Search and Social Changed Marketing

Yeah, I know, it’s not much of a revelation. However, I feel it’s important to state why search engines (let’s just say Google) and social media have changed the way marketing works.

Google’s search algorithm likes fresh content, at least that’s what I’ve heard. Fresh content for most mundane topical websites isn’t hard to produce. On the other hand, most businesses don’t feel their products and services are so mundane. In fact, marketing is about highlighting the uniqueness of the business’s offering to the consumer. Even if you’re selling an everyday household product you feel you’re providing something special to the marketplace. Unique content that is regularly published meets both Google’s demand and a business’s need to look different from competitors.

Second, it seems like every business wants to have a Facebook page or push out tweets. It seems logical, especially if that’s where your customers congregate. The challenge is not letting your consumers see a dead page. There is nothing, speaking personally and from experience, than a social media account that is unused. It basically says, “look at us NOT being social.” My good friend Brian always said that a business shouldn’t use a social media platform if their not a social company.

We all understand the meaning behind the saying content is king. And because of the immediacy of the Internet, regularly published content is critical. Thus, marketing is different.

Think of the Four P’s of marketing: 1) product, 2) placement, 3) promotion, and 4) price. Now consider creating content. Can you outsource your current content needs to just any writer? Typically, no.

You see, in the past before Google, you could just hire an ad agency to buy you marketing spots in any media outlet. Sure, you needed to create content but the process was drawn-out and tedious. Today a business needs to publish a detailed technical blog about tomorrow’s product and respond to yesterday’s Facebook post. The speed and regularity in which writing and editing takes place requires someone that knows what they’re talking about.

Translated for my accounting mind: why spend the money to outsource something that only an expert must do all the time?

So the world of marketing has changed. Instead of each marketing firm being a one-stop shop for their clients, the new marketing firm must realize that much of the work, due to basic cost accounting principles, will in the long-run be done in house. This transition happened for the accounting industry too with the advent of accounting software. Bookkeeping can be done in-house whereas tax preparation is outsourced.

Four ways to create a worthless B2B website.

There are at least four ways to create a worthless website but ignoring your customer, not thinking from their perspective tends to be tops on the “ignore” list.

Ignore user needs and usability. Don’t bother to define your users before you begin, either. Craft your content from your perspective, not theirs. Don’t create user funnels through the site to lead them in and engage them; they’ll find what they want eventually. via Web Sites – Four Ways to Create a Worthless B2B Website : MarketingProfs Article.

Does your website have bad links?

Google is getting better at finding out which websites are getting “bad” links. Here’s a process that can help you identify if your website is going to be deindexed.
  1. Identify as many linking root domains as possible using various backlinks data sources.
  2. Check the ToolBar PageRank (TBPR) for all linking root domains and pay attention on the TBPR distribution
  3. Work out the percentage of linking root domains that has been reindexed
  4. Check social metrics distribution (optional)
  5. Repeat steps 2,3 and 4 periodically (e.g. weekly, monthly) and check for the following:
  • A spike towards the low end of the TBPR distribution
  • Increasing number of deindexed linking root domains on a weekly/monthly basis
  • Unchanged numbers of social metrics, remaining in very low levels

via How to Check Which Links Can Harm Your Site’s Rankings | SEOmoz.

The key to this entire mess is to not get bad links in the first place. And you’re not going to get bad links if you build a website, optimize the tags, and try to get natural links. You only get bad links when you want to get bad links. Right?

Do entrepreneurs think different?

Risk takers or people that like to be the boss, those are the things that come to mind when someone wants to describe an entrepreneur. Maybe.

Entrepreneurs don’t learn by thinking, they learn by doing. via How an Entrepreneur Imagines the World :: Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing.

Entrepreneurs may think different because they like to do. What do you think?

What’s the best thing you can do to get found for local searches?

Be on all the platforms! Name claiming is a great way to just get found. This doesn’t mean you have to actively use the account. Create an account and fill-in the basic information and then measure to see if you get any traffic from that source.

Claim and optimize all your local profiles. Erroneous details in various profiles were costing one of Schepke’s clients—a family restaurant—significant tourist dollars: Google called it a grocery store; Yelp had it listed as an Italian restaurant; and Bing had an incorrect street address. via Search Engine Marketing – Five Steps to Improved Local Search ROI : MarketingProfs Article.

Simplicity is a good reason people prefer mobile over their computer.

I like simple website designs without clutter. Clutter can be too complex and complexity can lead to less conversions.

