Brand and Capture

Why the Web is Dead and What Inbound Marketers Need to Consider

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photo: Robert Whyte

A Sensible SEO Strategy 1: Keywords

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Search engine optimization is a vast and dynamic topic, with many experts and even more myths and urban legends. How can business owners or executives make sense of all the debate that goes on and arrive at a sensible search marketing strategy for their companies? Let's start with keywords, since much of the hype centers around this core topic. What's a sensible keyword strategy for SEO these days?

What Are Your Goals?

For most companies, sales are the #1 priority. Without sales there is no revenue. Without revenue, there is no company. So generating more sales leads is their primary marketing goal. This should also be your goal for SEO. You can spend a lot of money on consultants and tools and pay-per-click and content, but if you aren't generating sales leads from these efforts then your strategy isn't succeeding. Marketing takeaway: your keyword strategy is to generate sales leads, not to rank on page #1 of the SERP's. 

Who/What is Your Target Market?

You need to understand who will be searching for your products or services and what keywords they will be using to find you. Those are the keywords you should optimize on, not the ones with the most traffic or even the ones your competitors use. The most popular keywords are also the most difficult to rank on, and they may not even be relevant to your business. How do you determine which strategic keywords will drive sales?

1. Put yourself in your customers' shoes. Then search for your company's stuff. Don't bias yourself by what you already know - think like a complete stranger. If you can't figure this out, go ask them or try some focus groups. Now check the results. Does your company even show up? If so, how far down the list? Are your competitors doing better?
2. Next, do some keyword research. Start with the keywords you tried in your customers shoes or found from research. Find some variations and long-tail versions, for example "inbound marketing agency" as opposed to "inbound marketing", using a keyword suggestion tool like HubSpot's Keyword Grader. You will have an easier time ranking on long-tail keywords than on the high-traffic core keywords, and over time you can build up your authority on those as well.
3. Put together a short list of strategic keywords. These are the ones you rate as having the best chance for your target market to find you. Now, we'll focus on accomplishing the mission - getting sales leads via search.

Do This

• Focus on creating web pages, blogs, advanced content and social media updates that include your strategic keywords and are both RELEVANT and INTERESTING to your target market. Again, put yourself in their shoes. What are they most likely to click on?
• Make sure your Page Title and Meta Description are not just keywords but real, valuable information that will "click" in the searcher's mind and cause him/her to click through to your page. This is what they see on the search results page. Rank is important, but so is context.
• Optimize your content, but don't over-optimize. Today's reader knows the difference between a legitimate, well-written Web document and a piece of SEO bait. Focus on one topic and focus your keywords there as well. A really well-done blog post on a popular topic, optimized for the topic itself has a great chance of boosting your keyword ranking.
• Coordinate paid search with organic search. Use the same keyword strategy and content and see how you do.
• Measure results and adjust strategy. Which keywords are driving traffic and leads? Which topics, content types and landing pages are producing those conversions? Which social networks are driving the most qualified leads? Focus on those.

Don't Do This

• Don't focus on keywords with lots of traffic and just try to make your content fit those keywords. No one will buy it. The search engines might rank you highly, but you will not drive sales to your business.
• Don't worry about traffic and keyword rankings alone. Again, you might get highly ranked, but without click-through's and leads, you have accomplished nothing.
• Don't try to "game" the search engines with all the tips and tricks you see out there. Remember, your goal is sales, not ranking. People will find you because you are the best at what you do, and your search strategy reflects it.

Next - Part 2 - Content That Will Click

Need some help with your SEO strategy? We have a knack for that.

Photo credit: jeffmcneill

How to Promote Your Blog on LinkedIn and Still Wear a White Hat

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The problem with LinkedIn discussions and blog posts

For some time now I have been barking at LinkedIn about their decision to merge "News" items with "Discussions" in Groups. I'm sure the purpose was to make the user experience simpler and to encourage discussions. The net effect was to create confusion and angst. People who wished to post their blog updates to a relevant Group were forced to post them as a Discussion. Group participants (and many Managers) saw this as a sudden and overwhelming infusion of spam into their favorite discussion forums. Members were encouraged to flag these "commercial" posts as inappropriate and in some cases kick the offenders out of the group altogether.

