerful, but not so well-known feature in LinkedIn located under the News menu. The idea is to create custom searches to separate “signal from noise.” Do you want to follow an individual’s LinkedIn activity to look for an opportunity to engage?

Use LinkedIn Signal search to create custom searches.

Signal is a powerful search system built into LinkedIn available to all users. Consider using Signal in your LinkedIn marketing strategy in these ways.

• Save searches of activities of people who work for a specific company
  • For example, save a Signal search for people who work at HubSpot
• Save searches of status updates, mentions and content shared by an invidual
  • For example, save a Signal search of HubSpot’s Mike Volpe’s activities in LinkedIn
• Save searches of businesses that you want to court in an industry or a geographic area
  • For example, save a Signal search of businesses in the retail industry or in a specific region of the world

Create a Signal search for companies in an industry.

Share Your Employer’s Content

One of the benefits of using LinkedIn is to build professional credibility and network with other professionals. Another reason that is too often overlooked is to contribute to your employer’s social business strategy. The most effective way to do both is to share content that you find interesting and represents your professional interests. You can share content as status updates on your profile, on Company status updates and through LinkedIn Today content. Be sure to make a comment about an article sharing your insights. Share a mix of content from your employer and content from other sources so you don’t appear as purely focused on promoting your employer’s content.

LinkedIn Business Development and Integrated Marketing

I believe many businesses underestimate the power of integrating their employee’s activities on LinkedIn and the enterprise marketing strategy. In some organizations there is a disconnect between these two camps as large as the Grand Canyon. Integrating a social business plan between employees active on LinkedIn and the strategic marketing communication plan is very powerful. This integration requires planning and training. Often employees do not understand how to use LinkedIn in a way that benefits their professional networking while also benefiting the corporate marketing strategy.
    

Recently I guest hosted on the Malcolm Outloud digital TV show to discuss the social business journey underway at the Tampa Bay Times. My guests were Maryann Balbo and Amber McDonald. Together Maryann and Amber represent change agents in the Tampa Bay Times’ journey to re-imagine their business. Their story provides inspiration to any business who needs to embrace digital disruption for positive business outcomes.

Media Company Not a Newspaper

The Tampa Bay Times (formerly the St. Petersburg Times) is a Pulitzer Prize winning newspaper. The newspaper ranks in the top 15 in the U.S. and #1 in the entire south east. Over the past (approximate) two years, the organization has been undergoing a reinvention process. Recognizing the impact of digital disruption on the consumption of content by consumers, as well as the impact to the bottom line of other newspapers around the U.S. the organization set out to re-imagine their business. Fortunately, they don’t see themselves as just a newspaper. They see themselves as a media company responsible for delivering content through whatever channel their consumer wants. With this mindset, they set out to recreate the entire digital experience.

Two Way Engagement of Primary Importance

To their credit, the Tampa Bay Times set out to create an experience that enables engagement between TBT and the consumer. The newspaper industry has traditionally been a one way delivery of content through print, with limited opportunity for consumers to engage with the media company or with other consumers. The new Tampa Bay Times digital experience provides consumers ample opportunity to engage with TBT on articles and videos through any digital medium including their website and through popular social media channels including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Google+ and YouTube. The primary emphasis is to deliver content through a diverse mix of digital and print content to allow consumers to experience their content where and how they want.

On a Social Business Journey

I asked Maryann and Amber to describe their social business journey and they both responded that they are very much still on the journey. They spoke of the importance of experimenting with content and social media channels to gauge what is received well and not. They admit that for some TBT employees the journey has been outside their comfort zone. But, the organization recognizes this and is providing the tools and education for staffers to adapt to the digital revolution. Additionally, TBT has brought in new talent to make the leap from the traditional newspaper industry to the digital media industry. In fact, both Maryann and Amber are examples of new talent at TBT making their mark on this chapter in the organization’s history.

Local Community Services Vision

I asked Maryann and Amber to define success on this social business journey and they both prioritized consumer engagement. They want the consumer to find anything needed in their local community ranging from news, things to do and products and services. They even want to provide the consumer the ability to transact with local businesses. Additionally, their vision includes providing more services to local businesses in order to provide businesses more reach to the local consumer. They already provide social media marketing services for local businesses. In the future, they want to provide even more services that makes the Tampa Bay Times a strategic partner to local businesses with a full suite of offerings that strengthens ties between the local consumer and local businesses.

Below is the entire 13 minute interview. I invite you to watch it and leave your thoughts in the comments below.

Stay Tuned for My New Social Business Show

This interview with the Tampa Bay Times is sort of a pilot for my new forthcoming digital TV show! I’m partnering with Malcolm Outloud TV to launch this show on the forthcoming Outloud Network, which will be a digital only TV network. The show will bring more inspiring stories like this one. My new show will launch this spring so stay tuned. In the meantime, I’m building my list of guests and potential sponsors. If you want to recommend either, feel free.

When I launched my agency in 2002 our initial focus was SEO. In those days I was proud to say that I ran an SEO company especially since we’ve always used a white hat approach to SEO. Fast forward ten years and today we are much more than an SEO company.

Not a Sales Pitch

I won’t waste your time with a sale pitch. That’s not my blogging style. Rather, I will share the best advice I know to help you select an SEO company to help you get found and achieve your marketing goals.

People Search Twice As Much As Yesteryear

In Google’s Zero Moment of Truth e-book, one of many compelling facts Google shares is the fact people searched for twice as many data points in 2011 as they did in 2010 before they contacted a business about a product or service.

No matter your industry, if your product or service is in demand people turn first and foremost to the Internet to find it. And, as many options as we have at our digital fingertips, one thing still rings true today and that is that people still turn most frequently to a search engine when looking for products and services. And, Google is still the #1 search engine of choice.

Organic SEO Trumps PPC

Over the years there have been many reports indicating that people click on organic search engine listings more than they click on paid listings (PPC). For years the research suggested a 75/25 mix of user preference for organic over paid listings. The August 2012 report published by GroupM and Nielsen blew the doors off this stat with a 94% user preference for clicking on organic listings over paid search results! Yet, businesses around the globe continue to grow their PPC spend for one simple reason. Generally speaking most businesses struggle creating an organic SEO plan that produces results. Why?

Create Long Tail SEO Content

Most businesses that don’t seek SEO expert advice mistakenly try to get found in organic search for a broad and very competitive short keyword phrase. In SEO-context this is like trying to find a needle in a hay stack. Businesses should try to be found for long-tail keywords for two reasons. First, long-tail keywords are less competitive and therefore there is a greater chance of being found for them. The second reason is that people who begin a search with a short-tail keyword and don’t find relevant results revise their search with other keyword phrases. The revisions narrow the search phrase to a long-tail that is laser focused on the exact thing the user seeks. So, when you’re found for a long-tail keyword phrase, usually it’s exactly what the user wants (or very close). For example, someone searching for a specialty provider of clinical data management may start out searching “clinical data management” and after not finding relevant listings revise the search to “clinical data management services” or “clinical research data management services” or one of many other long-tail versions that will produce relevant results. 

Hire a Reputable SEO Company

A reputable SEO company will conduct thorough keyword and persona research in order to develop a content marketing strategy. At the heart of a successful SEO plan is a content marketing plan, and that starts with keyword and persona research.  Before you engage an SEO company here are some basic questions to ask them. 

• How long have you been in business?
• Explain your SEO processes
• What is the make up of your SEO team?
• How do you stay current with SEO best practices?
• Show me results of other clients.
• Who will be our primary point of contact?
• How long will our SEO plan take to get off the ground?
• How will you measure SEO results?
• What do you need from us?

A reputable SEO company will be able to respond to these questions satisfactorily. I don’t hesitate to acknowledge there are many reputable SEO companies around the world. Unfortunately, there are also some not so good ones that focus on winning clients on low prices and shady sales tactics. These bad apples will cut corners, and sometimes use black hat techniques that can be very risky to your business. Conduct a Google search such as “complaints about company name,” or “problems with company name” with company name being the name of the SEO company you are considering. If you don’t find any negative results, chances are it is a reputable SEO company.

SEO Skills Don’t Guarantee a Fit With Your Business

A reputable SEO company may be competent but it doesn’t mean that one size fits all. Just because an SEO company has the skills, a brand should also asses some of their intangibles. Other than reference checking, one of the best ways to assess if an SEO company is a good fit for you is your overall experience during the sales conversation. Is the follow through timely? Is the communication effective? Is there attention to detail during the sales conversations? Do you get along with the people you’ll be working with? Most SEO companies behave the same after the sale as they did before the sale. It is advisable to invest time up front evaluating an SEO company thoroughly to gain insight into how the experience will unfold once you become a client. 

Documented SEO Processes Rule

When we first opened our doors as an SEO company in Tampa Bay in 2002 we decided to operate with the processes of a large company, but with the high touch feel of a small company. Although we service clients around the U.S. and Canada, usually by online meetings, we understand the importance of communicating the details. As such, our sales conversation is two sided. A wise SEO company looks for a good fit and doesn’t accept every client. A good fit is a two way street. The relationship between a client and an SEO company is one that should last at least one year. If it’s not a good fit for both parties, no one wins.

No SEO company in the world can handle every client that needs their services. This blog post doesn’t intend to convince the reader that Find and Convert should be their chosen SEO company. As I mention above, this post is intended to offer tips to help a marketing director select an SEO company. I hope that these tips can help a marketer approach the selection process with a logical method that will maximize a positive outcome in the selection of an SEO company.

I’m convinced that every marketing department is not big enough. No, I’m not advocating for bigger marketing departments. My goal is to help marketers recruit internal brand evangelists. Here’s why it’s mission critical to every marketing department.

MARKETers are not domain experts

In most businesses (and non profits, also referred to as businesses in this context), the marketing department staff is not comprised of people with deep expertise in the business. Marketing staff should generally have strong planning, communication and technology skills. In this age of content marketing, it’s not realistic for a business to expect the marketing staff to create every experience for their intended audience. The marketing staff simply doesn’t have the domain expertise in all aspects of a business to make this a reality. 

Effective Marketing is Driven by Relevant Content

The lines between advertising, promotion and content marketing are blurring. Is WillItBlend content marketing or advertising? Are SuperBowl ads content or just advertisements? Some would argue that at a cost of $4M per spot they are advertising. Then why do brands such as Volkswagen share their Get Happy commercial prior to the SuperBowl on Facebook and YouTube? Specifically, Volkswagen invites you to view this content prior to the SuperBowl. Why do brands do this? For maximum reach, but…

Marketing Departments Can Not Maximize Reach

Let me guess, your budget didn’t allow you to advertise in the SuperBowl, right? So how do the rest of us reach our desired audience? Even brands with enough budget to advertise in a large media event like the SuperBowl want to maximize reach. The fact is no marketing department is big enough to reach its intended audience to the extent it would like. Both B2B and B2C marketers want to reach their audience in an environment where the audience has complete control over where and when we consume content. No matter how smart or hard working a marketing department is, it’s just not possible to reach everyone through the efforts of the marketing department alone.

Cooperation by INTERNAL Domain Experts IS A MUST

On August 28, 1963 the late, great Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous “I have a dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to more than 200,000 supporters of the civil rights movement. Dr. King’s team of civl rights evangelists was relatively small. They didn’t have an advertising budget to promote this event. They didn’t have a PR agency lining up the national media. Instead, they inspired the “domain experts” on this topic to spread the word using low tech, non-internet based word-of-mouth marketing. Some may argue that this event as an example of marketing is not relevant because it is emotionally charged, and not pertaining to a product. There is some truth to that. But, consider that when the true domain experts in a business lack passion for sharing their domain expertise, they handicap the marketing efforts of the business. The challenge for any business is to turn subject matter experts into passionate brand evangelists.

I’ve said many times that marketing is not a department. I want business executives to embrace this so that they empower the marketing staff to develop a content marketing plan that leverages the domain expertise of its employees. I want the domain experts spread across various departments in a business to share their expertise with their customers, partners, employees, suppliers and other relevant constituents who have interest in their content for the simple reason that the marketing department is not big enough to go it alone.

Whether a business has 5 or 50,000 employees it can not staff a big enough marketing department. To reach its marketing potential each business must achieve passion among its domain experts and become a social business. When businesses achieve this mindset, reaching your marketing potentials are possible.

A social business is an organization that embraces the culture and technology of the social revolution for strategic business outcomes. A social business understands that being social is good for employee productivity and for external engagement with customers and partners. There are however risks involved. Consider these five risks before you label your organization a social business.

Lack of Experience

Generally speaking a business should have not less than three years experience with social media to consider itself a social business. Just like we go through a maturation process before we’re ready for certain responsibilities in our careers, likewise a business needs to mature in its use of social media. It takes about three years for an organization to think strategically about how “social” is strategic to the business.

Lack of Executive Support

When the top executives in an organization do not support being social, it’s not possible for it to be a social business. The culture of a social business has to become part of its DNA. Companies like Dell, Lowes, IBM and many others whose names are not as well recognized are strategically social because their CEO has embraced social for internal and external business value.

Lack of Employee Ambassadors

In a social business, marketing is not a department. Certain employees with subject matter expertise embrace the opportunity to contribute their expertise through content and social engagement. When certain employees become brand ambassadors and participate in engagement both with other employees and externally with people who engage the brand, these employees share a branding phenomenon that benefits both the employee and the corporate brand.

Low Quality Content

Content is a pre-requisite to being a social business simply because it is the currency that engages people throughout the value chain of a business. However, an organization who doesn’t plan their content strategy using best practices to produce relevant content risks producing low quality content. Content for the sake of content is not the answer to being a social business. A relevant content strategy doesn’t have a one-size-fits-all digital marketing plan. Detailed analysis of personas and keywords that align with personas should drive the content plan. A content calendar with assignments to subject matter experts is a staple in any social business.

Lack of Social Technology Investment

A social business cannot execute their plans or measure progress without proper tools. Social business tools include solutions for scheduling, management, analysis and measurement. A lack of investment in social business tools is like trying to dig a ditch with a spoon. Social business tools are understood as an investment in the daily management and measurement of progress for a social business.

Recently, I shared my view of social business along with examples of organizations that are enjoying success on their social business journey with Pamela Muldoon of Content Marketing 360. The interview is below. Give it a listen and share your thoughts below.

In true Zuckerberg fashion, Facebook got us all talking earlier this week in anticipation of the big announcement about Facebook Graph Search. Rumors ranged from those focused on the volatile IPO’s bottom line with hints at something new in Facebook marketing to the comical – like the prediction that Beast, Mark and Priscilla’s Hungarian Sheepdog, would be named Facebook’s new CEO.

Since the announcement of Facebook’s new Graph Search feature, the Internet has blown up like a running Beast “dog explosion” of explanation and speculation. For now, we are left with more questions than answers – questions about what this new search capability within Facebook really means for users, for advertisers, even for Google and other sites.

Why Facebook Search?

With the copious amounts of data, content, and images collected by Facebook every day, the world has long expected Facebook to use that data to jump into the search game. First looks at Graph Search indicate that the new tool is not attempting to go head to head with Google search – maybe just to go around it.

The results users can get from a Graph Search may be more threatening for sites like Yelp or Foursquare. There is even buzz about Graph Search potentially taking a bite out of sites like eHarmony and Match.com, even Monster and Linkedin. In essence, Graph Search hinges on the idea that people trust the recommendations of their friends and people like what their friends like. This is the idea behind Facebook’s Sponsored Story ads.

How Will Graph Search Improve Facebook?

In the press conference, Zuckerberg pointed out that Graph Search is a return to the way Facebook existed to connect people with other people with like interests when it was still “The Facebook” and was only available to students at a few colleges and universities. Since Facebook has exploded into the social phenomenon we know today, it simply contains too much content, information, and images to be effectively sorted in the Newsfeed or on a Timeline.

Newsfeed content can only be sorted by “top stories” or “most recent.” Timeline sorts your own content by date. But, even on a personal timeline, finding a picture you remember taking two years ago can be a challenge. Finding a picture posted by a friend is even harder and finding the title of that book she recommended in a status update a few months ago might be nearly impossible. In the Newsfeed, you were lucky to see your friend’s post in the first place! In turn, if you ask your Facebook friends for advice about what movie to see or where to go on vacation, you will only get input from the small fraction of your friends who see the post and take the time to respond.

How will Graph Search Work?

The vast information posted by your friends and others on Facebook will now be easy to sort and find using Graph Search. While the new tool will abide by existing privacy settings and only show what you were already able to access on Facebook, it takes that content and delivers personalized results.

