Internet Marketing and Lead Generation
Online marketing tools and technology for SMB service businesses
Making Friends and Influencing Others
Among what Retail Info Systems News (RIS) considers the the top nine retailers in social media, there is not a single retailer that qualifies as a stand-out on more than one of the top three social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube). Even with their deep pockets these companies haven’t attained leadership levels of success on more than one channel – a focused social media marketing approach that smaller businesses can learn from.
In a recent blog from RIS, editor Joe Skorupa researched the top retailers utilizing the big three social media sites. He meant to compile a top ten list of leaders across all channels but he was disappointed to discover that there were not ten retailers who had dominant success across all three social media channels – there was not even one. In the end, Joe was forced to only name nine retailers that had a leading presence in one of the three channels.
His criteria were a million fans on Facebook; 10,000 followers on Twitter; or 100,000 channel views along with 500,000 upload views on YouTube. The companies who achieved at least one of these metrics (in alphabetical order) were Best Buy, Forever 21, Gap, Home Depot, REI, Sears, Target, Wal-Mart, and Whole Foods.
Knowing that none of these big name retailers have been able to dominate all three top social media channels offers a couple lessons in social media marketing: effective marketing and brand building via social media is much more complex than it appears; and dividing resources to conquer multiple channels is a likely path to mediocrity.
Photo credit: Luc Legay
Your Consumers Are Easier to Spot Online
Behavioral Targeting (BT) – the practice of directing advertising at users whose online activities suggest an interest in a specific product or service – is one of the hottest trends in online advertising today. User interest can be gauged using existing technologies that track a user’s activity online, over time. This information can be used by marketers (like you) for a customized online advertising campaign targeted at the individual users who are most likely to be interested in your ads.
Tracking technologies include: third party cookies, flash cookies, and beacons (little text files that are downloaded onto a user’s hard drive), upon visiting a site, which then track search queries, pages visits, ad clicks, and purchases.
You may be familiar with Amazon.com’s on-site Behavioral Targeting, which, based on tracking your searches and purchases, will recommend other related or complementary items that may interest you. Behavioral Targeting advertising takes it a step further, applying the same concept to the entire Internet. >> Continue reading
Your clients are talking. Are you listening?
You may have heard before that you should listen, not just talk (i.e. push your products and services) when using social media. But what does that mean? You should be listening for what exactly? And, how does this all relate to your business goals?
Put simply, you should be listening to what your potential clients have to say, because they are telling you things (about themselves, about their wants and needs) that you don’t yet know.
The biggest potential of social media is that it can be a two-way conversation. On Twitter, you might post a link to your company’s latest blog, published article, or white paper. You may push summaries about an up-coming senior executive speaking engagement or hosted webinar to Facebook and LinkedIn groups related to your industry. And although this type of one-way social media communication is the extent of most companies’ social media strategies, it is only one piece of the social media puzzle (it’s the “talking” piece). What about the “listening” piece? Relatively little attention is given to the ongoing conversations already happening – those not initiated by corporate efforts. This is a huge omission in many social media strategies, but an easy one to correct. >> Continue reading
http://flickr.com/kirinqueen/
The only way to be successful at online reputation management (ORM), is to routinely monitor what is being posted on blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Yelp, etc. about your firm and personnel, and then to respond. Benefits of responding to negative comments include pushing those comments into search engine obscurity with your own more creditable content (which you can probably get to rank higher in search) or heading off any real problems that need to be addressed within your firm.
ORM In Action
Customer complaints can quickly damage a company’s reputation. A recent case study, featuring the American Automobile Association (AAA), showed how a service orientated firm should respond. Triple A started tracking social media mentions of their company and executives using a paid monitoring service. This greater awareness of public opinion turned out to be an opportunity to be proactive, rather than reactive, or worse still, completely unaware. With this information, AAA gained the ability to quickly redirect complaints to customer care channels and to fix problems as they were alerted to them, such as broken web links, avoiding the possibility of bad publicity going viral and snowballing online. >> Continue reading
http://flickr.com/myklroventine/
It’s well known that social media is enjoying unprecedented popularity, but Facebook’s recent success in launching its own unique social version of search (where sites are ranked by ‘likes,’ not links), has forced search engine providers to respond more aggressively to this now direct threat to their own core businesses. Social media has always struggled to find a way to transform their communities into a viable revenue stream. Search appears to be their pathway to profitability.