The "fix" by LinkedIn

Well, finally LinkedIn has done something about it. Now there is a new tab called "Promotions" in most Groups, and if you share your blog to LinkedIn, you will often find that a Manager has moved it there. Fine. We'll play by the rules - at least we have a place to share our content. Oh by the way, this content can (and should) be helpful and informative, so it really doesn't necessarily deserve to be treated as a "promotion" or "spam", but it seems the purists will have their way. One more note to Group Managers and Members, let's not be totally hypocritical here. Your Groups and Events and many of your Discussions and Questions and Answers, in fact your membership in LinkedIn itself, are all designed to promote your personal brand and/or your company's status. Now suddenly, you're saying that's wrong. Hmmm.

My strategy for sharing on LinkedIn

OK, enough venting - here's my recommended procedure for sharing your blog posts (and other content) on LinkedIn:

1. When you use a LinkedIn Share button, by all means post it as a personal LinkedIn update and to relevant individual connections who will benefit from it.
2. DON'T use the Post to Groups option. This will automatically create a discussion and you will incur the wrath of the Troglodytes.
3. Instead, go to each group and post it as a new Promotion, -OR-
4. Post it as part of a discussion, i.e. post the central theme of your blog post as a question or comment and include the link to your blog post in the comments you make.

Now that we're all agreeing to play nice, let's see how well this works. Do we still get visitors to our blogs from LinkedIn? If so, no worries. If the tap gets shut off, then we have real data to go complain to LinkedIn about.

Please share your experiences with LinkedIn Group Promotions here. If necessary, I will volunteer to become an even more public advocate on the side of bloggers in LinkedIn.

Bloggers, there is a group that welcomes you and your posts! Please join us at the Cleveland Inbound Marketing Group on LinkedIn. You don't have to be from Cleveland, and your posts are welcome as discussions. Please try to stick to the main topics - inbound marketing, social media, blogging, SEO, and lead generation. I hope to see you there!

Thanks for your support! Comments welcome as always.

Photo credit: Superfantastic

Mobile Coupon Clipping the Latest B2C Marketing Trend

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Say hello to the latest trend in B2C marketing. Services like ShopKick, Groupon and Yelp offer coupon discounts for their member stores delivered via social media and cell phones. Say goodbye to coupon clipping. With Internet sales gaining over in-store sales, retailers are looking for ways to lure customers back to the shopping centers in which they're heavily invested. Each of these "players" has a slightly different approach to marketing.

Shopkick

Shopkick delivers merchandise coupons and special offers right to your cell phone. Capitalizing on the instant immediacy of Twitter and the universal popularity of smart phones, Shopkick beams store ads directly to consumers' cell phones as they walk in the door of a store. With Shopkick, retailers can instantly reward their customers with exclusive coupon savings and special offers just for walking through the door. Shopkick sweetens the deal by awarding consumers with "Kickbucks," redeemable for songs on Napster; Facebook credits and cash-back rewards at participating stores. Social media campaigns on Facebook and Twitter are planned to introduce the program and alert consumers to Shopkick deals. Shopkick is one more step toward the total integration of the Internet capability, social media immediacy and smart phone convenience to enhance and influence consumer buying habits.

Groupon

Groupon offers deep discounts via featured coupons that change each day. The catch is that a sufficient number of people must join the "Group" following the promotion to activate the "Groupon". This "collective buying" approach gives deal-seekers an added incentive to tell their friends about the offer, and so kick off a social media feeding frenzy that drives customers to each business with a featured Groupon promotion. The service also takes advantage of today's personalized search trend, sending only Groupon ads that fit your consumer profile. The feeding frenzy is also among businesses wanting to become a featured Groupon advertisers.

Yelp

Yelp is more like a smart Yellowpages. It "knows" your location, and finds shops, restaurants and entertainment in your area. Each listed business has consumer reviews and ratings, direction maps and social media and mobile sharing. Yelp is also experimenting with online coupons, or "Yelp Deals". In Yelp's case, there is no restriction to a single daily coupon, and the company is currently testing the service in San Diego only. Expect Yelp to join the wildly popular mobile coupon craze in full force soon.