For example, you could search for “restaurants my friends like in Miami” and Graph Search will return results ranked according to the perceived strength of your relationships within Facebook.

Below results returned from your friends, you will see general results posted by others (according to their privacy settings) and, to supplement Graph Search results, Facebook will turn to Bing for further results. (Web search conducted from within Facebook will continue to use Bing as well.) A “power bar” beside the search results will let you filter the results by gender, relationship, location, etc.

What will Graph Search Mean for Pages?

Currently, Graph Search is available only in a very limited Beta test so most of us will have to wait to get our hands on the new tool to know how useful it will be. The question currently left unanswered is “what will Graph Search mean for Pages?” It seems sponsored stories, those ads that show up in the Newsfeed, will be included in Graph Search results. Sponsored Results (a search-based ad currently available for Facebook advertisers using the Power Editor) will still be returned in search queries as well. It also seems likely that a new type of search ad may be coming to tap into the power of Graph Search. Pages that advertise on Facebook will want to watch for news and changes to ads in the coming months.

The take away for businesses on Facebook from the Social Graph announcement is the same social marketing strategy advice you’ve heard before – the key to success on Facebook is to cultivate and engage with fans in compelling and meaningful ways. When users search for information using Graph Search, a Page will be returned in the results and its rank in those results will be determined based on the connection and level of engagement that Page has had with the friends, interests, and community of the searcher.

The trick to being found by Graph Search will not be in keywords or in a magic optimization formula (although someone will inevitably attempt to reduce it to that). To be found on Facebook, Pages will need to be relevant and engaging enough to be worth finding. In other words your page will need to be truly liked by people to be included in a Graph Search.

We are diligently watching for more news of how Graph Search will work and how Pages will be affected. You can go to www.Facebook.com/about/GraphSearch and scroll to the bottom to join the waiting list as the new search tool is rolled out to users in the coming weeks. If you have questions, concerns, or high hopes for this new way to search, please share them with us in the comments below. If you see Graph Search capabilities on your own Facebook profile before we are able to update here, please let us know what you think!

The similarities between SEO and gardening strike me as being so similar. Let’s look at the similarities one at a time.

Planning

The beauty of a garden is in part how well it was planned. The average home garden requires the homeowner to begin with a plan of the botanic goals. Not the least of which this requires planning the types of plants, trees and shrubs to plant and how they will get laid out for visual presentation.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) likewise needs a game plan. Persona analysis is a must to consider the type of content needed on your website. Keyword research is another must to determine which keywords need to be included in the website content. These two elements are the minimum planning required for a successful SEO strategy.

Preparing the Soil

Once a home owner has a plan for the garden, the soil must be prepared before the actual planting begins. This is to ensure the soil has the requisite nutrients to feed the roots of the new plants as they transition from their temporary pots to their permanent life in the garden’s soil.

Likewise, a website must have a “healthy architecture” that will allow for search engines to properly crawl and index its content so that it will score the website’s content favorably and retrieve its content when people search using relevant keywords. Important SEO architecture issues include the URL naming structure, URL navigation structure, the proper use of meta data, and efficient coding that is easy for search engines to crawl. There are other technical issues that can impact SEO, but these are the big ones.

Planting

The home owner has planned their garden, prepared the soil and purchased the plants, trees or shrubs. It’s now time to plant your garden. You can expect to get your fingernails dirty as you plant your garden. The SEO equivalent is the act of optimizing content, page by page. Each page MUST be uniquely focused on one topic just like a plant is unique. Each page of content gets optimized with a singular keyword focus. Think of it this way. You want to make it easy for the search engine when it crawls your website to interpret the specific theme of each page so that it may get displayed in a search for a person interested in that topic.

Fertilizing

An experienced gardener understands the importance of fertilizer to provide nutrients to plants. Those nutrients serve to stimulate growth, botanic beauty and protect against disease. In SEO the fertilizer equivalence that gives a website content marketing strength is authority. And, authority is gained through a combination of longevity, and an abundance of relevant content, which other people link to and share through social media. Search engines determine the authority of a website by analyzing the quantity and quality of content and how much others link to it and share it. While low quality content is not effective, research proves that 50 pages is better than 20, 500 pages is better than 50 and 2000 pages is better than 500. This point illustrates that the more relevant content is present in a website, the more authority it is given by search engines which will result in more search discoverability and result in more inbound traffic to a website.

Pruning

A gardener understands the importance of pruning foliage. The pruning act gets rid of dead remnants in a garden to make room for new plant life. In the SEO context, editing content to reflect updates in your business or industry is the equivalent of pruning. Search engines have the capability to assess the last date of content revision as well as the frequency. Algorithmically search engines assume that if you don’t periodically update your content or add to your website’s content you aren’t giving your website visitors a good experience. The result is your website will be scored lower and result in poorer SEO results. In other words adding and updating website content is a must for long term SEO success.

Ongoing Care

A gardener would never conceive the notion that once a garden has been planned, the soil is prepared and the plants are planted that the act of gardening is complete. In order for a garden to thrive in the long run the gardener gives it constant attention. Yes, constant attention. Likewise, SEO requires constant attention. A quarterly crawl report should be performed to assess any technical issues that need attention. Periodic keyword research is advisable to learn of new ways your customer searches for your products. Observing the type of content your competitors launch is advisable. And, most important is a commitment to continually adding new content to your website throughout the year. No matter the industry, adding content is a must for effective SEO. New content can be in many formats, such as vertical industry solutions, white papers on unique topics, case studies, educational resources, e-books, blog posts, videos, podcasts, etc.

The parallels between gardening and SEO are mind-boggling. In fact, the next time we hire an SEO implementation consultant I’m going to look for someone who is an experienced gardener.

Whether you read this in January or July, in 2013 or 2015, these guiding principles are timeless. In order for a client to get maximum results from their relationship with a digital marketing agency it is best to wholeheartedly embrace these principles. These are the principles we live by everyday at Find and Convert.

Collaboration

At the top of my list is collaboration. I don’t just mean cooperation. I mean authentic collaboration. The difference is more than a subtle one. A collaborative relationship between a client and their digital marketing agency results in the agency being treated as an extended member of the client’s team. The client proactively communicates a 360 degree view of their overall marketing strategy. The agency is always in the know about the client’s marketing activities and how they fit into the client’s business goals. There are no major surprises. The agency is not just a vendor, but rather a member of the client’s team.

Resource Allocation

Sure, budget is very important. A budget that realistically subsidizes the required effort is a pre-requisite. An under-budgeted effort can yield limited results. And, just as important as budget is the allocation of non-monetary resources starting with the client’s internal staff. A digital marketing agency supplements a client’s marketing staff, not substitutes them. A client should have a minimum of one full time marketing director (or equivalent) and preferably at least one full time staff person. Availability of a client’s marketing staff with good planning, communication and project management skills makes a HUGE difference for collaboration with a digital marketing firm to execute successful plans.

Expectations

Clear definition of goals and expectations must be discussed and agreed upon before a client and digital marketing agency sign a contract for services. A lack of clear expectations is one of the biggest reasons for a failed relationship. Expectations and budget must be aligned. Only when expectations and budget alignment are clearly defined on the front end of an engagement can both parties kick off a business relationship that is well positioned for success.

Web Assets

A client’s digital marketing plan will revolve around content and web assets. The client’s most important web asset is their website. If the website is based on outdated technology that impedes ability to implement SEO best practices, creates a poor user experience or is difficult to update, these hurdles are game stopping. In such a situation, upgrading the web assets must be priority #1! No digital marketing agency on the planet can squeeze water from a rock which is the metaphor for trying to launch a digital marketing plan with poor web assets.

Content Brand Mindset

Current digital marketing practices require producing relevant content that engages customers and influencers. A one-size-fits-all content mindset, or worse yet, not recognizing the importance of creating compelling and relevant content is another game stopper. A client must embrace the importance of becoming a content brand, not just creating branded content.

Technology

A business needs certain technology systems to run its daily operations such as financial systems, ERP for manufacturers and CRM for sales operations. Likewise, to execute digital marketing plans certain technologies are a necessity (not a luxury) such as marketing automation software, email distribution software, social media management software and analytics tools to name a few. A client must be willing to license requisite digital marketing technology to execute and measure plans. Absence of technology tools in digital marketing is like asking the accounting department to run their books on paper.

Brand Savvy

A client with a good product (or service) that is poorly branded is not well positioned to benefit from a digital marketing plan. The client’s brand messaging should be clearly stated and credible with its target customers.

Communication

Typically, weekly status meetings are the norm. A weekly meeting covers updates on all digital marketing activities, issues that need attention, content planning, integration with offline marketing activities and next steps for each member of the team on the client side and on the agency side. When clients excessively skip meetings the plan results will suffer, and the relationship will suffer. See Collaboration above.

Responsiveness

The role of an agency is both “doing” and “advising.” The advice we offer is grounded in our expertise and our experience serving other clients with similar goals. In general, we expect our clients to heed our advice on major issues pertaining to best practices. Ignoring our advice calls into question the logic for engaging a digital marketing firm in the first place.

ROI Focus

Of course we want to get results for our clients! And, I make no apology in saying that it is somewhat self-serving. Getting results for clients wins us more clients. We have a lot of skin in the game. We measure everything with an eye on KPIs and bottom line results. We are very data driven in this regard.

Dual Engagement

These success factors outline what we look for in a client relationship. Our responsibility is to deliver an honest effort grounded in expertise, through clearly communicated plans, meticulous follow up on execution details and prompt response when called upon. In other words, what we expect from our clients is exactly what we strive to deliver in a two-way street relationship.

Our success in a client relationship is dependent on the success factors outlined here. In that regard, when we engage in a conversation with a prospective client we are conducting a due diligence on them as much as they conduct a due diligence on us. Our client’s success is our success. We strive to position our clients and ourselves for successful digital marketing results….I invite your thoughts and comments below…

If you’re creating your campaign in-house, you should concentrate on 3 things: creating a great first impression, engaging your audience with your business, and utilizing your email metrics within your strategy. An effective email campaign can increase your sales conversions, traffic, and lead generation if it’s managed with these best practices in mind.

Create a Great First Impression

A great first impression is hard to make when there are innumerable amounts of spam senders doing the same exact thing. And thus, a customers’ first impression of your marketing email should express your brand image and encourage customers to open the message.

• Place your business logo above the fold so that it is the first thing your customers see. This is an important element of branding – making yourself recognizable to customers through your brand, and then accurately depicting your message.
• Use language that implies urgency. MarketingForecast.com suggests this can work for B2B and B2C: “In the B2C sector, consumers may be more likely to click on emails with a subject line that contains words like ‘discount’ or ‘free.’ In the B2B sector, the promotional word ‘sale’ prompts the best open rates.” Sometimes it’s the smallest details that make the biggest difference.

Engage Your Audience

Email is a great way to market your products, but gives you the opportunity to do a lot more. Diversifying your email marketing messages will help you engage your customers’ interest and improve open and click-through rates.

• Utilize focus groups, conversations on your social media pages, and comments on your blog to determine the kinds of things your customers want to talk about beyond just product marketing.
• Use your emails to engage your customers in those conversations. Thank them for patronizing your business, send them exclusive product information, and keep them informed of developments in your business and the industry. The more compelling content you create, the more your customers will respond to your marketing messages.
• In order to reach the greatest number of customers, be sure that your website is optimized for mobile access. Add a link in your email signature to take mobile customers directly to your site.

Use Your Analytics

Analytics is critical to email marketing success. This will give you an idea of what messages your customers respond the most to. This information, in addition to what you glean from your social media and blog comments, can help you make your email campaign content more efficient with less time and effort.

• Metrics that you should track include: deliver rate, open rate, subscriber retention rate, and click-through rate.
• These numbers in particular will give you a clear picture of whether your emails are getting opened, what kind of headlines and content are most effective, and where you need to direct your email marketing strategy.

Together with your social media presence and website performance, your email marketing campaign is an important element of your overall online marketing strategy. Follow best practices by creating a good first impression, engaging your audience, and using your email analytics wisely.

Megan Webb-Morgan is a web content writer for Resource Nation. She writes about small business, focusing on topics such as business sales. Follow Resource Nation on Facebook and Twitter, too! 

How does a 300 person B2B technology company compete against global, established brands with thousands of employees and much bigger marketing budgets? One such company who is nameless in this article to protect their digital strategy asked themselves this question and became a social business along the way.

Recognition of Social Media Trend

Approximately five years ago they recognized a growing trend toward the use of social media in business. They were already very intent with SEO best practices. Their CMO shared a key stat with the CEO and the rest of the organization: As much as 90% of B2B buyers conduct extensive research online about prospective vendors before they are willing to engage in a sales conversation.

But, just SEO alone is a tall mountain to climb particularly when your competitors are 20 times your size. So, they set out to develop a content strategy that would create a relevant connection with their audience. A connection that would build trust and create sales opportunities. Every piece of content they set out to produce has two criteria: 1) it must be high quality, relevant content for their audience, 2) it must focus on a keyword that has search relevance.

Their CEO was very supportive from the get-go. He recognized the growing popularity of social media and encouraged experimentation with social technologies to help support their content strategy.

A Private Community

Naturally, they use Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn to engage and share content. LinkedIn in particular is a key aspect of their social business strategy. Many of their employees are active in LinkedIn groups where they participate in discussions and share links to their blog with industry peers. The big differentiator is their own private community. They created an online community hosted on their website where industry peers can join in on technical discussions and support each other. This vibrant community is over 5,000 strong at the time of this writing.

Content Requires Planning

As their content strategy evolved, they created an editorial calendar and assigned articles to subject matter experts (SMEs). Each article is focused on one keyword. The SME authors the article. An editor reviews it and helps to turn it into a white paper.  The white paper is made available via a download form, which creates top of the funnel leads. The white paper gets re-purposed into blog posts and in some cases a video interview is conducted with the author, as yet another piece of relevant content.

Once the content is published, the author and many of the other employees share it through their social network, particularly through LinkedIn. It’s interesting to note that the employees who contribute content have come to value the recognition and social influence they are developing within their industry community. This is a natural evolution in social business as employees become very active with their participation in online channels.

The C Suite Gets It

As mentioned above, the CEO quickly recognized the adoption of social media in business and that it might have marketing potential. He was very willing to embrace it early in the adoption curve in order to establish a quick and significant presence. This first-mover mindset proved fruitful.

Marketing Marketing

This is a real company with a marketing department of five people. I am not disclosing their name out of respect for the privacy of their strategy in a very competitive industry segment. I will point out that the CMO is always marketing their strategy to its employees to get them to embrace their role in marketing. In other words, Marketing (the department) is marketing the importance of marketing and how each employee can contribute. This company is a fine example of a B2B organization well along their journey as a social business!

I recently wrote a blog post about the 5 characteristics of a social business, and I’ve previously provided my slide deck on the topic from speaking gigs on the topic. One of the most important criteria of a social business is executive level participation. Simply stated when the C suite gets it, the organization is well positioned to become a social business.

Definition of C Suite

The “C suite” is typically the phrase that represents the highest ranking executives starting with the Chief Executive Officer or CEO. Executive titles vary from business to business. So, if “C” titles don’t apply in your organization, don’t sweat it. Just apply these ideas to the top managers running your company.

Blogger CEO

It doesn’t matter if your business is a B2B or B2C, when the CEO blogs he or she contributes thought leadership  in your industry. Perhaps the bigger impact is the “leading by example” affect on employees. Imagine a conversation among two employees going like this: “Wow, if our CEO can find the time to blog given the heavy demands on his or her schedule, I suppose I can too…”

Other C Suite Bloggers

It’s a big help when the CEO contributes blog content, but it’s even better if the entire C suite participates. Stop and think about the expertise among the management team spanning business functions like finance, human resources, production, engineering, customer service, sales, marketing and other specialty functions inside your organization. They don’t have to give away any trade secrets. All they need to do to contribute valuable content is discuss common questions and generally how they get addressed in your business, or discuss trends that relate to their business function. Often, these C suite execs don’t realize that what they know is not common knowledge to the rest of the organization and the industry. The content they produce can be extremely insightful and inspiring to employees in your business.

Executives on Twitter

Now I’ll get out of the comfort zone for some. A report earlier this year revealed that 70% of Fortune 500 CEOs have no social media presence and less than 5% of them use Twitter. Usually the reason C suite execs are not on Twitter is because they misunderstand it. Since 2007 I’ve heard executives scoff at Twitter suggesting it was a waste of time. Comments such as “I don’t get it,” or “I don’t care to know what someone is having for lunch” were common. Today, those CEOs who recognize Twitter as a “communication channel” use it to share thoughts on industry trends, share links to relevant articles and even offer rebuttals to claims they feel are not true. Twitter has emerged as a legitimate social media channel used across all industries where the playing field is level. On Twitter anyone can follow anyone. I can follow Bill Gates or Bill Jones (the latter being an ordinary guy and the former being..well, you know who that is)…Executives who attract a following on Twitter can set the tone for the rest of their company and often become a standout in their industry.