You’ll want to be knowledgeable about this trend—search engines behaving more like social media communities—as it may impact your digital marketing strategy. Be aware that their goal is to secure your advertising dollars, but this is great news for advertisers all around as healthy competition is usually to their/your benefit. We’re likely to see new search features and services (improving the user experience, attracting and retaining more users) and possibly better ad pricing – especially if the Google monopoly on search is weakened. >> Continue reading
Slow, but Growing Adoption
It’s no big secret that law firms are, as businesses go, among the most conservative service business – especially when it comes to adopting new technologies. And that includes internet marketing. So even though there is increasing participation among lawyers in social media and search marketing, participants still represent a small minority of the legal community. And it’s true that many of those who are participating are still learning the ropes. But the industry is starting to see a real shift toward greater adoption as lawyers share their experiences with each other…where else? Online.
Over Regulation?
One reason for the legal profession’s slow adoption of technology is the generally conservative nature of lawyers themselves. Their actions are strictly regulated by their bar associations, and many lawyers believe that these regulations include limits on their use of blogging and social media. I’m no lawyer, but it’s my understanding that, to the contrary, bar associations have been largely silent on the subject of lawyers using online media.
Public Debates
This has spurred lawyers to take up the debate among themselves – online and off. One of the most active online groups I have seen is a LinkedIn group dedicated to the subject of lawyer blogging. As of this week the group has over 4,300 members (some lawyers, some marketers (like myself), and others). The topics of discussion in the group are varied, but many of them are insightful – in one way or another. Some of the posts remind me that there are attorneys out there who are still unfamiliar with the basic concept of blogging and social media (some seem to think any use of social media has to be an overt, cheesy marketing pitch; others believe that a blog has to be operated separately from their website). But mostly I’m impressed with the lawyers who have adopted blogging, and who share their experiences and opinions with their constituents in this group. I can chime in all day with comments on the site, but my opinion will never pull as much weight with the lawyer who asked the question as the responses from his fellow attorneys.
The social media debate among lawyers is not a new one. This lawyers roundtable from 2005 touches on many of the same topics being discussed in this legal blogging group today. But one down side of attorney-only forums like the one from 2005 is that, since the participants are all lawyers and not internet marketers, they tend to perpetuate outdated e-marketing concepts among themselves. Contrast that to the LinkedIn legal marketing group: since there are other professionals chiming in there as well, the perspectives tend to be varied (this is a good thing). The marketers in the group aren’t all necessarily ‘experts’ – they, too, make misinformed comments – but overall the discussions are at least thought provoking. And I believe the group is doing its part to spur greater adoption of social media in the legal community.
Here are a few excerpts that were sent out recently by the group’s organizer:
The discussion “Does geographic location matter anymore? Can a law firm from Kentucky beat out a New York firm?” ( http://linkd.in/duGGNN ) expands upon a post written by Robert Algeri’s legal marketing firm, Great Jakes. The author claims that the website has replaced the office as a line of first contact with a firm; physical location is no longer relevant.
The post was well-received within the group. In the words of Keith Lee,
“Websites and blogs are the easiest and most convenient way to gather background information on a firm – which is why it’s difficult to understand why more firms don’t take the care to make sure their website is more than a glorified business card.”
Grammar isn’t everyone’s forte, but it’s an integral part of blogging. Kendall Gray shares his “On Brevity– Or how I learned to stop worrying and love the lite connector” ( http://linkd.in/azvkxF ). He divulges a simple tip: it’s sometimes acceptable to use sentence fragments to lighten your writing and add a conversational tone. But make sure to use these fragments wisely.
Gyi Tsakalkis emphasizes the value of taking online networking offline in “From The Web To The Flesh” ( http://linkd.in/bWITqE ). Essentially,
“While the Internet provides an extraordinary vehicle for the “virtual you” to get out of the office, your strongest relationships are still those that are nurtured through real-life interaction.”
Finally, an Associate’s Mind helps the group understand their rights as bloggers in the post “Blogger’s Legal Rights and more – Resources at the Electronic Frontier Foundation” ( http://linkd.in/bJRUYZ ). The EFF is a non-profit organization dedicated to protecting people’s rights online, and a trove of information for bloggers; their site ( http://www.eff.org ) is certainly worth a visit.
