Posted by Chris Knipper on Tue, Sep 07, 2010 @ 07:46 AM
In the number of seconds it takes to watch a YouTube video, the reputation of your brand can plummet from respected to reviled. Remember last year's unsanitary food handling video posted by two (now former) Domino's Pizza employees? How long was it before you'd take a chance on ordering from Domino's?
Businesses must maintain constant vigilance to protect their brands from damage. Brand perception has always been a concern, but today's instant communication makes it that much more important -- and that much harder -- to protect your brand. Large corporations devote teams of lawyers to protecting their brands by ferreting out and addressing every misuse, negative comment or derogatory reference to their brand. Small businesses simply don't have the resources to create that level of protection. For smaller brands, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) offers reasonable brand protection at an affordable price.
In concert with your inbound marketing program, SEO can be carefully managed to protect your brand against negative and malicious online content. Using effective SEO techniques, an inbound marketing professional can increase the search engine page ranking of official brand sites, forcing negative and unauthorized material off the first page of search results.
Fewer than 5% of Internet users navigate beyond the first page of search results, making SEO manipulation a relatively cheap and effective way of protecting your brand from harm. According to Internet marketing experts, customers performing a brand search are generally satisfied and stop investigating after encountering 10 positive to neutral search results. Since the average Internet search page shows about 10 results, pushing negative material off the first page is all that is required to protect your brand from negative online content.
To protect your brand, try these SEO tips:
- Optimize images by adding your brand name to ALT and title attributes. In Flickr, update the title and description in photo descriptions.
- Optimize video by creating tutorials, pod casts, product demos, etc. and adding keywords to video titles and descriptions. Place videos on your website as well as on YouTube.
- Optimize PDF files, particularly document properties that serve as title tag and meta description.
- Create a Facebook page and Twitter account to optimize your social media profile.
- Create optimized press releases monthly to maintain search engine ranking.
- Start a blog and optimize blog posts with branded keywords.
Are you monitoring your brand in social media and search engines? What's your SEO strategy for protecting your brand reputation?
Photo credit: CarbonNYC
Posted by John McTigue on Tue, Aug 31, 2010 @ 12:36 PM
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?
- 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?
- 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.
- 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.
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Posted by John McTigue on Mon, Aug 30, 2010 @ 07:00 AM
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:
- 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.
- DON'T use the Post to Groups option. This will automatically create a discussion and you will incur the wrath of the Troglodytes.
- Instead, go to each group and post it as a new Promotion, -OR-
- 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
Posted by John McTigue on Fri, Aug 27, 2010 @ 07:37 AM
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.
Posted by Chris Knipper on Wed, Aug 25, 2010 @ 07:48 AM
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
Posted by John McTigue on Tue, Aug 24, 2010 @ 06:46 AM
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.
Posted by Chris Knipper on Mon, Aug 09, 2010 @ 06:33 AM
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.
Posted by John McTigue on Tue, Aug 03, 2010 @ 07:09 AM
The debate rages on. There are two schools of thought.
The Utilitarians
These folks insist that design is secondary to content and that strategically placed inbound marketing elements are the only vital components of any website or other marketing medium.
The Stylists
These people know that design sells and that people are attracted first by the senses, not by the intellectual. Great design begets interest and leads to content consumption, not the other way around.
Who's Right?
Well, I would argue that the Stylists are right. Why are the iPhone and iPad so popular? There are plenty of smartphones, and the tablet PC has been around for years. Yes they both have cool apps and plenty of functionality, but it's the design that grabs you and won't let you go. It's the way apps and websites look that gets your attention and holds it. This shouldn't be a surprise. Our instinct is to evaluate everything we encounter with our senses first. We do this for a variety of reasons - to sense danger, to satisfy hunger and to find necessities. With the Internet, it's mostly visual. We instantly and subconsciously rate everything we see. Is this website, e-mail or social media interaction valuable to me? Just like in real life, we are attracted to beauty and repelled by ugliness. We have developed a finely tuned sense of good and bad based on visual cues, and they have a strong emotional impact upon us. When you walk into a beautiful house or check out the lines of a sexy new sports car, you say something silly, like "wow", but it's much stronger than that.
Making a Good First Impression
We are guided by visual and other sensory experiences. We choose a mate, buy a house, get a job, buy a car and feed ourselves based in large part upon what we see and how we make ourselves more attractive to others. It's completely subjective, but there are general rules derived from thousands of years of living together. We have a pretty good idea of what well-groomed looks like, or messy, or sleek or traditional or modern. We have images of these things in our head. So when we encounter a website or blog, we formulate a first impression in a second or less. We know what you're about before you have a chance to open your mouth, based entirely on your design. We either connect with you or we don't based on what you look like (first). We may give you a second chance by reading your stuff, but probably not. You're in or you're out. Think about that when you're surfing.