Up-to-Date LinkedIn Profile

Another social media channel which has emerged as a serious player in the social business landscape is LinkedIn. There are more than 150 million active users (at the time of this writing) who use LinkedIn for professional networking. LinkedIn is a triple crown social media channel. At one level LinkedIn is where each of us stores our work history in a digital profile which is often scrutinized by customers before choosing to to business with your company. At another level, LinkedIn allows us to create and join professional groups with like minded professionals to carry on digital dialogues on relevant topics. Executives can do some efficient listening and engaging in LinkedIn groups. And, LinkedIn is also where any business can create a company page. A LinkedIn company page is like a website. LinkedIn provides it free with options to upload graphics that represent your company’s products and promotional messaging. You can also upload a video promotion to support your product messaging. And, it offers a place to post job openings as well as deliver insights into the people who follow your company page. The C suite should embrace LinkedIn for what it is – a digital channel where its customers, current and prospective employees, suppliers and investors engage with people and brands who choose to engage them. A social business embraces LinkedIn starting in the C suite. Ignore LinkedIn at your own risk.

Recognize Employees for Social Business Contribution

Perhaps the most impactful way executives can support their journey to being a social business is to recognize and encourage employees to participate. Here are three scenarios to illustrate the point.

1. An executive can simply retweet or share on LinkedIn an article that was written by an employee. The premise for this scenario is an employee who wrote an excellent blog post and published it to their social channels (LinkedIn or Twitter, etc.) and an executive “likes” or “shares” or “retweets” the article. Such a “shoutout” is the digital equivalent of a pat on the back which works well in a geo distributed business environment. The positive impact on the employee’s morale can be huge.

2. Let’s face it not all employees like to write or write well. Therefore, no one expects all employees to write blog posts or articles. An executive who is visiting with employees at a plant, or a field office or at a conference can simply have a picture taken with those employees in a casual setting. When that executive shares the picture through a social media channel like Twitter or Instagram, the morale boost to those employees is more than one might imagine.

3. Another way an executive might engage with employees is through spontaneous video. Imagine the scenario in #2 above and instead of taking a picture (or in addition to) the executive pulls out his or her smart phone and asks the employee to shoot a 30 or 60 second video to allow the employee to explain some great example of customer service or whatever has made an impression on that executive in the moment. This demonstrates a human side to the executive that creates a sense of connectedness between the employee and the executive.

Social Business Common Thread Elements

In each of these five examples the social business common thread includes two key points. 1) Content: When executives actively participate in the content strategy, they set the tone for the rest of the organization. They send the message that quality content is an important element to the company’s overall value equation to customers, employees and actually to all its stakeholders.  2) When executives overcome whatever reluctance they may have about the use of social technologies they become more relevant to employees. Executives who make comments such as “I have no problem with social media, I just don’t want to use it,” demonstrate a mindset anchored in 2005 when social media was new and used mostly for entertainment. Social media has proved to be a digital engagement channel that enables businesses to reach people externally and internally for measurable business value. That’s why this movement is known as social business.

The chief marketing officer (CMO) is under a lot of pressure to produce consistently measurable results. Additionally, the CMO is bombarded with new social media tools and technology as well as endless content marketing advice to be relevant with target customers, while the CEO is saying “show me how all this content you’re producing results in sales.”

This article is not intended to convince you that good content marketing can positively influence sales. Visit the Content Marketing Institute for a healthy dose of that evidence. Rather, this article serves to convince C suite executives to embrace the new paradigm of “social business.”

Spread Marketing Across the Organization

In a social business, the marketing efforts are spread across several functions of the organization. The logic for this model is actually very pragmatic. Your customer has access to a digital megaphone. She can say good things or bad things about your brand in many social media channels. And, there isn’t anything you can do to stop her. Consider also that your customer has friends and friends of friends who might listen to her. What she says online can influence the perception of your business or products. In short, she can influence your sales.

Now, ask yourself if your marketing department is big enough to listen and engage to all those digital conversations? Hopefully, your marketing team is using social media management technology to listen and engage. But, if you expect the marketing department to efficiently listen and engage to those conversations on the social web AND also create a whole bunch of relevant content, AND plan all those events you budgeted to host or attend, AND execute all those advertising campaigns that are considered important to your brand, AND manage your website (or online store), etc.….If you really expect your marketing department to manage ALL that, it’s no wonder the CMO’s office is a two year rotating door.

The CMO is Not a Super Hero

The CMO described in the previous paragraph doesn’t exist. In today’s digital age, the most successful CMOs establish the vision for marketing success and create partnerships of shared responsibility with other business functions. I submit that at a minimum the functions which should participate in the marketing of your business should include the sales team, customer service team and the production team. Let’s look at each function’s role in marketing.

Today’s Sales Professional is Marketing Savvy

Today’s sales professional is active in at least two social media channels. In B2B sales, building and maintaining an active network on LinkedIn is not an option. Twitter is another social channel where both B2B and B2C sales professionals can participate in the marketing communication effort. One simple way sales people can participate in the marketing effort is by sharing relevant industry content with their network through LinkedIn or Twitter. Some of it should include content produced by the marketing team such as blog posts, e-books, videos, etc. And, some of it should also be third party, industry content such as industry reports, relevant articles, etc. By sharing relevant content with your network, the sales professional builds credibility for herself and her employer. And, sales leads will occur from this activity. An excellent example of sales professionals in social action is SAP.

Today’s Customer Service Rep is Digitally Active

Customer service staff should be empowered to communicate with customers in social channels. I don’t suggest moving customer service entirely to social media. I do however suggest that some (or all) customer service professionals should be proactive and reactive to customer issues through social channels by listening and engaging where appropriate. These interactions should be “H2H” or human-to-human. As a consumer, I want to deal with a real person at a business, not the company logo or a faceless form. In B2B companies another type of customer service engagement is the people who deliver a professional service. Often, these are highly skilled staffers with titles such as “consultant,” or “engineer.” These employees should be willing to engage H2H with customers and prospective customers in social channels including blogs, Google+, LinkedIn and Twitter. Two outstanding B2B examples of “customer service” engagement through engineers or consultants include Indium and Kinaxis.

Today’s Production Team is Social

If you are a maker of any type of product, you have “production” people. In manufacturing the production people may work in a factory. In a software company production people are developers. In a hospital they are the healthcare practitioners. In a law firm they are the practicing attorneys. They are all the same in the context of “making a product.” Not all production people need to participate in online engagement. That’s where some planning is important. The CMO should partner with the leader of the “production” team (whatever that is in your business) to identify the person or people who are best suited to participate in social business conversations. It may take some experimentation but with a collaborative mindset, the right people can be integrated into the marketing effort. An excellent example of production people in action at a social business is Sarasota Memorial Hospital.

Employees Are a Branding Asset

The mindset that the corporate brand is the only “brand” asset has been obsoleted in the digital age. Employees can develop a valuable brand that can be “shared” with the corporate brand. Not all employees are well suited for shared branding. And, not all employees are qualified or even willing to participate in the shared branding process. That’s why planning between the CMO and functional leaders is so important with full support from the C suite. In order for that to happen, department leaders need to embrace the fact that marketing is not a department and be an enthusiastic partner in the planning process with the CMO. This collaboration should focus on the integration of corporate branding and employee branding. An excellent example with CEO level participation and support is Tribridge, an award winning IT service provider.

Business 2.0

I know the “2.0″ moniker has been over used. I’m as guilty as anyone as the author of the book Marketing 2.0. But, I can’t think of a more suitable way to frame this marketing paradigm shift. In the new paradigm, organizations who embrace the merger of corporate branding and employee branding intuitively recognize that marketing is an enterprise wide shared responsibility not just one department.

A social media monitoring system (SMMS) is a necessary element in any digital marketing strategy. Social media has become essential for businesses to engage with their desired audience and to listen to their comments about their brand. The online chatter about your brand, your competitors, and the needs of your customers is (in many cases) a 365 days a year, 24 hour per day reality. While few businesses have employees on the clock 24/7/365, we have reached a point where social business technology is accessible and affordable to any business.

Maturation of Social Media Monitoring Systems

As social media monitoring systems have become increasingly available in recent years, they’ve been mostly affordable only to mid size and large enterprises. Systems such as Buddy Media, Sysomos and Radian6 have proved very useful tools for brands to manage their social media activities. But, their fee structure isn’t built for the SMB market. Enter free tools such as TweetDeck (acquired by Twitter) and HootSuite, as well as lower priced tools such as SocialOomph (offers a free version) and SproutSocial.

It’s Not About HootSuite Versus TweetDeck

Two of the most popular social media monitoring tools are HootSuite and TweetDeck. We’ve used both for about three years now. We’ve elected to put our vote behind HootSuite to support client social media marketing activities. There are plenty of articles that provide a comparison of HootSuite versus TweetDeck. Rather, I will summarize the key reasons Find and Convert recommends HootSuite to our clients for social media monitoring.

HootSuite is Very Scalable

About 20% of top brands already use HootSuite. The free version of HootSuite provides a single user login with up to 5 social media accounts and the ability to schedule messages to any social media account that supports scheduling such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. If a business starts out with the free version of HootSuite and needs more robust features, HootSuite offers a Pro and Enterprise plan. The Pro plan starts at $9.99 per month for 2 users, with affordable options to add up to 10 users. Once a business has a need for 10 users, the Enterprise Plan plan makes sense. This migration path is very practical allowing any business to test HootSuite, learn how it works and gradually increase functionality as their social business strategy evolves.

Manage Multiple Social Media Channels

Most businesses are using many social media channels including Twitter and Facebook. Beyond these two social channels, HootSuite also supports LinkedIn, Google+, FourSquare, WordPress and others. This allows a social media marketing team to manage all their activity from a single dashboard.

Manage Multiple Social Media Applications

HootSuite is impressively adding support for many social media applications to enable users to manage those applications from within the HootSuite dashboard. Some of the applications that can be managed from HootSuite include YouTube (channel), Instagram, Flickr, HubSpot, Get Satisfaction, SocialBro, StumbleUpon, Slideshare and others.

Set up Internal Social Media Response Teams

As your social business team grows (internally or externally or both), you can set up teams. HootSuite calls them “organizations.” For example you can set up separate organizations for customer service, field events, sales, PR, etc. Within each organization, you can set up people with limited access to the social channels pertinent to them.

Assign Actions to Teams Members

As your social business activities progress, you can assign people within those organizations to take action on specific social interations. For example, if you see a comment that is best addressed by someone on the customer service team, you can assign it directly to an individual on that team. The admin of an organization can track the response to ensure it was addressed in a timely manner.

Social Media Marketing Analytics

HootSuite has a robust set of analytics features. The free and Pro version has integrated Google Analytics and Facebook Insights, as well as Twitter analytics tied to shortened URLs created in HootSuite. The Enterprise version provides enhanced analytics, including custom analytics. I will point out that HootSuite is not in the same category of enterprise social media analysis tools such as Crimson Hexagon (which, in full disclosure is a Find and Convert client).

HootSuite Offers a Strong Mobile App

HootSuite has an awesome mobile app that makes using HootSuite on the go very easy and productive. It is currently available for iOS, Android and Blackberry.

Measure Social Influence of Twitter Followers

HootSuite allows you to view the social influence of your Twitter followers through their Klout score. This allows you to determine which Twitter followers should get your attention from an engagement perspective. Using the assignment function described above, is one way to make use of this feature.

Independence

One point I believe worth mentioning is the fact that HootSuite is a standalone business. It’s certainly feasible HootSuite may get acquired as we’ve seen occur among other SMMS products such as Radian6, BuddyMedia and Yammer. I don’t have a problem with an acquisition of a tool, provided the tool can still be useful to the general public without ties to the parent company.

HootSuite University

HootSuite University is an impressive resource included with Enterprise and optionally available to Pro users for $21 per month. H.U. is terrific for any marketing organization who needs to educate staff on social business best practices.

HootSuite social media monitoring is a practical solution for our clients, most of whom are SMB (small and medium size) companies in the range of 10 to 500 employees. Each business should evaluate social business tools according to their needs and make a selection that suits their specific needs.

Start a FREE HootSuite Trial

The SEO impact of Google+ is no longer a mystery. It’s real and it’s getting bigger. Consider that when Google+ first became available in June 2011, it was met with relative skepticism. Despite the fact the social network comes from behemoth Google, it was Google’s third attempt at a social network.

Little did we know that Google’s motive was less about capturing market share from Facebook or Twitter or other social media channels. It’s now evident that Google’s primary motive behind Google+ is to maintain more control over the search marketing landscape.

While Google is increasingly diversifying its business (e.g., Android), it is first and foremost in the search engine business. Google is vying for ad dollars from marketers, and vying for mindshare from you and me to use Google as our preferred search engine to find stuff we need. Facebook has emerged as a serious competitor for ad dollars, and that is what Google has their sites on.

Branded Google+ Profiles

Google opened up Google+ for brands in November, 2011. A Google+ page is in concept very similar to a Facebook page. One difference is that when you publish content from your Google+ page and select “public” as an audience option, that content can show up in Google’s search results for people logged into their Google account.  Google is not able to (nor probably interested) in indexing Facebook page content. All marketers are well served to post quality content through a Google+ page for this reason alone.

+1 Content Sharing

Google first announced the social sharing signals in October 2009. Since then, the +1 signal has been progressively increasing. Speculation that when people “like” your content through a +1 click, Google favors that content through search engine results position (SERP) improvement is no longer speculation. The now famous experiment by SEOMoz Rand Fishkin is one of several experiments that proved Google’s ranking preference for content that has been +1′d. Sharing content in Google+ has a similar affect. When someone in one of your Google+ circles shares content, you are more likely to see that in a search result.

AuthorRank is Coming Soon

Google results are more personal than ever before. Google wants to reward individuals for publishing and sharing quality content, and is similarly showing signs of penalizing anonymous content publishers. I like this because it is consistent with the social business movement which motivates brands to publish content through employees (real people). It requires that businesses ask their employees to set up Google+ profiles and connect their blog content to it so that their content will be displayed as their content in Google’s results. Brands need to embrace the fact they can not hide behind a logo, but rather leverage the expertise of their employees.

A Word About AuthorRank

At the time of this writing, Google has not fully disclosed how to get displayed as an author. Sure, they’ve published the “authorship” instructions. I have followed the instructions to the letter but my author profile has not yet been displayed in search results. I suspect this is because AuthorRank is not yet official. Nonetheless, brands should get ready for widespread availability of AuthorRank as it will be yet another influential role in search engine optimization results.

A Search Marketing Arms Race

Remember that Google and Facebook are in intense competition for time spent on their respective sites and utility. Google wants to remain the top search engine choice among users worldwide. And, while Facebook boasts more than 1 billion users compared to a mere 100 million active Google+ users, Google has billions of searches performed everyday in its search engine. And, that’s what Google wants to maintain. Everything Google does is in defense of its search engine market share. And, that’s why Google+ is so influential on SEO.

I had the honor of speaking at the 4^th annual Bend WebCAM conference in Bend, Oregon October 25^th and 26^th where I enjoyed one of the best conferences in the search marketing industry. Bend WebCAM is not as well recognized among search marketing conferences as others. Did you know that Bend, Oregon is recognized as the birthplace of SEO? That is largely credited to John Audette’s online agency Multimedia Marketing Group in the mid 1990s located in Bend. Audette was the first to coin the phrase search engine optimization. His work influenced others and spread quickly among other internet marketers in Bend and around the U.S. and the world. The Bend WebCAM annual event is put on by Mark Knowles, CEO of Pixelsilk. Mark’s relationships run deep in the SEO industry because he has created a content management system in Pixelsilk that is built from the ground up to be SEO friendly. Many of the search marketing industry’s best minds have provided input to make Pixelsilk the most SEO friendly CMS in the market. Indeed, Find and Convert has embraced Pixelsilk as we regularly recommend Pixelsilk to our clients.

Key take aways from Bend WebCAM 2012

Danny Sullivan: Opening Keynote

Danny is recognized as one of the pioneers of search marketing. His opening keynote delivered on both substance and form. Danny has a “boy next door” style that has made him very popular because he is so authentic and knowledgeable in search marketing. Among many key points Danny made are:

Search 4.0 is personalized search

Key ranking factors include: location, social interaction by your network, especially in Google+.