You can’t fit everything on that first screen so you’re left with what’s most important. You give users one way in and one way to accomplish tasks. Believe it or not – most users actually prefer this. It makes it easier to complete the task we landed on your site for because there are fewer distractions vying for our attention. via Mobile sites people like.

If you’re going to redesign your website I recommend you look at keeping it simple and clean. Offer the user one or two options and that should help you increase your conversions.

Tracking time can be amazing, as long as you keep it simple.

Maybe it’s the cost accountant in me, but I love time tracking. It’s akin to tracking your weight when you’re losing those extra pounds. You need the data to know the results.

As a growing small business, it’s time to start thinking past paper-based or homegrown timesheet systems, Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, or multiple installed time collection systems that produce inconsistent data. Without timesheet software, it is very difficult to understand project costs. via How Small Business Can Benefit from Time Tracking.

An even better analogy would be to consider time tracking a way of creating a recipe. To know how much sugar to put into the batch of cookie mix you need to know how much you put before. Sometimes the cookies were too sweet or not sweet enough. Once you get the right mix you can reproduce it on a regular basis.

Keep your elevator pitch short.

An elevator pitch is important in many aspects of your life. For me I always get the, “what do you do” question, and I feel I do so much that an elevator pitch won’t do justice. Then I remember that the question is just a way to say hello and get a conversation started.

Remember, your cocktail pitch doesn’t need to tell your entire story; it doesn’t even need to cover all the important points. A great pitch succeeds if it draws interest from the other person and gets them to want to know more. via How to Perfect Your Elevator Pitch.

Good design is key to good content.

Of the seven lessons of content from Mashable, I found the first to be the most compelling. Design matters.

This may seem obvious, but if you want to be taken seriously by consumers, it’s important to make your content visually compelling. via 7 Lessons From Content Marketing’s Greatest Hits.

A good design sends signals of quality and professionalism. Higher quality allows for a higher price premium; think of Lexus or Rolex. And a professional uses design to demonstrate his/her attention to detail.

Measure something other than where Google ranks your website in its search results.

For such a valuable offering, search engine optimization has so many things wrong with it. For example, clients always want to measure where a keyword ranks in Google search results, which is fine, but it misses the point. Instead, I’ve been a big advocate of tracking non-brand related terms in Google Analytics.

Build out a list of branded terms and exclude traffic from these terms. This leaves you with your non-branded traffic. It’s important to know if your link building is resulting in more people entering the top portion of the funnel. via How your reports make your link building suck.

Non-brand terms means people are finding your products potentially for the first time. Having more visitors that never heard of your brand means more people in the future that will search for your brand.

How to move people with two irrational questions.

Getting to the reason behind decisions isn’t easy. I’m a big fan of Daniel Pink and he’s taken a snippet out of Instant Influence to explain something quite complex. Now here’s Dr. Pantalon:

What do you say when someone at work says, “No” to your suggestion?  You probably respond with a perfectly rational question like, “Why not?” Unfortunately, I’ve learned that rational questions are ineffective for motivating resistant people. Instead I’ve found that irrational questions actually motivate people better.

For example, imagine you’re a manager at a major PR firm and one of your reports balks at revising an important part of the next big campaign.  Instead of asking rational but ineffective questions, try the following 2 seemingly irrational questions:

1. How ready are you to make the revisions, on a scale from 1 to 10, where 1 means not ready at all and 10 means totally ready?

Make sure she gives you a number. On the rare chance that she says, “1,” surprise her by saying, “What would turn it into a 2?” In telling you what it would take for her to become a 2, she reveals what she needs to do before she is able to make the revisions to the campaign. That is what you motivate her to do first.

2. If she picks a number higher than 2, ask, “Why didn’t you pick a lower (yes, lower) number?”

Question 1 seems irrational, because you’re asking, “How ready are you…?” of a person who just said, “No,” which we can assume means not at all ready.  However, most resistant people have some motivation that they keep from us.  If you ask, “Are you going to take my suggestion, yes or no?” they continue to keep their motivation hidden.  But if you ask them the “1-10” question, they’re much more likely to reveal their motivation by saying a 2 or a 3, which is far better – you’ve now moved from a “No” to at least a “Maybe.”

Question 2 seems really irrational, perhaps even absurd. It’s the opposite of the rational and expected question, “Why aren’t you more motivated?” which only breeds more resistance.  However, by asking Question 2, you’re asking her to defend why your directive to revise the campaign is even the slightest bit important to her (e.g., deep down, she knows getting over her defensiveness around critique is an important career goal) rather than to defend her excuses why she won’t do it (e.g., too busy).  The answers she gives lead her to rehearse the positive and intrinsic reasons for doing what you asked, which, in turn, dramatically increase the chances that she gets the project done.

via How to move people with two irrational questions | Daniel Pink.