There will undoubtedly be other players soon. The interesting thing about mobile coupons is that they generally require you to purchase in-store instead of online, an interesting twist on online marketing. Will B2C marketing embrace the new coupons and promote them to the top of their inbound marketing strategies? It's already happening, and your company may be the next big participant.

What's your B2C marketing strategy? We have lots of ideas, including mobile marketing.

Using Inbound Marketing to Capture B2B Sales Leads

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Inbound marketing has changed not only the way businesses interact with their customers but the way they interact with each other. If you pay attention to your marketing stats, you're likely to discover a dramatic drop in the cost-benefit ratio of the "old reliable" marketing techniques you've used for years. Old school marketing techniques (now called outbound marketing) such as tradeshows, cold-calls, print advertising and direct mail no longer produce the lead generation results they used to. In today's fast-paced business world of instant communication, those old reliables just aren't reliable any more. New inbound marketing techniques that make use of popular social medial marketing tools are where the action's at!

The Internet has changed business-to-business (B2B) communication and interaction. Today, more than 90% of B2B buyers begin the purchasing process online. Business buyers are turning to the Internet first to research companies and products and place their orders. Business sellers are responding by centering their marketing efforts on inbound marketing techniques such as well-designed websites, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and interactive web info and order forms. 

Inbound marketing tools have the substantial benefit of speeding up the entire purchasing cycle from lead generation to final sale. And not only is the cycle spinning faster, increasing opportunities to boost sales, but inbound marketing is generating a higher volume of leads from more motivated potential customers. The ease and speed with which potential B2B customers can now request information about a product or service (via Twitter, for example) and receive a response is forcing businesses to embrace inbound marketing techniques.

B2B purchasers no longer rely on sellers for research information about a company or its products; they're doing their research online at their own convenience. Potential business purchasers are no longer content to wait for a catalog to arrive via snail mail; they want you to tweet them a link to the online catalog on your website. They don't want to spend hours on the phone responding to unsolicited cold calls; they want to access your website or Facebook page, request the specific information they want and place their order.

Today, the speed of inbound marketing communications is overwhelming comparatively slow and increasingly passe outbound marketing tools. Who wants to limp along with the snails when they can run with the cheetahs?

Are you ready to get with the B2B program?

Photo credit: paulamarttila

Tips for Turning Twitter into a Valuable B2C Marketing Tool

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Many business owners undervalue Twitter as a useful marketing tool for building brands and connecting with consumers. Social overuse of Twitter to report the inane, decidedly ordinary events of daily life has given Twitter a bad rap as a business tool. When used judiciously, Twitter can be an effective tool for expanding your reach in social media, which is now considered a crucial part of any B2C marketing strategy.

In addition to product marketing, B2C marketers find that Twitter is useful for monitoring conversations about their products as well as communicating in a customer service role. Many companies are using Twitter as their primary customer support tool, which helps improve customer satisfaction and retention rates.

The immediacy of Twitter is what makes this inbound marketing application such a powerful business tool, but it is also one of the primary reasons that more business owners have not embraced Twitter. Belief that tweets can only be sent in real time makes Twitter seem too constrictive and time intensive. However, programs that allow you to pre-program tweets for future publication and the ability to text in tweets from your mobile phone have significantly increased the freedom and usability of this inbound marketing tool.

Business users will find that certain Twitter applications enhance Twitter use, making this popular social media platform easier and more efficient to use. Applications like Tweet Deck and Twitter Feed allow Twitter to become a more successful and productive partner in your overall inbound marketing strategy.

Here’s a rundown of some of the most useful Twitter aids for business users:

• TweetDeck allows simultaneous posts to Twitter and Facebook. TweetDeck is an essential tool for managing tweets that allows you to search by topic and organize followers into groups to better track potential leads.
• HootSuite is a multi-account, multi-network application that allows you to engage in Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn conversations from a single platform.
• Twuffer is a post scheduler that allows you to pre-post tweets and schedule them for later release. This application is a real time saver, allowing business users to budget tweets so creation doesn’t interfere with your work schedule.
• Twitter Feed allows you to integrate blog posts with Twitter, increasing interaction and expanding your consumer base for both platforms.
• Twitter Grader speaks to your competitive drive, rating your tweets against other users based on number of followers, number of updates and tweeting frequency.
• TweetBeep helps you manage your brand’s online identity by alerting you when Twitter users tweet about your company.
• Twitoria is another Twitter management tool that helps you find and delete inactive followers.
• Owitter is another Twitter management tool that alerts you when followers drop you, allowing you to fine tune your message to better connect with your target audience.