There is no such thing as “normal” search results anymore due to local results dominating.

When someone you know has shared or +1 a listing, you will see that ranking over other rankings.

People answering questions on Quora also show up on SERP listings.

Social is the best opportunity for clean link building. It’s natural and easy when people like content in social.

Paid inclusion is back in Google’s Shopping results engine.

The future of search (it’s here already) is verbal search (think Siri) followed by content or maps or both.

Facebook Marketing: Marty Weintraub

Marty is a very high energy, entertaining speaker with the content to back it up. He delivered an amazing presentation on Facebook marketing. Marty literally wrote the book on Facebook marketing. Among his many tips include:

Think of Facebook as an email list. Always be building it.

Some of your posts should be promoted using Promoted Posts and Sponsored Posts to increase visibility with fans.

Advertise a post with highly targeted demographics. Test ads targeted to “likers and friends of your page.” Target ads at people who work at specific companies with relevant posts.

If you don’t get 3% to 5% CTR on content posts, your content isn’t relevant to your fans.

Clean up your posts by editing descriptions copied from other sites and removing the URL from the post. Remove the URL of links in Facebook posts! Always use an image in a post!

Use Alltop.com to find content on desired topics to share with your Facebook fans.

Google Analytics: Caleb Whitmore, Analytics Pros

Caleb Whitmore is one of the top Google Analytics Certified Partners globally. Caleb has been working with Google Analytics and the team at Google since launch of the product in 2005. He regularly contributes to the official Google Analytics blog and speaks at industry events. Below are a few of Caleb’s tips on use of Google Analytics.

The 7 Causes of Digital Analytics Failure

1. No strategy
2. No plan. Need a plan to execute the big idea.
3. Bad implementation.
4. Data overload – analysis paralysis.
5. Distrust of data (different data results across diff analytics tools)
6. Barriers to reaching data – if don’t get it out to decision makers.
7. Lack of action after insights

Rather than ask a question about a metric, ask the business question that drives the value in the metric. Then, focus on the correct data.

Google Analytics Team Skills Needed:

1. Business analysis
2. Developer
3. Data miner
4. Analysis ninja

7 Essentials in Google Analytics.

1. Implementation: Google Analytics has more than 55 settings for the tag alone. Cookie domain, campaign anchors, x-domain linking, etc. If these settings are not set up properly, data will not be accurate. E.g., your own website shows up as a referring site. Use tools: Analyticscheckup.com, Observepoint.com

2. Goal Setting Set up a range of goals, e.g., viewing pages that lead to a conversion. A range of goals in Google Analytics gives you a spectrum of metrics to study

3. Campaign tagging Tag email campaigns, landing pages, etc. When you don’t tag campaigns, it gets reported as direct traffic. Ad tracking parameters. See GA Help for explanations.

4. Segmentation There are 6 ways to segment data in GA.

5. Geographic analysis Look at visits and engagement in geo locations.

6. Technology analysis Study browser reports to see how people view your website. Study screen size report. Shows heat map of how people see your site on different monitors.

7. Entrance Point Analysis The Home page is not always the most common entrance. Study the long tail of entrances to understand the content that attracts visitors. Product pages are usually the most common entrants, especially on commerce sites.

Pinterest Marketing: Andrew Melchior and Matt Siltala of AvalaunchMedia.com

Andrew and Matt gave an insightful presentation on how to market using Pinterest. Below are some of their tips.

70% of the Pinterest user base is female with 81% between 25 and 55 years old.

Geographic location of users are primarily in middle America.

Pinterest ranks #3 in retail referring traffic:

1. Facebook 26.4%
2. Twitter 3.61%
3. Pinterest 3.6%

A Bizrate study reflects compelling insights into how people are using Pinterest:

70% use Pinterest to get inspiration on what to buy.

Only 17% of Facebook users do so to get inspiration on what to buy.

43% of Pinterest users associate with retailers or brands they follow.

Ways to use Pinterest:

Destination brands: boards with pics of places, things to do.

Agency: highlight recent campaigns.

Nordstrom: releases new products on Pinterest before they launch it on their website to drive pre-orders and increase demand.

ZAGG features products, gadgets and related things that surrounds their products.

Create boards around gift ideas.

Link your Pinterest account to Twitter and Facebook.

People on Pinterest want DIY and “how to” images.

Optimizing images for Pinterest:

• Don’t use Flash based images
• Some Javascript image preview tools block the option for pinning
• There are plugins available for WordPRess and others

Pinning tips:

• Have the keyword in the file name
• Link the image to a web page
• Add a description with keyword
• Replace e-commerce images if they are too small
• 554 pixels wide max
• 5,000 pixels in length max

Pinterest Tools:

• Curalate.com
• PinAlerts.com
• PinReach (possibly no longer available)
• PinPuff
• Pinerly (similar to GA for Pinterest)
• Repinly
• Pinterest.com/source/yourdomain.com
• Bit.ly/pinterest-bookmarklet

SEO Marketing Tips: Marshall Simmonds of Define Media Group

Marshall is one of the most widely recognized SEO experts in the U.S. His background includes five years overseeing the search strategy for the New York Times. Marshall shared soooo many tips, I couldn’t capture most of them. Below are a few I was able to capture.

“16% of queries typed into Google every day have never been used before.” Avinash Kaushik, Google

“Every page on your website is a home page.” Caleb Whitmore, Analytics Pros

Optimize Title tag (based on KWs people actually search),

Optimize images.

Use Rich Snippets where appropriate for reviews, ratings, ingredients to differentiate your listing from other SERP listings.

Embed YouTube video on web pages optimized with relevant keywords. Optimize images for image search with links back to your site.

Conduct a reverse image search to find people who have downloaded your image. Ask them to link back to your site from the image instead of asking for a cease and desist.

The Google+ influence on search results is huge! We don’t have to like it. He recommends we use G+ and try to get +1s on content. Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz ran an experiment on a URL. He asked for +1s and no other form of social sharing. He found the URL ranking #1 in Google for the main title within a few hours.

Beer Marketing

The last session of the event was a panel comprised of five local beer breweries discussing their marketing plans with questions and engagement from the audience. Naturally, beer samples were provided.  The panel also included Tim Mather, founder and CEO of UNTAPPD, a mobile app which is credited for having a positive marketing impact on the beer brewing industry. My biggest take away from this panel is how the breweries recognize that growth of the micro brewery industry benefits everyone (the rising tide lifts all boats effect). So, they work together to rise the beer tide.

Our Little Secret

The BendWebCAM digital marketing event flies under the radar of many in the search marketing industry. It doesn’t receive the buzz that other events receive. In one sense that’s good because this event is very intimate with approximately 200 people in attendance. Don’t share this blog post with your friends. Bend WebCAM might become more popular in 2013 as a result.

A digital marketing plan needs a roadmap. At Find and Convert, we create roadmaps for each client engagement to serve as a Plan of Action (POA). Each POA contains four primary elements, which get further defined in the roadmap according to each client’s unique digital marketing plan.

Web Assets

A digital marketing strategy is made up of digital assets. Think in terms of real estate assets. However, in this context we’re working with digital destinations. The company website is nearly always the mother web asset or target digital destination. The company website is where you describe who you are as a business (your products/services), what problems you solve (your value proposition), for whom you solve them (your target customer segments) and how you solve them (your distribution channels).

In the web assets element of the POA we audit the website’s architecture so that technical issues which may exist get identified and corrected. We execute keyword and persona research to develop the SEO strategy. We also develop a pay-per-click (PPC) search engine marketing plan, and the accompanying landing pages. The analytics key-performance-indicators (KPIs) get established, along with the measurement criteria and frequency of metrics reporting.

There are two aspects of planning web assets in a digital marketing plan. There is the up front planning, even for existing web assets such as the current website. And, there is the ongoing maintenance and updates of web assets. Web assets need to be updated regularly for technology reasons and for content reasons. And, speaking of content….

Content Strategy

The content marketing strategy is a parallel effort in the POA.  Of course, content marketing is also a long term plan. Content which is determined to be relevant to the SEO strategy and is available on the website undergoes a review and optimization process. This can take months (usually between 1 and 6 months). Additionally, a dynamic content strategy usually anchored in a blog is also developed to bolster the SEO value of the web assets. New content also serves the important purpose of delivering a relevant user experience.

The content strategy serves two masters: 1) Google (and Bing) is one master because being found in a search query for relevant keywords is very desirable. 2) It’s also very important to create relevant content that will be consumed and shared by your target audience. The content strategy is the fuel that makes the engine (web assets) valuable.

Social Channel Strategy

Social media is a channel of engagement and distribution for content. Whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube, Pinterest or Instagram each social destination serves the purpose of human engagement with relevant people who have interest in your content. The social marketing strategy is defined according to the customer segmentation strategy (customer personas) and the content strategy. This approach to a social strategy is the dog wagging the tail. A lack of persona definition and content plan results in a tail wagging the dog approach. It simply doesn’t work. Unfortunately, many businesses do it this way.

Tools/Technology Strategy

A digital marketing roadmap can not be executed without tools to execute and measure progress and outcomes. Each situation is unique. At a minimum free tools such as Google Analtyics, Google Webmaster Tools, Facebook Insights and Crowdbooster offer insights into key metrics. Beyond the free tools, most businesses require a robust set of marketing management software tools that allow for ongoing communication, engagement, nurturing and measurement. Examples of such tools include an email service provider (ESP) such as What Counts and Bronto, advanced analytics tools such as Omniture and Coremetrics, marketing automation tools such as HubSpot and Eloqua and social media management tools such as Argyle Social and HootSuite.

These four elements make up a digital marketing roadmap. A roadmap, allows all the members of the marketing team to have an understanding of each of the components and the general timeframe that is estimated for each component. An added benefit to a roadmap is that it serves as a communication piece for stakeholders such as executives who have approved the digital marketing plan budget, but are not involved in the details. The roadmap literally paints a picture of the scope, effort and timeframe of a digital marketing plan.

Below is a sample digital marketing roadmap (POA).

A digital marketing plan is doomed to fail when it lacks proper planning and team work. There are at least five digital marketing skills needed to succeed.

Business Planning

A digital marketing plan serves a business purpose. Starting with a clearly written objective, a business plan should outline the goals, risks, resources needed, budget, and a high level concept of the plan. On a campaign by campaign basis, this is often represented as a creative brief. The plan should be easy to read, and most of all it should be clear and concise in the business objectives. For an enterprise digital marketing plan, a Plan of Action (POA) is a must. A well documented POA gets the nod from the management team, and also serves as a “blueprint” for execution.

Analytical Planning and Assessment

In this era of relevance, marketers must use data driven marketing to analyze the competitive landscape to understand competitive strengths and weaknesses. Marketers also must analyze customer segments to identify specific interests and deliver relevant messages to specific customer segments. Another aspect of analytical skills is in use of tools and technology to audit web assets. Your web assets are like an automobile. They occasionally break and need to be repaired. Marketers need analytical resources to repair website technical problems which, if left untreated, can negatively impact user experience, not to mention adversely impact SEO results. The third form of analytical skills needed is the ability to analyze results of digital marketing campaigns using third party tools such as Google Analytics, HubSpot, RavenTools, etc.

Technical Skills

We need team members who are fluent in technical aspects of a digital marketing plan such as Javascript, HTML and CSS, to name just a few. Whether these technical skills reside inside your four walls or not, all digital marketing plans require technical talent. These technical skills are needed through all stages of digital marketing, beginning with the planning stage to help assess scope, budget, resources needed and risks. Of course, technical skills are needed throughout the implementation process to help execute a digital marketing plan.

Creative Talent

At some point in your digital marketing plan the time will come to get creative. Whether you’re writing website copy, creating an email lead nurturing plan or writing an e-book to build thought leadership, the creative talent is needed to design the user experience. The creative folks must have access to a business plan or creative brief in order to contribute creative that meets the business objective. It’s important to note that creative talent needs to be in alignment with the business objective. When creative talents goes in his or her own direction, ignoring the business plan, the end result is usually not good. A good creative talent is more than just creative. He or she understands how to interact with the other team members in the context of the business objective(s).

Marketing Skills

Does it strike you as odd that I list marketing as the last skill? I don’t intend to underscore the importance of marketing skills in a digital marketing plan. The marketing skills needed run the gamut starting with strategic skills from the top marketing person, to specialization skills such as content optimization, email marketing, social media, and many other execution elements handled by members of the marketing staff. Each person in the staff lineage needs to understand their role and how the digital marketing plan or campaign fits into the big picture in the business. Consistent messaging across digital marketing campaigns is a key marketing skill needed from the top, supported by the entire marketing staff. The chief marketing officer (CMO) should drive the brand’s key message points and guide staff under that strategic message umbrella for all marketing campaigns.

As an avid sports fan, I can think of several team sports analogies that align with digital marketing skills. No matter your favorite team sport, whether it’s football, soccer, baseball, basketball, hockey or another sport not mentioned here, a marketing team similarly needs several “position players.” Each team member brings distinct skills to the equation. The five digital marketing skills outlined here are high level. Each marketer should start with these five skills and break them down as their situation warrants.

When I spoke recently at iSummit 2012 on data driven marketing, I knew the topic was hot. The truth is, this is not a new topic. But, during the past three years with the rise of interest in big data in social business, data driven marketing has taken on new meaning.

Three Marketing Eras

In the 1960s and 1970s, the creative era gave rise to some memorable ad campaigns such as Wendy’s “where’s the beef?” In the 1980s and 1990s marketers added direct marketing to their mix using database marketing tactics with a “1% mentality.” A 1% return produced a profit, even if it alienated 99% of their list. Today, the consumer has revolted. We live in the relevance era. Consumers expect brands to know more about them, and to message them relevantly. It’s relevance or die!

The Stakes are High

The potential consequence of delivering irrelevant messaging to our target customer is loss of the relationship with our customer. Recent survey data supports that consumers are willing to sever brand loyalty ties when consistently delivered irrelevant messaging.

Unfortunately, many brands are not yet getting this right. And, as a result brand defection is high, due mostly to delivery of irrelevant messaging. The truth is the customer is “mad as all-get-out and they’re not going to take it anymore!” And, that is because the customer is in control. All we have to do is tweet our dissatisfaction, or post it on a brand’s Facebook page, or post it on a forum and the brand’s customers see the complaints. We live in an open communication, digital world where the customer is in control.

Enter Data Driven Marketing

The way for marketers to increase their chance of winning and keeping customers in the digital age through inbound marketing is with a data driven marketing approach. And, it starts with the collection of data from customers.

Although, the data driven marketing tools have been available for decades, most brands have not adopted a data driven mindset yet. Until recently the data analysis tools were mostly limited to large organizations with large budgets. But, in recent years, small and midsize companies have affordable access to analytical tools, which levels the playing field. Essentially, a $10M company can steal market share from a $10B company with smart data driven marketing practices.

Data Driven Marketing Delivers Inbound Marketing Results

Data driven marketing can produce results all brands want; more revenue, customer retention and loyalty, and ROI on marketing expenditure. If more organizations practiced data driven marketing, the average tenure of a chief marketing executive could be more than 22 months. In fairness to the CMO though, it takes a village. IT must cooperate in allocation of resources to license, implement and support data analytical technology tools. Effective data driven marketing is inherently dependent on technology tools, supported by an analytical mindset.

Three Forces of Data Driven Marketing

The first one is economics. Consumers want the best bang for their dollar. They are less loyal to brands who don’t deliver the best bang. And, the C suite is scrutinizing every dollar of marketing spent.

The next one is intensifying competition. In the digital age it’s easier for competitors to make inroads in almost any industry. Oracle saw Salesforce go from a scrappy startup to a serious threat in CRM software. Google saw Facebook encroach on their turf within six short years. New marketing paradigms allow competitors to reach and engage consumers like never before. And, when a consumer is wowed (in a relevant way of course) she develops brand loyalty, provided the wow is backed up with a quality product.

The third force is advancing technology. The market for business analytics, marketing automation software and optimization is growing very rapidly. IBM alone has invested more than $20B in recent years in acquisitions to be well positioned to capitalize on a $200+ billion market. As technology continues to become available to marketers to reach their customers in relevant ways, businesses are allocating budget as they increasingly understand the need to use data driven marketing and analytics to micro target customers with relevant messaging.