I could cite a lot of research about human psychology and marketing, but why bother? We already know this stuff. So why are we debating about whether or not your Web content should be stylish? Of course it should, unless you just don't care if anyone finds it and subscribes to it. But what constitutes stylish? Ahh, there's the rub. Clearly, your design should convey something important about you. If I went out and dressed like Lady Gaga, I might attract attention, but it wouldn't be about me - it would be about her. The other consideration is what other people want. Yes, you have to design for your audience. You must anticipate who they are and what they like. This requirement has kept advertising agencies in business since forever. Finding that design balance between you and your customers is crucial to marketing.
Bottom Line
Pay attention to your design - it's the all important first impression. Then work the content and relationships. Weave the design through all that you do. If it's a great design, it will reinforce those good feelings and instill loyalty. Don't be afraid to change your design periodically. People love that. Right now people are waiting to see the new 2011 car designs before they will buy. There's a reason for that.
Good, bad or ugly? How does your design impact your visitors?
Photo credit: pixeljones
Posted by Chris Knipper on Wed, Jul 28, 2010 @ 07:51 AM
The pervasive presence and overwhelming influence of social media in our daily lives is forcing business owners to change their marketing strategies or face extinction. Today's marketing climate is reminiscent of the computer revolution that separated inflexible old-schoolers from forward-thinking risk-takers. Business dinosaurs who clung doggedly to their typewriters and fax machines quickly succumbed, choked by the dust as their more flexible, forward-thinking peers stampeded past. The advent of mobile phones and then cell phones marked another critical turning point in the evolution of business marketing. Today, social media has pushed U.S. business to another crossroads that is destined to change the face of business marketing.
For decades, marketing strategies have relied on trade shows, seminars, email blasts, internal cold calls, telemarketing and advertising to generate leads and attract customers. Collectively referred to as outbound marketing, these marketing techniques focus on blasting your message OUT to huge numbers of consumers in the hopes of connecting with a few. The problem today is that consumers have become pretty savvy about blocking those attempts to connect. From telephone answering machines to computer spam filters to commercial-less Tivo and Sirius, consumers have become adept at avoiding outbound marketing ploys. Despite the fact that most companies still devote nearly 90% of their budgets to outbound marketing, it has become today's dinosaur. Don't get me wrong, there's still room for mixing in outbound techniques as part of an overall marketing campaign. But the days of 100% outbound marketing are rapidly approaching extinction.
The ever-increasing availability, accessibility and mobility of computer connectivity through smartphones, tablets and notepads have shifted consumer interest to Internet-based social media. The universal popularity of Facebook and Twitter combined with omnipresent cell phones and America's love of texting has transformed communication and consumer expectations. Consumers are no longer content to wait for an email response to a question or problem. Twitter has ramped up the importance of immediacy in business-consumer relations. In a recent Time magazine article, a columnist tracked response time to a customer complaint. When email response was at 48 hours and counting, he Tweeted about his problem and received a response within 2 hours.
To catch the attention of today's consumer, marketing strategies must now focus on interactive social media that lure consumers IN to their websites. Savvy marketers are spending their marketing capital on social media websites like Facebook and LinkedIn. They're creating blogs, Twitter accounts and YouTube videos to appeal to today's constantly plugged-in consumer. Called inbound marketing, these social media marketing venues are the wave of the future -- and the future is now!
Are you making the switch? We can help with the transition.
Photo credit: slworking2
Posted by Maddie Weber on Tue, Jul 27, 2010 @ 07:14 AM
Through experimentation and practice, inbound marketing professionals have developed a laundry list of tried and true tricks guaranteed to increase your blog's readability and keep readers coming back for more.
Create visual distinction between your post and the rest of the page. The start and end of each post should be clear.- Keep it short. Short posts. Short paragraphs (2-3 sentences). Short sentences.
- Create logical structure and flow (title, intro, heading, text, etc.) and use it consistently to give your site cohesiveness.
- Choose a common font that most readers are likely to have.
- Use larger fonts, bold, underlines or color to make headings and subheads stand out. Be consistent in application.
- Set space between lines in a paragraph to 1.5 (line height divided by font size should equal about 1.5).
- Pull quotes from the blog body to entice interest. Highlight with italic or bold type or by placing in colored boxes.
- Underline links so they're easy to spot.
- Skip SnapShots links. They may seem cool, but quickly become annoying and disruptive.
- Don't break up posts with ads; it disrupts readability. Place ads below the post or to the side.
- Shorten sidebars so they don't compete with content.
- Italic and bold type call enough attention to themselves. Don't distract the reader by making them a different color than the body type.
- Avoid all caps in body text; they're hard to read.
- Avoid large text blocks that can intimidate readers. Break up text with bold type or bullets and lists.
- Indent bulleted and numbered lists to differentiate them from text paragraphs.
- Left align text for best readability.
- Make pagination navigation clear and clickable. Add the option to read the entire article on a single page.
- Expand acronyms using acronym HTML code with the typical dotted bottom border.
- Place images at the beginning of a post to draw in readers. Top right placement captures greatest reader attention.
- Check text wrapping around images and adjust text or resize image to create a pleasing fit.
How readable are your blogs? We can help.
Photo credit: margolove