How are you using Twitter for B2C marketing, and what challenges are you facing in daily use?

We have some ideas for building your brand using Twitter and other social media tools.

Inbound Marketing Tips for Reaching Your Target Market

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Most businesses are jumping on the inbound marketing bandwagon. Facebook, Twitter and other social media marketing tools are proving to be far more effective -- and faster -- at marketing businesses to consumers and promoting brand identity. Compared to traditional outbound marketing methods like cold calling and direct mail, inbound marketing is targeted, rapid, interactive and the only way to reach today's Internet-connected consumers.

In the rush to move online, businesses often neglect to fully define their inbound marketing goals and develop a comprehensive inbound marketing strategy. Without careful forethought and planning, Internet marketing efforts can be ineffective and appear to be disjointed, failing to produce the desired results. Without proper goal definition and a well-planned strategy to meet those goals, inbound marketing experts warn that social media campaigns can fall flat and produce disappointing results. When Internet marketing campaigns fail, the fault is not in the inbound marketing techniques used but in their execution.

In order to connect with consumers, you must first figure out what consumers want. There are 3 tried and true methods of determining consumer needs relevant to the product or services you sell:

1. Ask. Pay attention to consumer questions asked via twitter, comments made on blog posts and surveys conducted on your website. See which web pages on your site have the highest click rates. Review sales statistics to see what consumers are buying. All of these efforts can help you gain a better understanding of what consumers are looking for when they access your site.
2. Tune in. Stay current on happenings and developments in your industry. Subscribe to competitors' blogs, follow industry experts on Twitter and subscribe to industry-related news feeds.
3. Track. Sign up for Google Alerts. Google Alerts is a particularly productive tool for monitoring the effectiveness of your keywords and fine tuning them to more accurately target your desired customer pool. Google Alerts shows you how other people on the Internet are using your keywords, providing you a window to competitors using the same words. Knowing who is using your keywords and how they are using them allows you to tweak your keyword list quickly if it isn't resonating correctly with consumers.

Professional inbound marketing experts have the technical expertise, Internet savvy and social media experience to ensure that your inbound marketing campaign is effectively designed and executed to produce the results you desire.

We Updated Our Website Design - Again!

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If you're new to our website, we hope you enjoy our brand new design. If you've been here before, you'll notice a major facelift. Yes, that's twice in the span of less than two years. Why did we do it? Are we obsessive about having a pretty website, or are there fundamental business reasons to redesign our site. I assure you, it's the latter. We're taking our company to a new level of business, and our website is leading the way. Here's our rationale for the update:

1. New Business Model - we're focusing on inbound marketing now. We still do brand development, graphic design and conventional marketing campaigns, but our emphasis is on getting our clients found online and capturing qualified sales leads using inbound marketing.
2. Work the Partnership - we're proud of our partnership with HubSpot, and we want to make sure our prospective clients know about it. We feel that HubSpot has the best software solution for inbound marketing, and we want to be known as one of the best service providers.
3. Growing and Changing - we're in a new office (since last year) and we've hired new people. We want to grow the company and become better known across the United States and even overseas.
4. New Ideas - we have lots of creative energy and ideas about new media marketing. We want to share those ideas with our visitors and subscribers.
5. Generate Sales Leads - if we're going to be doing this for our clients, we might as well start at home. 

So, how does a website redesign help to accomplish our goals?