Data Driven Marketing Wins New Direct Flight at TPA

Tampa International Airport’s (TPA) management team used a data driven approach to attract a new international route. Under a new management team, TPA executives poured over data knowing that the economic impact of direct routes is substantial – $154 million and 1,200 jobs.  After pouring through data, TPA officials learned that 35% of guests in Pinellas county beaches rented cars in Orlando. That meant that people were flying into Orlando with an interest in visiting Florida west coast beaches. With a powerful buying rate in Tampa Bay, TPA officials decided to pitch their airport to Edelweiss, a popular Swiss airline with direct routes between Orlando and Zurich, Switzerland.

The pitch to Edelweiss was entirely based on data. TPA officials showed them that more 30 Tampa Bay companies do business in Switzerland and that 24 Swiss companies have subsidiaries in Tampa Bay, and that many European travelers fly to Orlando end up in Tamp Bay to visit the beaches.

The end result was that Edelweiss Airlines cancelled their Orlando to Zurich flight and instead launched their Tampa to Zurich flight.

Data Driven Marketing is Precision Marketing

In today’s hyper competitive digital world, organizations across all industries that use data driven marketing give themselves a fighting chance to excel. No brand is secure just on brand equity alone. Just look at the current state of Kodak and Research in Motion (Blackberry). Marketers who embrace data driven marketing give themselves the possibility of being relevant to their customers. And, at the end of the day, that is what your customers want most from you – relevance.

All the sources supporting the this blog post are available in my slide deck below. Additionally, I strongly recommend you pick up a copy of Precision Marketing for a deeper dive into data driven marketing and many more case studies.

The second annual Content Marketing World rocked in Columbus, Ohio with over 1,000 attendees from 20 countries convening at the Columbus Convention Center September 4 – 6 to take in over 70 presentations from content marketing experts. It’s impossible to write a summary of all presentations. In fact, I was only able to attend 8 breakout sessions, 3 keynotes and I delivered one presentation.

If you are a marketing professional with a strong interest in digital marketing, this a conference you should put on your list for 2013. Joe Pulizzi and his talented staff host an amazing conference that offers high quality content from high quality speakers. Joe is widely recognized as the father of modern content marketing. His brand adds personality with his love all things orange, especially his orange shoes. He’s even inspired me to add some orange to my wardrobe.This year’s entertainment factor was highlighted by legendary rocker Rick Springfield at a private event available only to CMW attendees. His energy and entertainment were are as good as any rocker you’ve ever enjoyed live in concert. It was a show for all ages!

Below are 38 key take aways in bullet format. Note, that these are excerpts from some of the sessions I attended. You might want to consider purchasing the on-demand download of all presentations from the Content Marketing Institute to see the entire presentation of each speaker.

CTRL ALT DELETE: HOW TO REBOOT YOUR CONTENT FOR A MOBILE WORLD by Mitch Joel 

1. Power of direct relationships with consumers.
2. Data driven marketing
3. Utility or death (apps versus landing pages)
4. Passive vs. active
5. One screen. (screen agnostic, desktop, smartphone, tablet)

THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO Content Marketing METRICS BY Jay BaEr

Why are you making content?

1. Brand awareness
2. Website traffic
3. Demand generation

Don’t do content marketing “checklist.”

Start with business goals, then marketing objectives, then content objectives, then content tactics, then content metrics.

4 types of content metrics

1. Consumption
2. Sharing
3. Lead generation
4. Sales

Brandscaping: THE SECRET TO UNLOCKING BIGGER CONTENT MARKETING BUDGETS AND DRIVING FASTER RESULTS by Andrew Davis

Getting budget for content.

1. Steal budget from other budgets
2. Partner with another firm

The historical 90/10 rule (should be the other way around).

• 90% of budget buying ad time or ad space.
• 10% creating the content.

Your customer tomorrow is someone else’s customer today. Who already owns your customer?

To raise awareness, buy ads….To increase demand, create valuable content.

GOOGLE’S ZERO MOMENT OF TRUTH BY Sam Sebastian

Put someone in charge (of Zero Moment of Truth).

Find your Zero Moments. Brands should run three search queries:

• Type their brand name in Google.
• Then type “[company name] review.”
• Then type “Best [your category, e.g., photocopier].”

Answer the questions people are asking. Brands should get specific and relevant in search marketing by answering questions that people are asking.

Optimize for ZMOT.

Be fast.

Don’t forget video.

Jump in! Test, fail, and adjust.

CUSTOMER STORIES, HOW TO UNLOCK AN ABUNDANCE OF CONTENT BY Deana Goldasich

The brilliance in how you facilitate the story can’t be forced.

Customer stories always have two stories:

1. The assumed story
2. The detour. Welcome it, embrace it.

One customer interview can result in: (stats below are real example)

• 1 e-book
• 3 stories
• 10 blog posts
• 25 tweets
• 3 Facebook posts
• 5 videos
• 12 Pinterest pics

Position the customer, not the brand.

Make the customer the hero, not the brand.

Look at the ratio of customer to brand ratio in the story. It should be 10 to 1.

DISTILLING THE MAGIC AND THE MYSTERY THAT IS CONTENT MARKETING SUCCESS BY THE SALES LION: MARCUS SHERIDAN

1. How do I get started with content marketing?

The ultimate content marketing strategy……Listening….Write down the top 50 or 100 questions from your customers. Create a content plan around those questions. Topics:

• Price
• Problems
• Comparisons
• The best
• Reviews

2. My competitors will steal my secrets.

Myth. We don’t have any real secrets.

3. I don’t have time.

We always have time for payroll. So, we have time for relevant content. It’s like breathing.

4. Thought Leadership

We should all have desire to be thought leaders. Marcus wrote an ebook about how to buy a pool. His email got flooded from people wanting his expertise.

“Have an opinion and share it.”

5. ROI

Use marketing automation software to measure keywords, leads, sales.

Moneyball Content Marketing. Find the key metric that correlates directly to sales. For RiverPools it was “30.” 85% of the people who read 30 pages of content purchased.

My favorite quotes from Content Marketing World Presenters:

“Content marketing is about utility—not just repurposing press releases and making them SEO friendly. You have to create utility.”

“Answer the questions people are asking.”

“Your community is only as interested in you as you are in it.”

“Think like the consumer, not like the marketer.”

“Write a review of primary competitors and you’ll show up in online searches for their name.”

“80% of all blog traffic comes from a first-time visitor.”

“Content marketing is not about storytelling, it’s about telling a true story well.”

“Be the best teacher in the world at what you do.”

“Every time you press publish, are you adding value to your customer relationships, or just more noise?”

“Ask your customers questions to create content you can summarize and share. Content is in front of your nose.”

“In storytelling, your AUDIENCE is the hero, not YOU. You (your brand, company, self) are the mentor, guiding them.”

MY PRESENTATION AT CONTENT MARKETING WORLD

I spoke on the value of content in your career. I reminded marketers that businesses don’t produce content, people do. And, I encouraged marketers to view the content they produce as currency in their career portfolio. Below is my slide deck. If you think it’s useful, I hope you’ll share it with your colleagues.

I attended the annual Inbound Conference in Boston August 27 – 30. On the morning of the 29^th, HubSpot co-founders Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah unveiled HubSpot3 in an inspiring way. Rather than review the new features of HubSpot3, I prefer to offer you relevant context. After all, that’s what HubSpot3 is all about.

I’ve worked in the software industry for three decades. One of those decades was in Silicon Valley, where I witnessed some amazing company announcements, many of which were full of glitter and Hollywood style hype. Such hyperbole serves to create a memorable, yet momentary high. As I reflect on some of those moments in years past, they were really fun and memorable, but not terribly meaningful.

Those announcements of yesteryear weren’t meaningful to me because they didn’t offer a lasting impact beyond a new product. I mean, they didn’t have an impact on the global economy. They didn’t change an established paradigm.

The HubSpot3 announcement on the other hand is not just a new version of HubSpot’s marketing automation software. During their unveiling on August 29^th, CEO Brian Halligan characterized it this way:

“This isn’t just about software. This is about a movement to create marketing that people love….Lovable marketing.”

Co-founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah shared how he has long been ashamed to admit he is in marketing when faced with the “what do you do” question in a social setting. He shared a slide that shows how marketers rank no higher than lawyers and car salesmen in popularity.

Darmesh went on to share that his excitement over HubSpot3 is one of his magical moments in life.

“This moment as it’s happening right now is one of my personal magical moments in life.” said Dharmesh Shah, CTO and co-founder of HubSpot. “Success is making those who believe in you look brilliant.”

In just six years, HubSpot has evolved from a small Cambridge, MA startup to a 400 plus person tech company, well on its way to becoming a mega superstar in the software industry. Halligan predicts with great confidence, that HubSpot will be a company with many billions in annual revenue in the future. At the core of what HubSpot’s marketing software does for a business is capture leads. He shared this mind blowing series of stats:

In 2010 HubSpot customers have generated over 2M leads.

In 2011 HubSpot customers have generated over 6M leads.

In 2012 HubSpot customers have generated over 35M leads.

If you are not familiar with HubSpot as a marketing automation software product, let me start by introducing you to HubSpot the movement for marketing that people love.  Don’t believe me?

Consider that as one of 60 plus Certified HubSpot Inbound Marketing Agency Partners, we have access to educational content delivered by HubSpot whose primary purpose is to help us grow our agency regardless of how much HubSpot revenue we do or don’t produce. Our cost for this education is zero. Nada…

Consider that the new HubSpot Academy is an online learning community where marketers from anywhere in the world can consume content in the form of e-books, webinars, videos and more, all for the sole purpose of helping you become a better marketer, regardless of whether or not you are a HubSpot customer. Your cost is zero.

HubSpot’s weekly internet TV show, formerly known as HubSpot TV, now called Marketing Update, features HubSpot employees sharing marketing news of the week.

Skeptics may claim that creating educational content is just good marketing and HubSpot does it for self serving purposes – to gain new customers. That’s partially true. But, hey they practice what they preach! Produce great content that acts as a magnet to your business. It is superb marketing. Are you an inbound marketing magnet in your business resulting in new sales leads?

Aside from the fact that great compelling educational content is exceptional marketing, HubSpot truly views their inbound marketing cause as a movement. Make no mistake, they are a for profit corporation. They understand that the most compelling way to grow their business is to create a strong connection with marketers around the world, and a healthy portion of them will end up signing on to use HubSpot’s marketing automation software. And, why not? Their software rocks!

I truly believe that HubSpot is making a contribution to the global economy starting with the net new jobs they’ve created in their own company. Six years ago, HubSpot started as an idea by Brian and Dharmesh. At the time of this writing they employ more than 400 very smart and high energy people. Considering their impressive growth rate, I’m sure they will one day have thousands of employees. They will be mentioned in the same context as technology employers such as Apple, Microsoft, Oracle and Salesforce.

As marketers improve their results through effective inbound marketing strategies, in part due to HubSpot’s free educational content and perhaps with the assistance of HubSpot software and partners such as Find and Convert, those businesses improve their ability to grow and create more jobs themselves in support of their growth.

How many software companies can lay claim to a worldwide movement that creates net new jobs? Currently, approximately 7,000 businesses worldwide use HubSpot. In the years to come, there will likely be another zero at the end of this number.

HubSpot3 is an intelligent marketing automation application that enables marketers to more effectively target relevant prospects and deliver the information they want in relevant context according to how their needs change over time. To learn more about HubSpot3 go here.

A Forrester Research report indicates that 50% of organizations surveyed are investing in social business technology in 2012. The other 50% are waiting for evidence of business value.

I’ve struggled to find a consistent definition of social business so I’ve created one of my own. I believe a social business is one that exhibits these five characteristics.

Executive Level Support

A social business understands at the C suite level that the organization is made up of people who probably already engage with friends, family and business colleagues in social media. And, rather than trying to create two separate personas between the proverbial 9 to 5 worker and the social creature, the C suite recognizes that the employee is a social creature whether at work or not. As such, being a social business embraces the social element in at least three functional groups of the organization: 1) human resources, 2) customer service, 3) marketing. Ideally, the Sales organization also embraces social, especially when an organization invests in social business technology empowering sales people to collaborate with all corners of the organization to achieve sales objectives. Executive level support also means transparency. When C suite execs participate in social communication both internally and externally, it sends a strong message to employees and to the market that the organization is genuine in its actions as a social business.

Marketing is Not a Department

A social business understands that marketing is not a function of one department. A CMO collaborates with other C level executives to identify strategic goals, then defines the content strategy and communication plan to achieve the goals. In a social business, the CMO is empowered to recruit other functional subject matter experts to participate in marketing execution plans. A content strategy that involves all customer-facing departments must include cross functional subject matter experts. Such participation allows for creation of more relevant content. Engagement in the market place with subject matter experts is far more credible than engagement with employees of a marketing department who may lack technical subject matter expertise on certain topics.

Employee Branding

A natural extension of the “marketing is not a department” concept is the notion that some of the participating cross-functional employees that participate in community engagement can develop a brand of their own. A social business embraces individual employee branding because a social business provides guidelines and encouragement for both parties to benefit – the employee and the employer. I call this the “halo effect.” A social business has alignment with select employees whose brand develops in the market. When such alignment exists, we see this halo effect. One of my favorite examples is Matt Cutts of Google. He is the face of Google to the SEO community. Additionally, many other Google employees shoot videos discussing product announcements.

In a social business, social media channels are just that – channels. There is no talk of “social media strategy.” It’s a business strategy! Social media channels are just part of the enablers in the business strategy.

Investment in Social Technology

A social business understands that technologies are needed to facilitate internal engagement among employees, external engagement in the market, development of content, social sharing, social engagement and measurement of outcomes. Recent acquisitions this year in social technology include: Salesforce acquired Buddy Media and Radian6. Oracle acquired Vitrue. Microsoft recently announced they are acquiring Yammer. These acquisitions are evidence that enterprise software companies must provide tools to their customers to enable their social business.

Data Driven Marketing

A social business is very analytical. It must understand the make-up of its employees, partners and customers. And, the only way to truly understand each of these segments is through data. As referenced in the previous point, use of technology to analyze big data is critical to have a keen understanding of each segment. We live in the age of relevance. Whether we’re marketing to prospective customers or engaging with employees or partners, communicating in hyper relevant ways is absolutely necessary. In today’s social culture, generic communication and engagement is received as not relevant. Nothing turns off a person faster than a non relevant engagement. People simply don’t have the patience for non relevant communication. More importantly, people have options and with a simple click can turn away from your message or engagement. Even worse, the negative sentiment created in non-relevant communication can have a long lasting and potentially viral effect.

Data driven marketing also refers to keen analysis of customer reaction to marketing programs. Technology investments are necessary to make data driven decisions. A social business understands the necessity of making this investment in order to make data driven decisions.

A social business is a journey, not a destination. At the time of this writing, few organizations have made the paradigm shift culturally toward becoming a social business. Sure, many have invested in social business tools and technology. But, the culture shift is an even bigger paradigm shift than allocating budget for social business software.

I’m speaking on social business at several upcoming events. Download my slides and join the conversation.

Consumers have expectations from brands today they didn’t have just five years ago. Marketers have access to communication and engagement channels they didn’t have five years ago to listen and meet consumer expectations. Marketing executives need to have keen insight into the most effective ways to reach and engage their audience and turn them into loyal and raving customers. Following are four marketing paradigms every marketing executive should embrace or risk losing customer preference to competitors who embrace these marketing paradigms.

SOCIAL BUSINESS

Marketing is not a department. The entire organization should understand their role and participate in the marketing process.

A social business is one that exhibits the following characteristics:

1.  Executive level support to embrace a transparent approach to marketing with active participation from all levels of management.
2.  A commitment to a content strategy that involves all customer-facing departments – no exceptions.
3.  An understanding that social media channels are a means to an end and therefore play a vital role in delivering content and permitting engagement with your audience.
4.  Intense use of tools and technologies that facilitate development of content, social sharing, social engagement and measurement of outcomes.
5.  Keen analysis of data for insight into reach, sentiment, engagement with your target audience and lead intelligence including closed loop marketing.

Few organizations can genuinely say they are a social business as of this writing. Dell, IBM, Starbucks, Ford Motor Company are a few to observe. Smaller companies are positioned better to embrace social business principles with fewer layers of culture to change compared to large businesses with thousands of employees.

EMPLOYEE BRANDING

Encouraging employees to build their personal brand is good business. Organizations who constrict employees from building their personal brand are constricting their own brand. All businesses are made up of people and most employees have a digital presence. For a business to think they can restrict employees from using social media channels during work hours is naive. Instead, organizations should create guidelines and boundaries to encourage employees to develop their brand in such a way that both parties benefit – the employee and the employer. A well aligned branding plan between employee and employer can have a “halo effect” on the brand.