Jul
Re-Visiting Keywords – the Most Important Part of Your Search Marketing Campaign
Posted by: Dan Cawrey
from happyhints.com
Have you ever thrown a bunch of money at an unsuccessful Google AdWords (search engine marketing (SEM)), campaign? Don’t be embarrassed, because businesses do this on a daily basis. Thinking that they have found a marketing goldmine, business owners will often throw good money after bad at an SEM campaign without the necessary up-front planning. However, the way the system is set up, you need to put quite a bit of thought into keywords before you ever spend a single dollar on SEM. The most obvious keywords may not necessarily offer you the best return on investment.
Focus on Cheap Keywords
Sometimes people just use commonly used, competitive, keywords in their SEM campaigns – the keywords that are consistently “bid up” by other advertisers who are targeting those same terms. You have to think smarter than your competition in bidding for keywords. The most popular keywords are also usually the most expensive. >> Continue reading
from jfaccento.quicm.net
Imagine your word of mouth advertising on steroids…minus, uh, the adverse health effects
A business owner asked me recently why his business should consider increasing their internet marketing spend if they were “doing quite well” on word of mouth alone. Initially I answered the question with another question(s):
What exactly do you mean by ‘doing quite well’? Don’t you want to ‘do better’?
He rolled his eyes and answered ‘yes’ (of course). But the real meat of his question was whether marketing can actually bolster whatever word of mouth (WOM) advertising his business already had rolling in. >> Continue reading
from bharathreddypunuru
Whether you know it or not, some of your customers are quickly evaluating the trustworthiness of your website and your company (compared to your competitors) based on Google’s PageRank (PR) – the zero to 10 ranking scale Google applies to all web pages. In the absence of other criteria, it’s actually an easy way for consumers to compare apples to apples. They use PR to determine at a glance how much Google trusts your website, and by extension, how much they should trust your website. The only problem is it’s an imperfect ranking system. Your competitors can fake a high PR, and likewise you could be the unknowing victim of a lower PR. The latter actually happened to GoDaddy.com recently – it looks like they were downgraded from PR7 to PR2 overnight. It’s a fluke (see blow), but if it can happen to them, it can happen to you.
There are other reasons to be aware of PageRank’s imperfect scale. Not least of which is if you are paying some freelancer to do link building or search engine optimization (SEO) for your business website. If you or your service provider don’t know how to identify a website’s true trustworthiness, you could be spending time (or money) acquiring links from the wrong sites. Sneaky website owners can actually fake high PR for the purpose of making their websites look more popular than they are. >> Continue reading
Apr
What Your Local 10 O’Clock News Team Can Tell You About How to Market Your Services
Posted by: Jeremy Reither
How many times have you heard a newscaster (or any non-expert) describe your industry’s services to a lay audience in a way that made you think, well that’s not actually the way it is? That’s because they’re trying to dumb down your offering into a 10-second spot to explain it to the consumer. Kind of like what you should be doing for some of your marketing campaigns.
The general public doesn’t understand what you do – and in fact they don’t want to. Consumers just want to know what you’re selling will benefit them. If you provide what I call “complex services” (like legal, medical, financial services / insurance, etc.) you’re probably too close to your business to know the best way to explain the value your company offers to customers. It’s been called the “curse of knowledge” – it means you know too much about what you’re selling to help someone else appreciate or understand it.
Understanding the mindset of the consumer can be one of the most challenging aspects of marketing. Unwrapping their wants, needs, and values are what marketing is all about, but all too often companies forget (or never learn) how to market in a way that is meaningful to their target audience.
But watch what the reporters on the evening news try to do – they boil down topics to their most essential emotional points, because that’s what consumers (their audience) respond to. In sales and marketing, perception is more important than substance…you need to know how consumers perceive your services. Listen to the ways the news team simplify what you do – it may not bee 100% accurate, but it can give you insight into the mind of the consumer, how they perceive your offerings, and what they believe sets one provider (ie: you) apart from another (ie: your competitors).
So pay attention to that 10 o’clock news report next time they’re doing a story on you or your competitors – there could be some gems in it for you and your marketing team.
Facebook
RSS
Twitter