Confused? I was too. But reread it a couple of times and I think you’ll get it.

A person, not a team makes the decision. Always.

It’s seems obvious when you think about it but it’s true, there’s always one person that makes the ultimate decision. Teams meet and maybe even vote. Then at the end, everyone will turn to the decision maker to see if she agrees.

Absolutely correct. The group discussion helped evolve the boss’s thinking, which reshaped the ultimate decision. But even if the decision wasn’t one the boss would have initially made or isn’t his or her top choice, the fact is that the CEO was part of the consensus. via If You Think Your Team Makes Decisions, Think Again – Bob Frisch – Harvard Business Review.

Take a look at Bob Frisch’s latest book Who’s in the Room: How Great Leaders Structure and Manage the Teams Around Them.

There’s a difference between automated data and data analysis.

Too often people define reports some sort of quick snippet of data in a great looking graph. While graphs can look amazing, it takes a trained eye to understand what the graph is communicating. Every marketing firm shares data, but how many actually share the data then share their insight via written analysis?

Yet an agency’s main value-add isn’t report creation, but analyzing data and providing key findings and recommendations to clients. And while Google Analytics provides the tools to slice and dice the data, many web agencies also want to present clients with personalized reports, complete with the agency’s logo. And they want to be able to deliver and share reports without requiring users to log in, especially in large organizations where report distribution can become an onerous administrative process. via Sharing Personalized Dashboards using the Analytics API – Analytics Blog.

Lockheed Martin Announces Layoffs

Lockheed Martin is making cuts to survive. Is your local government doing the same?

Lockheed Martin Mission Systems and Sensors, or MS2, announced it will lay off between 450 and 550 employees in the U.S. this year. MS2, which employs approximately 14,000 people, introduced a voluntary layoff program to reduce positions before it begins an involuntary layoff action. via Lockheed Martin announces layoffs – YNN, Your News Now.

Kodak Proposes $13.5M in Bonuses

This is an interesting move. I always support paying people more.

Eastman Kodak Co. is seeking permission to pay about 300 executives and other employees a total of $13.5 million in bonuses to persuade them to stay with the company as it reorganizes under bankruptcy protection. via Kodak proposes $13.5M in bonuses, withdraws plan to cut retirees’ health care benefits | syracuse.com.

Retailers report a greater than expected increase in sales for March | syracuse.com

Maybe the economy is turning around.

A combination of warm weather and high demand for spring fashions boosted revenue for the month, but analysts say there’s much more than higher temperatures at play: Americans who cut back on spending in the slow economic recovery are encouraged by the improving job market.

via Retailers report a greater than expected increase in sales for March | syracuse.com.

Small Businesses Are Hiring and Growing Again

Good articles all around.

Why your business really needs a blog writer. It’s not a job people might have been hired for even a few years ago, but the importance of blogging today is well known. It’s a skill that will likely be a full-time career someday. FixCourse

via Small Businesses Are Hiring and Growing Again.

Does Blogging Work For Business?

Mitch is right.

That’s the power of blogging; that’s why I talk about it all the time. You never know who might find your content and be impressed enough about it to contact you for business.

via Does Blogging Work For Business? | SEO Xcellence Blog.

Japan ain’t Central New York

 

Japanese McDonalds

Japanese McDonalds

When I think of the culture I think of Japan. Having moved from Japan to Central New York a few years ago I can easily distinguish the differences between the two. The best example would be customer service. A Japan fast food hamburger looks like the picture on the menu and is served by a polite, well-groomed employee. In America, well…

My culture in the the Air Force was unique too: the history of flight, uniforms, warrior spirit, acronyms, and etc. And while similar in many aspects, Site-Seeker won’t be issuing uniforms anytime soon. No, our culture at Site-Seeker is our own. Each organization, military or business, has it’s exclusive culture that shapes how it operates.

Read the rest of the article at www.site-seeker.com.

SOPA: Some Officials just Pass Acronyms

When pirates take hostages off the Ethiopian coast the U.S. President sends in a Navy SEAL sniper team and issues an order to kill. Alternatively, every day other pirates profit off stolen online content yet our government hesitates to pull the trigger on legislation to prevent it. Pirates are pirates, right?

Assuming this link still works (Wikipedia is going dark in protest), the Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA) was written to make it harder for online content to be stolen and monetized. Who can be against theft? Consider that so many of us Internet marketers work hard to create unique content in the hopes that we earn a coveted link. That link passes Page Rank and validates that we came up with that thought.

Read the rest of the article at www.site-seeker.com.