One way to embrace employee branding is by encouraging employees to have their own personal blog such as Michael Brenner of SAP. His blog B2B Marketing Insider reflects his thought leadership ideas in B2B marketing which serve to build Michael’s personal brand, and also reflects positively on his employer, SAP. While not all employees are well suited to have a personal blog that aligns with the corporate brand, there are many other ways employers can encourage and guide employees to build their brand for mutual benefit.

DELIVERING EXPERIENCES

Consumers want to experience your brand, not just read about it. Promotional campaigns are often most successful when they are transmedia campaigns. This refers to campaigns that touch the target customer across multiple media channels, inviting the consumer to participate through an experience. A B2C example is the Ford 2013 Fusion campaign where consumers are invited to share what they would do if they were one of 100 people loaned a brand new Ford Fusion. This campaign is comprised of television commercials, YouTube videos and the destination website at Random Acts of Fusion. During the 2012 London Olympics, I experienced live events and more on their mobile app. A B2B example of experiential marketing is Kinaxis, maker of supply chain management software. Kinaxis has created a vibrant online community comprised of more than 6,400 supply chain professionals where they experience the wisdom of the crowd (each other). Kinaxis provides the destination. But, the experience is left to the members with a little help from the Kinaxis Community Manager.

DATA DRIVEN MARKETING

Measuring marketing activities is nothing new. The pressure on marketing executives to measure the impact of their marketing plans is greater than ever before. Fortunately for marketers, there is a growing list of data driven measurement tools that allow for measurement of reach, engagement, sentiment, conversions and more. Integration with CRM systems allow B2B marketers to measure online marketing results.

These four marketing paradigms represent a fast change in consumer behavior. This shift in consumer behavior along with the rapid pace of marketing technology tools, requires marketers to consider their impact on current and future marketing programs.

I’m speaking at an AMA event on September 21, 2012 on these four marketing paradigm shifts. You can download a free copy of my slide deck here.

The pressure on marketers to fill the sales funnel with sales ready leads is greater than ever, especially in this age of Internet marketing. But, the truth is that the healthiest sales funnel has a diverse mix of leads, not all of which are sales ready. Targeting a mix of leads across all three stages of the sales funnel is a productive way of maintaining a healthy flow of leads that mature into sales ready leads. Here’s a look at the three stages of the sales funnel and some of the marketing plans that can keep your sales funnel healthy.

Top of The Funnel: TOFU

People who enter your sales funnel at the top of the funnel (aka TOFU) are potentially viable prospects, but they may not necessarily be sales ready. Consider the dating analogy. This is a first date. Your goal with TOFU leads is to build a relationship with these people. Effective calls-to-action (CTAs) to attract TOFU leads can include blog posts, webinars and white paper or e-book downloads. Effective ways to nurture TOFU leads is through consistent digital touchpoints, each one offering another opportunity to “get to know you better” through CTAs that invite them to consume more detailed content about your product or service. As people accept your offers to know more about “what” your products do, they can enter the middle of the funnel, aka MOFU.

Middle of The Funnel: MOFU

As in the dating analogy, people in the middle of your sales funnel are interested in getting to know more about you. In this stage, they are more responsive to learning more specifics about what your products can do for them in their situation. They are potentially willing to attend a detailed presentation of what your products do. In the MOFU stage people want to know if you are a serious contender for their situation. They may be building their short list of possible products. Depending on the length of your sales cycle, you may need to engage them in several touch points during the MOFU nurturing process. CTAs for online demos, customer case studies and other forms of reassurance that your product has met the needs of others with similar needs are effective. At this point, one-on-one sales contact may not have occurred. But, through multiple touch points where you qualify sales leads according your qualification process, an invitation to have a sales conversation may be appropriate. When that invitation has been accepted, this prospect has entered the bottom of the funnel, aka BOFU.

Bottom of The Funnel: BOFU

In the bottom of the funnel, aka BOFU, your prospect has been nurtured and courted through effective content marketing and hopefully through a good experience with your multiple touch points. Some relationship has been developed, and likewise some trust has been established. However, the prospect may have not yet decided that your product is right for her. Effective CTAs here can include invitations for a free but limited consultation, a private demo for her entire evaluation team, a configuration discussion to her specific needs, a discussion of your pricing, and for lower priced products a free trial offer.

All sellers know that a relatively small percentage of sales close out of all incoming leads. By segmenting your sales funnel into these three phases, you can hone the CTAs and messaging. Through careful sales funnel analysis you can measure conversions from TOFU, to MOFU to BOFU leads. And, best of all, you can do your sales team a wonderful service by only getting them involved in BOFU leads. Sales professionals who only deal with BOFU prospects have a higher close ratio, not to mention higher morale because they don’t waste time talking with prospects that are not ready to engage in serious sales conversations.

Each seller’s situation is unique, and therefore these guidelines are generalizations. The intended strategy described here is to offer guidelines to efficiently manage your sales funnel through your digital marketing efforts.

The movie Field of Dreams made famous a saying used by many – “build it and they will come.” When it comes to your blog content, most organizations executing inbound marketing strategies have two objectives: attract readers, and engage readers. Follow these six guidelines to write blog content people will read and share.

expand your  Target Readers

Most businesses think they know who their target blog readers should be. When asked, they answer with a description of their target customer. But, your target customer doesn’t live in a bubble. He/she is influenced by other people in other roles. For example in a B2B marketing scenario your target customer may be an IT manager, yet he/she is influenced by business people in finance, operations, senior management, sales, marketing, customer service. Writing relevant blog content that builds trust and credibility with influencers of your target audience can help when that IT manager recommends your company as a potential solution to a problem.

Expand Your Keyword Strategy

The same principle applies to the keyword research you conduct to drive your business blog strategy. Expanding your keyword strategy so it appeals to your target reader as well as influencers is a wise strategy. Think of your keyword strategy as the first five circles of a dart board. You have your most desirable “money” keywords in the “bullseye” circle. The next 3, 4 or 5 circles (or more) include related keywords. Don’t hesitate to go long tail in these circles. You’ll attract people with very specific interests, and you’ll build SEO credibility with Google as Google scores your blog and connects your keywords together. For example, if a CPA firm writes blog content about very niche topics such as SOC, SSAE 16, ISO 27001, etc., they can attract relevant readers who care about those topics.

Editorial Calendar

Creating an editorial calendar for your business blog is a must. If you’re not sure where to start, identify the subject matter experts who will contribute blog content. Ask each of them to write blog posts that appeal to their domain expertise in your organization. Give them two guidelines:

1. Write about the “why” not the “what.” The “what” is your products and services. The “why” is a problem or issue people care about. For example, if you sell an exercise drink that gives people more endurance during exercise, write about the importance of endurance during exercise (the “why”), not about the exercise drink (the “what”).
2. Write about the most common questions people have about your products or services, but again, not in the context of your products. Rather answer common questions people have about the problems your product solves. For example, if you sell cloud computing solutions answer common questions about the benefits of cloud computing.

Create a Pleasant Experience

No matter how niche your industry, don’t assume your reader will read your blog post from start to finish. Create a pleasant reading experience for your readers. A well written but verbose blog post with no formatting is not a pleasant reading experience. Break up each blog post with section headers using bolded header tags. Allow the reader of your blog post to easily skim your post. Use images to support your blog post. Images communicate that the author cares enough about the reader’s experience to provide a visual connection.

Spread The Load

I’ve said it many times, “marketing is not a department.” Your company blog should not be the sole responsibility of the marketing department. Recruit subject matter experts from different functions in your organization to contribute blog content. Following the keyword strategy outlined above, your subject matter experts can deliver a steady stream of blog content. Depending on many variables, you should strive to publish a bare minimum of one blog post each week, preferably more. As documented in The State of Inbound Marketing Report, the more blog content you produce, the more traffic you can drive to your blog and website. This leads me to the sixth and final guideline for successful blog content marketing.

write for all stages of the sales funnel

Your blog can be a magnet for inbound marketing traffic. You should consciously write blog content that appeals to people in different stages of the sales funnel. For example, a blog post about the benefits of big data analysis may offer a webinar invitation as a call-to-action. But, those attendees may not necessarily represent buyers in the short term. Blog content that more specifically addresses issues that call for immediate action may produce more sales ready leads. Content that appeals to the top of the sales funnel, the middle of the sales funnel and the bottom of the funnel provides best long term inbound marketing success.

The strategy you use to write blog content determines the success of your blog strategy in inbound marketing. I hope these guidelines offer useful tips. Your comments are welcome below.

Learn more about how to produce blog content that acts like an SEO magnet to your blog and website.

Inbound marketing has become popularized largely by HubSpot and supported by inbound marketing agencies across the globe that specialize in creating online marketing strategies to attract prospective buyers to a business. At Find and Convert we perform inbound marketing services, but we call ourselves a digital marketing agency. Here’s why.

Digital Marketing Begins With Strategy

It’s important to begin new digital marketing initiatives with a strategy that starts by asking questions like; “what business are we in,? “what is our brand strategy,?” “who is our target customer,?” “what are our target personas,?” “who are our competitors,?” “what are our strengths/weaknesses,?” “which marketing programs have produced results in the past,?” “what is our sales process,?” “what is our customer service strategy,?” and other questions that cause executives to reflect on the big picture. Asking these questions usually results in detailed conversations about the business with executives. The outcome of these discussions allows us to build a digital marketing plan that includes brand strategy, inbound marketing strategy (which includes content marketing, SEO, social media and PPC plans) and an outbound marketing strategy. Yes, outbound marketing too…

Inbound Marketing Inherently Has No Outbound Elements

One philosophical difference I have with inbound marketing purists is that I consider email marketing outbound marketing, not inbound marketing. And, I’m way okay with outbound marketing as an element of an integrated digital marketing plan. We’ve had many clients in our 10 year history who sell a product or service with a very defined universe of target customers. Reaching out to them through outbound marketing tactics using online and offline channels can produce viable leads and brand preference. This integrated marketing approach is pivotal to a digital marketing strategy. The tactics vary widely depending in part on B2B or B2C factors.

Multiple Touch Points

Let’s face it, we live in a noisy world in terms of marketing messages. Most of us are exposed to over 5,000 marketing messages each day. A marketer needs to create multiple message touch points to create brand awareness, or differentiation. Touch points may include PR communications, direct marketing, email marketing, live events, webinars, online paid advertising, sponsorships, endorsements, content marketing, social media and SEO. Throw in this mix the fact that 50% of all online touch points are mobile, requiring a distinct approach to engage buyers on mobile devices, and we have a digital marketing environment that requires multi-touch attribution.

Social Media is Not Inbound Marketing

In fact, social media is not a strategy. This is a pet peeve of mine. Social media is a channel where a marketer has potential to engage with customers and future customers. A marketer can use social media as an outbound marketing channel as well as an inbound marketing channel. For example, you can send a direct marketing message to a consumer via an ad, direct mail or email, drive the recipient to a landing page that has an offer, and ask the recipient to share the offer with their network through social media. When the recipient shares the offer on Facebook or Twitter with their network, is that inbound marketing? Frankly, I don’t care to split hairs over this. This is integrated digital marketing with multiple touch points. The recipient may visit your website or Facebook page before even going to the landing page and proceeding with the offer. As people share your offer through social media, if you can measure their influence as shown in the image below, you can effectively leverage digital marketing channels across multiple touchpoints.

Integrated Digital Marketing is King

The purpose of this blog post is not to open up a debate with inbound marketing purists. My purpose is to acknowledge that marketers have a difficult job reaching their target customer because the lines are blurred between online and offline channels. When someone sees a marketer’s message in any channel, be it online or offline, eventually there is usually an online touch point. Because there are multiple touchpoints, I characterize this as integrated marketing. And, I characterize the online touchpoints as digital marketing because whether it was an article, a blog post, an email, a banner, a print advertisement, a radio or TV ad (let’s include Pandora in this) or an organic search listing the catalyst is not always attributable to one online touch point. Therefore, integrated digital marketing is the most effective way to execute marketing plans that deliver measurable results.

You’re familiar with the cliché “don’t put the cart in front of the horse.” That is exactly what many marketers do when they develop a new website. They design the look and feel of a website, commission the developer to build it, and then they add the content as the last step. When it comes to digital marketing strategy, this is backwards!

Start With the End in Mind

That’s another familiar cliché, but it’s not so commonly applied to website design. The content strategy of a website should be planned first! Your website’s content serves two masters. It should serve the visitor to your website first and foremost, with relevant and compelling content that engages the visitor to your website. Additionally, your content should be friendly to search engines so your website is discoverable for desirable keywords in organic search results. Every website owner wants this.

How Well Do You Really Know Your Customer?

In order to be in business you have to know a thing or two about your customers. But how well do you really understand them? Most businesses have multiple customer segments. Your website content strategy should not use a one size fits all approach. Persona analysis helps you identify your target customers by segments, as well as who influences each segment. Most important, persona segmentation should identify their needs from the customer’s perspective so that you can develop your content strategy to address the specific needs of each segment.

For example if you sell a health care product that serves children your persona segments may include K-12, national, state and local government entities that govern children’s health care, pediatricians, parents, non-profits who specialize in child care services and others. The content for each segment should speak uniquely to how your product addresses a need that is relevant to the persona segment and (in this example) children. How well you segment your customer persona segments feeds right into your keyword research.

Persona Analysis Precedes Keyword Research

Any SEO professional knows the importance of conducting keyword research. Keyword research that is conducted after the persona analysis is far more relevant. It will help the marketer greatly align keywords against their targeted persona segments. It will allow you to prioritize keywords. And, it will help in developing an effective content strategy for the new website.

Competitive Analysis

Understanding your competitors’ digital strengths and weaknesses is essential in building a digital marketing strategy with a competitive edge. Your biggest competitor’s digital marketing strategy is sometimes not one you should emulate. In order to build competitive edge, you should understand which aspects of your competitor’s digital strategy have been executed well. You may discover that some of your desirable keywords return results on page one in Google for companies with whom you don’t even compete. By returning to your content strategy, you can determine which competitive battles are worth fighting. Few businesses have the resources to win every digital marketing battle. The appropriate cliché here is “pick your battles carefully.” Thorough online competitive research can reveal many insights to help you decide which battles you should fight so you can concentrate on winning the war, not just a few battles (another cliché).

You Need a Strong Foundation to Construct a Skyscraper

A skyscraper is not just a building. It is a very tall building. The construction project of a skyscraper starts with months of work creating a very strong foundation before the building construction begins. Likewise, a strong digital marketing strategy should begin with a rock solid foundation. Your website is the most important digital asset. Therefore, your investment in creating a strong foundation can provide outstanding digital marketing ROI. In addition to having a well planned content strategy, the website’s underlying architecture should be very solid.

Website Architecture is Mission Critical

A sound website architecture generally includes a good CMS that is SEO friendly, a well executed internal link structure and URLs that align with the content on each page. There are other factors, but these are the big ones to list in this brief article. In our ten years as a digital marketing agency we’ve been engaged countless times by companies that redesigned their website with little or no regard for the architecture’s impact on SEO. This is like building the skyscraper with no thought given to the plumbing and wiring infrastructure. It’s mission critical to a website.

Contrary to conventional thinking, your website is not about your company. Your website is the most important digital asset for visitors to discover what you offer that solves a problem or interest. Your navigation strategy must be intuitive to what visitors are looking for. The navigation of your website must be simple and intuitive. The content should address your visitor’s interests, not your interests. Make content easy to find, and when they find it, it should be about the visitor, not about you. Your calls-to-action (CTA) should be relevant to each customer segment to capture leads or online transactions.

For example if you sell a consumer product in the sports industry, your navigation and content should speak to each customer segment specifically by sport or by demographic. As you deliver CTAs, segment your list so that you can nurture people according to their specific interests.

Digital Marketing Success

Digital marketing is all about attracting customers to your business through various digital channels. Each industry is competitive. And, customers have choices. The marketers that outperform competitors with persona segmentation and deliver a relevant navigation and content experience in all digital marketing assets starting with their website, followed by all social media assets, win the most customers. Visit our digital marketing success stories to learn more.

On June 1st, BizJournal in cooperation with Spark Business from Capital One launched a national competition called Social Madness. The name is perfect because it is madness. The competition is held in 43 local metro markets. The idea is for local businesses to promote their social media accounts to get the most votes, fans and followers during June 1st and June 18th, eventually with the competition culminating in three national winners on September 11th.

5 Reasons Social Madness is MADNESS

To be clear, I think this is madness. There is nothing I like about this contest. The essence of the competition is to score the popularity of local businesses according to votes as well as growth in Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn followers. In other words, the local businesses that do the best at asking their customers to vote for them and plug their social media channels to grow their following stand the best chance to win.