• Updated, fresh, modern look and feel. These things still matter to people. If we're going to design a website for you, ours had better be first class.
• More interactive. Today's consumer wants to engage with us on blogs, social media, anywhere where we can find our audience and communicate with them. We made it easier to find these channels and include content from them on the website.
• Easier to navigate. We broke our content down into 2 main areas that our potential clients are seeking: 1. Building brand awareness and reputation and 2. capturing sales leads online. Now it's easy to find our solutions for those customer needs.
• Practice what we preach. Now you'll see calls-to-action on every page in prominent positions, landing pages that convey the offer and compel you to sign up as a lead. Lead nurturing campaigns to move potential customers down the sales funnel. We blog frequently about subjects that matter to our target audience. We optimize every page, blog post and social media update for search engines. Yes, we drink our own Kool Aid.

We hope you like the new design, but part of our inbound marketing mantra is to ask you how you feel about it.

Give it up - what's your reaction to our website makeover?

The Advantages Inbound Marketing Pros Bring to the Table

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Depending on your Internet experience and social media comfort level, inbound marketing either seems impossibly complex or ridiculously easy. The truth doesn't reside at either end of the spectrum but somewhere in between.

If your business marketing campaign is still focused on outbound marketing strategies such as trade shows, email blasts, cold calls and telemarketing, it can be more than a little disconcerting to jump into the free-wheeling, paperless, high-speed world of social media where instant gratification seems to reign.

On the other hand, if you've embraced social media in your personal life, spend hours updating your Facebook page and posting messages to your friends, and are a dedicated tweeter, you may fail to recognize the distinct differences between personal and business use of social media and the need for a certain amount of careful restraint in business applications.

In both cases, your company's marketing campaign will benefit from development and hands-on management by an experienced inbound marketing professional. Among the distinct advantages inbound marketing experts bring to the table is the expertise to build a platform of individually tailored social media products and measurement analytics to power your company's specific needs and target both broad and narrow goals.

The speed and targeting accuracy made possible by computerization and Internet dispersal allow inbound marketing strategies to be quickly and continuously tweaked by knowledgeable professionals. Computer analytics provide immediate, measurable results that quickly reveal the effectiveness of individual inbound marketing strategies. Inbound marketing experts use carefully selected analytics to continuously monitor and tweak marketing programs to ensure that they quickly produce the desired marketing results. Constant evaluation ensures that your marketing program reacts to and gains the greatest benefit from consumer response, market forces and changing demographics.

The wide variety of inbound marketing products and platforms allows businesses to capitalize on broad spectrum dispersal of their marketing message with one media while targeting very specific consumer demographics with another. Successful inbound marketing campaigns generally employ diverse techniques to approach company goals from several angles to maximize success. To the uninitiated, inbound marketing attack plans can appear to be random and fragmented. Indeed, it is manipulation by skilled inbound marketing professionals that produces a cohesive campaign.

Contact us for a free inbound marketing consultation.

Tips for Using Multimedia to Enhance Your Blog

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A no-frills blog that is not enhanced with multimedia is like Las Vegas without the lights. The inclusion of multimedia -- photographs, video, audio files -- in a blog post captures the reader's attention, adds visual interest to your blog and illustrates the purpose of the post, increasing the likelihood that they will return to your site.

Multimedia firms churn out endless streams of web-ready content, but bloggers and marketers should be aware that much of this content has a price tag attached. Copyright infringement is a serious infraction that can land writers in legal hot water. Authors, reporters, students and bloggers get in trouble if they borrow a paragraph from a book or news article and print it as their own work. In the same vein, you can't add photos, graphics or song clips you find on the Internet to your blog without obtaining the originator's permission.

Here are four ways to play it safe when adding images, video or sound clips to your blog:

1. Purchase media from its creator. For example, many photographers offer downloads for a fee. You can also purchase multimedia from online resources and galleries such as iStock and Getty Images. Most will allow you to pay per item, but check into quantity discounts for big savings.
2. Use media that is provided with your software. Many software products like Microsoft Word and Adobe Photoshop come with free access to extensive clip art/image galleries that can be used without charge by their customers.
3. Link to media hosted on other blog sites. Many bloggers will allow you to reproduce photos and videos on their sites as long as you provide a credit and direct link to the home site.
4. Create your own original media for your marketing purposes. Post your photos, self-produced videos and original music compositions.

Lastly, if you search for images using sites like Google Images - it is imperative to click through to the image source and review the permissions required for reproduction and use in your blogs as part  of your inbound marketing strategy.