Relevancy Doesn’t Matter

If a local plumber you’ve never used asks you to follow them on their social media accounts, will you do it to help them win? There is no relevance if you’ve never used that plumber. If a local CPA firm asks you to follow them, and your company doesn’t use this firm, will you follow them to help them win? If any local business promotes their social media accounts to me, I would not follow them to help them win if they are not relevant to me and my interests. In fact, I will have a negative impression of a business that asks me to vote for them just to help them win votes in the Social Madness Challenge.

Engagement Doesn’t Matter

As far I can determine from their explanation of the rules, their proprietary algorithm doesn’t factor engagement. If it does, it’s not obvious. Here’s the explanation of how they will count votes and determine finalists.

Social Madness Promotes short term thinking

Reports such as the 2012 Social Media Marketing Report from Social Media Examiner illustrate that one third of businesses using social media devote 11 or more hours per week and have been using social media for 3 years or more. Social Madness is a competition that promotes a very short term window to grow your social media presence just to win the contest. This short term mindset sets a bad example. As a consumer, if I follow a business whose primary interest in me on social media is getting my vote to win a competition, how loyal do you think I’ll be toward that business in social media or as a consumer?

2012 Social Media Marketing Report via Social Media Examiner

Social Madness Winners Prove Nothing

Even though BizJournals is segmenting the competition according to size of business in attempt to level the competitive playing field, what will it prove to win the competition? Social media marketing is about building a loyal community and engaging with them about the things that matter to your community. The Social Madness challenge feels like a weight-loss contest with no regard for long term sustained benefits or promotion of strategic planning that can help a business over the long run.

Social Madness Promotes Worse Practices

Social Madness is spread across 43 metro markets. Each local BizJournal publication has been writing about the competition to spread the word. One such article by Roger Hughlett from the Washington Business Journal wrote a story titled 6 Reasons to Enter Social Madness. His list includes:

1) Formalize your social media outreach

Really? Where’s the strategy? This contest is all about winning a popularity contest. That’s not a social media marketing strategy!

2) Impress our readers

If that’s important to a local business, that’s a legitimate reason to enter. But, it sounds more like self promotion to the local Business Journal than a benefit to local businesses.

3) Represent your local city

If your business is local only to your metro area, being one of the finalists in this contest in your local market can be a nice promotional perk.

4) Gain national exposure

If you win the local round between June 1st and June 18th you’ll be written up with national exposure as the challenge progresses to the next round. That’s cool. But, if your business doesn’t have a long term social media marketing strategy, this is a short term win. And, if the winners don’t continue to build and engage a loyal social media following they’ll do more damage to their brand reputation than help it.

5) Reach new audiences

Maybe, but if you get votes from irrelevant audience just for the contest, there is no long term value in that.

6) Bragging rights

Give me a break…Business is not a sport. Consumers are smart. They care little if any about your bragging rights if you win this contest. When I pick up my shirts at the local dry cleaners, the fact they won this contest means nothing if they don’t do the little things to deliver a quality service to win my loyalty offline and online.

We Can Do Better Than This

The reason I state at the top of this post that Social Madness is a throwback to 2007 is because back in the early days of social media marketing, the early adopters in the business community had a “grow your fans and followers” mindset. At the time, it was understandable. It was the early days of social marketing. Those brave businesses just starting to use social media didn’t know any better. It was a “figure it out as we go” time. Over the next couple of years, the brands that enjoyed the most success with social media marketing figured out that building a loyal community with engaging and relevant content, minimal selling and maximum authentic engagement with your community about issues they care about is the secret sauce to successful social media marketing. Frankly, a contest that promotes a 5 year old mindset is very disappointing. At best it’s outdated thinking. At worst, it’s an insult to the intelligence of the consumer.

BizJournals should know better than this. And, the folks at Capital One should also know better. This contest is indeed social madness in every sense. There is however, one thing I like about this competition. The $7,500 prize to the three final winners will be awarded as a donation to the winner’s charity of choice. So, there is a silver lining in this social madness competition. Share your thoughts below…

The 2012 Social Media Marketing Industry Report by Social Media Examiner provides valuable insights into the how’s and why’s of social media marketing. This year’s report includes findings from more than 3,800 businesses across four continents. Here are my three major takeaways.

Before I share my takeaways, I am compelled to offer some context for these takeaways. As the owner of a digital marketing agency, I witness clients desiring to “get found” through online channels in order to “convert” online encounters into various measurable and meaningful outcomes which range from expanded brand awareness, lead generation to online sales. These days getting found entails multiple touch points. One of those touch points is social media. But, it’s not the only touch point…

Social Media Channels Continue to Grow

The Social Media Examiner report illustrates how marketers are using and considering using several social marketing channels including Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, Google+, Video and photo sharing sites such as Pinterest and Instagram. I often refer to the aggregate of these social channels as “the rising tide affect.” This phenomenon occurs when people encounter your brand in more than one social channel and “touch” your brand in a desirable action. The actual social channel responsible for the desired action is usually not measurable. As a marketer, it’s often inaccurate to attribute the “last touch” to the referring source of your desired outcome. Consider that most buyers/consumers may experience your brand across multiple digital assets including one or more social media channels and your website. Just because the last touch point may have been Facebook doesn’t mean that Facebook is necessarily responsible for the desired outcome. The person may have clicked to your Facebook page through a Tweet, a website page, an email, a verbal recommendation or from some other referring source.

As brands continue to invest in social media marketing they are experimenting with multiple social channels because of the rising tide affect. For example, at the time of this writing two hot social media channels are Instagram and Pinterest. Marketers that are serious about using social media to drive effective results are testing at least the 4, 5 or 6 social channels mentioned here and illustrated in the chart below from the Social Media Examiner report.

 Image source: 2012 Social Media Marketing Industry Report, Social Media Examiner

Social Media Marketing Takes a Lot of Time

If there is one thing we live and breath everyday in the course of delivering our digital marketing services is the reality that creating content, engaging audience and building community across these myriad social media channels takes time. In fact, the Social Media Examiner report points out that:

“A significant 59% of marketers are using social media for 6 hours or more and 33% for 11 or more hours weekly. It’s interesting to note that nearly 15% of marketers spend more than 20 hours each week on social media.”

Why does social media marketing take so much time? There are several reasons. The biggest reason is that creating and/or curating compelling content and engaging with people across various social channels is time consuming. Consider the analogy of building meaningful relationships in life that result in trust. Such relationship and trust building is time consuming. The online nature of human encounters with a brand coupled with the real-time nature of social media exacerbates the time consuming aspect. And, consider that most people use social media to be social, not to be marketed to. So, it takes time to build trust in this context.

Social Media Maturity Matters

Another finding in the 2012 Social Media Examiner report is that businesses using social media three or more years experienced greater results.

“58% of marketers who have been using social media for more than 3 years report it has helped them improve sales.”

This is an intuitive finding. Or, at least I think it’s intuitive. Any new approach to any aspect of business takes time to evolve into successful outcomes. Then, why do so many businesses jump into social media marketing campaigns expecting quick results? Maybe it’s because of well publicized social media marketing success stories of brands like Dell, Zappos and Old Spice. But, there are tens of thousands of small and mid-size businesses who don’t have household brand identity. I liken social media marketing to planting a tree. It calls for a plan, patience and persistence over a sustained period of time. And, let’s not overlook the importance of high quality content. Despite the temptation to use social media channels as pure advertising channels, it’s proven that the best results come from a combination of:

• Owned media: website, videos, e-books, white papers, blogs, etc.
• Earned media: media mentions, people liking and sharing your content online, etc.
• Paid media: PPC, banners, promoted stories, promoted tweets, etc.

Marketing Benefits Always Start With Awareness

Above are my three takeaways from the 2012 Social Media Marketing Industry Report. But, I can’t overlook another key result worth mentioning. The most common benefits of social media marketing reported were:

“A significant 85% of all marketers indicated that their social media efforts have generated more exposure for their businesses. Increasing traffic was the second major benefit, with 69% reporting positive.” 

 Image source: 2012 Social Media Marketing Industry Report, Social Media Examiner

No matter your specific social media marketing goals, I encourage you to download and read the 2012 Social Media Marketing Industry Report from Social Media Examiner to gain valuable insights. And, if you’re a mid-size business in the first two years of this journey, visit our social media case studies and consider engaging us to help you reach your social media marketing objectives.

Pinterest has taken the social media landscape by storm, making it one of the most popular and fastest growing social networking sites in 2012. In fact, a recent study reported that Pinterest is the number 3 social network in the U.S. Companies can use Pinterest for marketing in many ways to build their community, brand awareness and make emotional connections with consumers.

The one thing I love most about Pinterest is that it provides SEO value for all brands by driving traffic and links back to their digital assets. In addition to brands, Pinterest can even be used effectively for individuals in a job search. The importance of Pinterest marketing is engaging with your community and target audience by liking images, repinning images, leaving comments, tweeting links and posting to Facebook your pinned images. Each “pinned” image on the Pinterest boards you create links to its online source, resulting in a link back to that particular online source when pinning images. Pinning images can come from any online source, including past and upcoming events, blog images and other relevant websites within your community. Since the link of an image pin connects back to its source web page, tracking visits to your website from Pinterest is available in Google Analytics.

10 Pinterest Marketing Tips

Pinterest allows any brand to get creative. Below are 10 Pinterest marketing tips to help you engage with your target audience as well as build and grow your social media network and overall SEO value.

1. On a branded Pinterest account, include a short description about your company at the top of your Pinterest profile. Believe it or not, many companies overlook this. Make sure to include strategic keywords in your description so you’ll be found in a keyword search in Pinterest. Here’s an example of a good branded Pinterest account with a keyword-centric description.

2. In a personal Pinterest account, create one company pin board with website and blog post images, short descriptions for each image with a link back to the online article for each image.  Make sure not to overdo this by having all of your boards be company-centric. One or two company-centric pin boards is sufficient.

3. Add the “Pin-It” button to your website and blog content. Make it easy for others to repin your images.

4. In the image descriptions for each pin in your boards, make sure to use related and strategic keywords for each image description. Use related keywords for each Pinterest board title as well.

5. Create several fun boards relevant to your company. This will add a human touch to your brand, thus creating more engagement within your community. HubSpot does an excellent job with this.

6. Use Pinterest search to search strategic keywords for images you can repin, like, comment, etc. Pinterest search can also provide ideas for you to create boards you didn’t even think of.

7. Link your Pinterest company profile to your other social media networks.

8. Encourage your employees to create their own Pinterest account. Chances are many already have one. Encourage them to add a board about your brand like the Find and Convert example above.

9. If your marketing team attends conferences, have them download the Pinterest app to their smartphone. They can pin photo images from their smartphone to their company pin board.

10. Tweet links to pinned images to drive visitors to your brand’s Pinterest boards.

In total, these simple Pinterest marketing tips above should encourage you to engage socially with your community and target audience on a variety of relevant topics, resulting in more awareness and potential viral sharing of relevant images.

Even if you are a B2B marketer, Pinterest offers value to your social marketing efforts. Pinterest gives you an opportunity to support your brand’s personality and give your employees a chance to get creative, while building links to your website.

Do you have any additional Pinterest marketing tips you would like to share with me and others? Please share them in the comments section below. Happy pinning!

Check out this social media case study to see the results in a well-executed social media plan.

Corporate marketers know how important it is to develop a lasting reputation for their company.  Buying decisions are increasingly being based on trust and personal recommendations and, influenced less by traditional advertising. Email marketing is a necessary ingredient in all marketer’s brand strategy.

In order to capitalize on this, you need to develop a solid content marketing strategy.

Being the ‘go-to’ source for great content and smart analysis on topics within your industry is like the gift that keeps on giving.  If your message (curated content + original stuff) is good, then it will be shared by your audience, which is the best type of marketing.  Instead of trying to search and haggle for new business, it often comes to you. Here’s how you can accomplish this.

Use email to get your message out 

Obviously there is a huge amount of buzz around social media marketing but email is still the most common way people share content, business people in particular.

You need to send a new, better version of the traditional newsletter.  Instead of a bunch of random company announcements scattered across an ugly looking template, you can deliver a concise summary of news and announcements in a polished format.

Getting people to think of you as more than just someone who wants to sell something will help your chances at converting them later.

Use curated content in your campaign 

The amount of quality content available on the Internet is limitless.  The value you give to your audience is sorting through the noise and highlighting the stuff that matters.  This is known as content curation and it’s easy to do.

Using other sources to complement your own message shows that you know what you’re talking about and keeps your clients engaged.  Include white papers, great videos, tutorials or anything else you think your clients will enjoy.

Don’t waste your time and money

Most email marketing campaigns take hours to compose, but you should be spending way less time than that.  Reduce the amount of information you normally send and make it superior quality.  Don’t write a novel, just give people what they want and get to the point quickly.

You can save money by using free email marketing tools like AllTop and Google Reader to get your content and then send out it out with an inexpensive email tool like FlashIssue or MailChimp.

Patrick Carver is the Director of Marketing for FlashIssue, the better way to get your message out through email. He’s an entrepreneur with a passion for technology, soccer and music. Read more of his stuff at the FlashIssue Blog or follow him on Twitter @FlashIssue.

Today’s marketers have the daunting challenge of executing integrated marketing campaigns across multiple media channels. Marketing executives are under intense pressure to reach their audience across offline and online channels, while measuring the contribution of each channel to leads or sales results.

Marketing executives have more choices than ever to reach their target audience including offline channels such as print, television, radio and events, and online choices include owned web assets, social media and mobile.

How does a marketer develop integrated marketing campaigns in measurable and effective ways?

Start With Your Target Customer

Marketing 101 requires you to know everything about your target customer including where you can find them so you can engage them there. Today’s consumer (B2B or B2C) is usually not confined to one medium however.  So, marketers must integrate offline and online channels to build brand awareness, brand preference and desired actions.  A growing challenge for marketers though is the increasingly blurred lines between offline and online content consumption by our target audiences.

Let’s take a high level look at considerations for marketing executives when designing integrated marketing strategies.

Business to Business Integrated Marketing

A B2B marketer is primarily focused on two goals: brand awareness and lead generation. Whether you’re a little known B2B brand or a mature, well established B2B brand, integrated marketing is crucial to success.

Most B2B marketers allocate resources to brand building and lead generation programs through combinations of trade advertising, webinars, conferences, SEO, PPC, social media, content marketing and more recently mobile marketing. To achieve effective and measurable results, marketers should study the behavior of each of their target persona. For example, if your ultimate decision maker is a C level executive and your analysis suggests that he or she reads certain trade publications, attends certain industry events but they are not very active in social media, your integrated marketing approach might look like this. Your advertisement in a trade publication would address brand awareness with a possible call to action to visit relevant content on your website or your blog or a landing page with content that specifically appeals to the C level executive. In most B2B situations, the C level exec relies heavily on staffers to research, evaluate and recommend potential vendor solutions. Typically, these staffers are savvy users of digital channels to conduct their research using search engines, social media and blogs. If you truly understand the personas of your prospects, your reach should include content marketing strategies across your LinkedIn company page, a Facebook business page, a Google+ company page, a branded Twitter account and of course a content rich blog. All of the above digital channels should offer highly relevant content providing the opportunity to engage with your brand offline or online in order to drive them into your sales funnel. The content targeted to staffers should specifically address their important issues during an evaluation.

Picture a conversation at your prospect’s office where the staffers present their list of potential vendors that address an important business issue to the C level executive who responds favorably because the integrated marketing met both audiences where they spend time, and the content spoke specifically to each persona. In this example of integrated marketing the key ingredients were:

• Persona analysis
• Relevant content for each persona
• Efficient reach across offline and online channels
• Calls to action to engage each persona
• Nurturing prospects through the sales funnel

Business to Consumer Integrated Marketing

As I mentioned earlier, the lines are blurring between offline and online channels. Truly integrated marketing seeks to engage a consumer in ways that are appealing to the target customer without regard for medium. Of course, all the marketing 101 principles mentioned above apply. Consumer brands seeking to engage their target consumer need to integrate channels in a blended way that engages, entertains and compels the consumer to share their experience. For example a print campaign (billboard, mail, magazine or retail POP display) should offer the consumer an easy option to visit the brand’s offer online. QR codes as well as social sharing incentives such as specials on Foursquare offer the consumer an easy way to engage with your brand, respond to a call to action and share the offer with their social circle.

The rapid rise in popularity in Instagram and Pinterest also offers brands the opportunity to engage their consumer through integrated marketing. For example, if your brand participates in live physical events, taking a lot of pictures and shooting video allows the participants at the event to share it with their online community when you post the video and pictures to your Facebook page and your Pinterest account.

The key ingredients in B2C integrated marketing include:

• Appealing to the audience’s emotional needs relevant to your product
• Making it easy to consume a brand’s offer through mobile or desktop access
• Delivering content and offers with an element of emotion or entertainment
• Blending offline and online content in the consumer’s experience
• Offering incentives for the consumer to share your content through digital channels

Integrated marketing is not an option for brands to reach, engage and win customers. The blurred lines between online and offline marketing present opportunities for brands to reach target customers in effective and measurable ways.

As Find and Convert celebrates its 10th anniversary this month, I reflect on the lessons we’ve learned of inbound marketing. The phrase “inbound marketing” isn’t 10 years old. But, the concept is at least that old. Here’s a look at the last 10 years in under 1000 words.

SEO Still Rules

Although the SEO (search engine optimization) landscape has certainly evolved quite a bit over the past 10 years, getting found in organic search listings is still the most desirable outcome for most businesses seeking to have inbound marketing success.

Relevant Content

As Google continually evolves their search algorithm one constant that will always remain is Google’s interest in delivering results that are relevant to a user’s search. To that end, the number one factor in determining relevant search results is relevant content. Businesses often struggle with this, often delivering a limited content experience on their website. Brands who value and prioritize a relevant content marketing mindset enjoy the most inbound marketing success.

Two inbound marketing Audiences

Since SEO still rules it’s important to recognize that your content assets have two audiences. The most important audience is the ultimate consumer of your content. The other audience is search engines. Don’t misunderstand this point. I am NOT suggesting SEO trickery to game the search engines. No! However, your website must be easy for search engines to crawl. Your content must be well represented in a search engine listing with a well-written title and description tag. Your website’s architecture should be organized so it passes muster with Google’s more than 200 variables in its search algorithm. Any marketer that favors one audience over the other will yield limited inbound marketing results.

Calls to Actions

Creating relevant content and getting found by your target audience is an awesome outcome. But, the true desired outcome for most marketers is an action that leads the consumer to draw closer to becoming a customer, or spreading the love of your brand from your customer’s loyalty. Giving the consumer of your content calls to action that are relevant to them in the moment according to their relationship with your brand, is the way to achieve actionable outcomes.

Social Marketing

Another valuable inbound marketing lesson is the emergence of social marketing. SEO success absolutely requires a social marketing element. Businesses whose employees participate in their inbound marketing initiatives through sharing of content across social channels enjoy the widest reach. Google rewards content that has been “+1’d” and otherwise shared. Google uses social sharing as signals to determine the relevance and popularity of your content and uses these signals in delivering search results. The most progressive businesses are a social business with enterprise wide participation among employees.

Metrics Matter

Last but certainly not least is the importance of measuring the results of your inbound marketing efforts. Marketers need to continuously justify their budget and demonstrate results of their inbound marketing plans. Measuring meaningful outcomes is not an option. In B2B marketing, measuring leads and the sources of leads is one of many important KPIs. In B2C marketing, measuring the impact of communities in various social channels and their impact on sales results is likewise an important KPI. There are many other valuable metrics that measure inbound marketing success. Marketers should discuss metrics with management continually to have two way dialogue about what inbound marketing activities yield the most tangible benefits to the business.

My inbound marketing lessons over the past 10 years are too many to write in one post. However, this summary characterizes the big picture. I can only imagine what’s in store over the next 10 years as social business gets closer to becoming mainstream.

As we approach our 10^th anniversary (April 1^st) as an Internet marketing agency, I’m reflecting on how SEO (search engine optimization) has evolved during the past ten years. Getting found by prospective buyers in a Google search is vitally important to most businesses, therefore SEO is still the primary goal of most of our clients. Of course, our SEO goal for our clients is getting found in search engines and converting visitors into viable sales opportunities.

The idea of “SEO outsourcing” is an oxymoron! Some will argue that I’m splitting hairs over semantics. Hear me out on this…

Outsourcing Defined

The simple definition of outsourcing is to procure goods and services needed by a business under contract from an outside supplier. So far, so good.

While outsourcing has been an accepted business practice for decades, a certain mindset has evolved, which is where I have a problem with “outsourcing” and “SEO” in the same sentence. The mindset to which I refer is the expectation that an outsourced supplier performs all aspects of a contracted function with very little involvement by the client. Most businesses do not have available skilled internal resources to manage their organic SEO strategy. So, they think they can “outsource it.”

payroll Outsourcing Example

When a business outsources their payroll to a company such as ADP, the entire payroll function is handled by the contracted supplier.  ADP and the client work together to configure their payroll system, then ADP handles it entirely month-in and month-out.

manufacturing Outsourcing Example

When a business such as Apple chooses to design and market a product such as the iPhone but decides to outsource manufacturing, the decision is very clear. Apple does no manufacturing. This function is entirely outsourced to another manufacturer.

you can’t outsource SEO

The reason I feel strongly that you can not outsource SEO is because the client that engages outside SEO agency services must be actively involved in the process from day one and stay involved. Surely, the SEO company is responsible for specialized “heavy lifting.” But, the client’s involvement in the SEO process is very intricate. In fact, the client’s involvement is absolutely critical for successful outcomes. Therein lies my key point.

A client that believes you can outsource SEO doesn’t have the proper expectation of his or her own involvement in the SEO process.

SEO Processes

I’ll briefly review the SEO process to support my case in case you’re still not convinced of my main point that you can’t outsource SEO.

Business Insights

An effective SEO plan requires the client provide their Internet marketing company a comprehensive description of their business. We use a 30+ question document to gain intricate insight into our client’s business.

Persona and Keyword Research

The client should be willing to provide a detailed explanation that will allow the SEO agency to conduct target customer persona analysis. This is often an interesting exercise for the client. Sometimes it’s somewhat eye-opening to identify the business aspects of customer personas. This level of persona understanding greatly positions the keyword research to be meaningful.

Competitive Research

The client should provide a list of their key competitors. Once the SEO consultants do the competitive research, the review with the client is invaluable. Detailed competitive research always uncovers insights that require discussion with the client to discern the most meaningful details that can impact the SEO strategy.

Website Architecture

A client’s website architecture must be analyzed in detail by the SEO agency. The client’s initial involvement is minimal. However, if (or when) architectural issues are identified that need to be addressed for SEO success, the client’s IT resources or external website developer must be engaged to make revisions. Unfortunately, this process can be an involved and politically charged communication and negotiation process. This part of the SEO process alone has potential to require a significant amount of collaborative effort with the client. But, it’s necessary.

Content Strategy

Effective SEO is largely dependent on a content strategy. The process described above will drive the content strategy. It is a collaborative process involving both client and the SEO firm. The SEO content strategy has a beginning, but it has no ending. It’s a perpetual aspect of effective SEO. Collaboration between the SEO firm and the client’s marketing team, and hopefully other departments within their company is important and an ongoing communication process.

Social Media Strategy

SEO and social media go hand-in-hand. Search engines score the extent to which your content is shared through social media. You can’t outsource social media engagement. Your SEO agency should participate by guiding your social media strategy driven by your content strategy process described above. But, the client must be actively engaged in the social media strategy to get optimal results.

In short, a client’s SEO strategy is a very collaborative process. My peeve against “SEO outsourcing” is predicated on the notion that a client and its external SEO company need to work very closely and very collaboratively. This truly requires a commitment on the part of the client. I know this is true of other traditional outsourcing relationships. But, I argue that SEO requires a serious commitment by the client to collaborate and take accountability for its SEO success. That’s why you can’t outsource SEO.

There’s plentiful evidence that online marketing is migrating quickly and firmly from primarily text to primarily video. This presents problems for marketers who have been trained to promote and persuade using the written word. Visual storytelling is significantly different – requiring a different approach that is foreign to most of us.

We’ve all grown up watching movies and television. A complete media experience is written, produced, edited and presented for our viewing enjoyment. We normally don’t think too much about the production process.

Different Mindset and Different Skill Set

If you’re going to write video scripts, and most of us in marketing will be doing just that, you have to think about how to present a story visually. You’re writing in one medium (text) for another (video), so you have to change the way you write.

You’re no longer writing something to be read directly by your audience. You’re writing a script that will be interpreted and transformed by a production team into a video and/or multimedia presentation. It’s no longer the reader’s mind who will supply the pictures to go along with your words. The director, actors, motion graphics artists, post production specialists, etc. have to supply those visuals, so you need to describe them in detail.

Visual writing means making images stand for words. In a novel, you might write, “It was nearing midnight…” In a script you might request a visual of “a clock face in a brick tower, the hands at 11:50, a night time sky visible behind the tower.”

Show, Don’t Tell

As much as possible, you want to show not tell. That keeps viewers interested, and compresses the time needed to communicate. The linking and condensing of actions is visual writing. It communicates a narrative via a sequence of images. We’re all familiar with the silent movie villain, tying the heroine to the railroad tracks, intercut with images of a fast approaching train. That’s a story unfolding in front of us without a word of dialogue.

Sights and Sounds Working Together

Today, we want to include dialogue and/or voice over narrative, maybe even sound effects and music. All of these audio elements can help to tell the story while simultaneously compressing the time necessary to communicate it. Unlike a PowerPoint presentation where the presenter reads the bulleted text that appears on the slides, we want to deliver different, but inter-related information to the eyes and ears simultaneously.

Marketers Must Continually Upgrade Their Communications Skills

B2B products and services are complex. It’s nearly impossible to communicate effective B2B marketing messages in a brief enough timeframe for today’s prospects’ short attention span. Well-produced video is a way to get peoples’ attention and hold it. A well-produced video requires visual storytelling. Few B2B marketers have visual storytelling / scriptwriting skills. Online video as a B2B marketing vehicle isn’t a fad. It’s a sea change. It’s time to do your homework – learn these new skills.

Bob Leonard spent over 20 years working in Corporate Marketing at Fortune 1000 IT firms. Since then, Bob has transformed himself into a digital marketer specializing in content marketing, SEO copywriting, inbound marketing, and social media marketing. Today he is reinventing himself once again as an online video marketer. You can learn more about Bob and B2B marketing at his acSellerant website.

2012 is about one fourth over and already there have been many new trends in social media marketing that offer new and interesting ways to expand brand awareness and generate sales leads.

If you read daily digital news outlet such as Mashable, WebProNews, Social Media Examiner, Social Fresh and the HubSpot Blog (to name a few) you can stay informed of marketing trends and announcements.

The frenetic pace of new social media marketing announcements is enough to make your head spin. So, I’m highlighting three recent social media marketing trends that marketers should pay attention to.

LinkedIn Company page Follow button

LinkedIn is quietly getting more social. And, in the process LinkedIn is getting more useful to marketers. Most people associate LinkedIn with connecting with people for either job recruiting or business development, or just professional networking. Few marketers leverage the LinkedIn Company page where you can post status updates from your company, list your products and services and display recommendations written by customers.

Now LinkedIn also offers a company page follow button similar to Facebook’s Like button. Consider adding the LinkedIn follow button to your website or blog to grow your company followers and keep them informed through status updates and announcements.

Facebook Timeline for pages

Facebook recently released the timeline feature for pages. All Facebook pages will be migrated to the timeline model by the end of March. It’s best to make the move before the deadline to become familiar with the new model. For a complete summary of the Facebook page timeline features and marketing opportunities visit this article.

One of the most noticeable changes in Facebook pages timeline is the new poster as shown above in the Find and Convert Facebook page. As you can see above a lot of real estate is allocated to the poster at the very top of your page. You can change your poster image as often as you want. However, Facebook rules prevent selling or advertising an offer or like-gating from your poster. The intent of your poster is to provide a unique message to create engagement with your Facebook page fans. Consider that in the past more than 90% of fans never returned to a page after liking it! You were dependent on showing up in their stream with your wall posts. Facebook wants you to promote your page with promoted stories, which amounts to advertising. This AdAge article summarizes Facebook’s goal of increasing your page reach from just 16% (on average) to as much as 75% through advertising.

Pinterest Link Building

Pinterest has taken the social media landscape by storm. Pinterest is currently mostly used by B2C brands. However, some progressive B2B brands are experimenting with Pinterest, and why not? There is one thing Pinterest does well for all brands, and that’s drive traffic and links. Pinterest also allows any brand to get creative. To find brands on Pinterest just conduct a Google search such as “U.S. Marines Pinterest.” Check out how the Marines use Pinterest below.

By pinning images to theme-centric boards that link to your blog or website, you will create links that have SEO value. Pinterest is a low risk, low resource social media outpost. It’s worth experimenting with especially if any aspect of your business is social. For example, if you’re a B2B company that holds events or attends conferences, pin pictures to Pinterest that you take at those events. Be sure to pin those pictures from your website so the linkback flows to your website or blog. If you’re a B2C company you should have a field day experimenting with Pinterest. See how Whole Foods has created several boards around themes relevant to their brand.

As we help our clients develop social media marketing strategies, we strive to filter out noise and focus on the social media trends that can have a measurable impact on desirable business results. Remember that social media marketing is a means to an end. All businesses seek to either increase brand awareness or generate sales or leads. Social media marketing strategies always need to align with specific business goals. They must also align with budget and resources. Avoid falling in love with social media “shiny objects.” Instead focus on the social media marketing trends that can measurably contribute to your business goals.

Check out this social media marketing case study to get inspired.

In today’s digital marketing environment, search engine optimization (SEO) has a negative connotation for some marketing teams while others understand it is a necessity in order to achieve long-term successful organic SEO results. To be fair, the digital marketing landscape is constantly evolving, especially with the use of social media in business, and sometimes it’s hard to keep up with all of these changes. But SEO should not be downplayed as some may think. Where I see most marketing teams miss the boat is in a lack of understanding that SEO should be one of the main components in their overall digital strategy, not the only component.

Three ways marketing teams can improve organic SEO results are through interlinking content, website architecture design and social media for overall digital marketing success.

Content Strategy

I say this to my clients all the time… content is king and queen for being discovered online. The reality is that your content is your marketing. The meat and potatoes of your digital marketing plan is your content strategy. A content strategy can include static website content, blog posts, downloadable e-books and white papers, videos, still photos, customer-contributed content and recorded webinars and podcasts, just to give you some examples. Say you have a white paper on the “Top 10 Pain Points for XYZ.” Write a blog post on each pain point with a call-to-action to download the entire white paper. If you recently created a video or on-demand webinar, write a blog post specifically about the video or webinar with a direct link to view it on demand. Ask your partners to contribute guest blog posts. Take photos at your next event, some can even be entertaining and funny, and post them to your Facebook company profile and one of your Pinterest company boards. As you can see, the possibilities are endless.

Where does SEO play into all of this? SEO flows from all your content. However, having lots of content is not enough. Your content must be optimized in order to increase your chances of being found, thus improving organic SEO results. Keyword and persona research are key when it comes to your overall content strategy and SEO results.

Website Architecture Design

In addition to having lots of optimized content, it’s important that your website (and blog) are designed to be search engine friendly so you can reap those positive organic SEO results. Several important website architecture design details in combination with overall SEO efforts include:

• Keep web pages as close to the root as possible
• Text navigation is a must
• Proper use of static instead of dynamic web pages
• Use meta tags in this order: title, description, keywords
• Create both XML and HTML sitemaps
• Create a custom 404 error page
• Meaningful URLs, preferably separated with dashes, 100 characters or less
• No frames or session IDs
• Java scripts should not be embedded into content
• Should be able to edit images and include ALT titles and text per image
• Should be able to include header tags to content
• Make use of 301 redirects only when redirecting to other web pages
• Add social media share buttons to all web pages
• Validate website using w3c validator

Social Media

While social media marketing is rapidly increasing, these efforts aren’t always coordinated with SEO or aligned in terms of search benefits. But they should be. Every time one of your blog posts goes live, post it to your company social media profiles with a comment. Don’t just slap it up with the blog post title. Ask employees to post the blog posts to their individual profiles as well for increased SEO benefits and reach potential. In addition to posting content, engage with your audience as they comment or share your blog posts. Let them know you are listening to them and that you care about what they have to say.

By your marketing team working together and integrating these efforts with SEO, your business can maximize the direct effects of a content strategy, website architecture design and social media activities for improved organic SEO results. And think of the business benefits from all these organic SEO results… more quality leads and new business opportunities… the ultimate goal in SEO.

Check out this SEO case study for details on how a U.S. based software provider tripled lead conversions from organic SEO results.