Missing In Action

The one element I see missing on 99% of business related websites is compelling offers and calls-to-action. The 1% of businesses that understand the purpose and value of compelling offers took the time to develop, measure, and test their offers to learn what their customers are looking for on their website. These businesses are successful at converting their website traffic into qualified leads and new sales.

Not Compelling At All

In my opinion these examples are not compelling offers. How many of you would give up your email address for these offers?

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Kicking The Tires

The purpose of adding compelling offers and call-to-action on your website is to motivate your visitors to engage your business. You know…pick up the box and shake it, kick the tires, and take a test drive.

Think of the business model for bookstores. If you ever walk into a Barnes & Noble or other mega bookstore, you’ll notice the ambiance and experience is much different than that of your public library.

As I walked into a brick and mortar business like Barnes & Noble, let me describe their compelling offers and call-to-action:

• A coffee/tea bar
• Comfortable, cushy couches
• Reading tables
• Expansive magazine rack
• Music CDs
• Movie DVDs
• Bargain priced book table
• Recommended book lists
• New releases book table
• Bestsellers book table
• Book club
• Children’s book section

All of these compelling offers and calls-to-action are there to enhance my experience, help build loyalty to Barnes & Noble, and keep me coming back.

When a prospect visits your website, you want to create an experience such that they will take their time clicking and scrolling through your virtual store. They’ll sit back in their chair and read a few interesting articles, get up to refill their cup of coffee, view a few videos/demos, download your eBook, read your blog and share it with friends, read the articles in the special interest areas of your website, sign up for your eNewsletter or better yet follow you on Twitter, and so on.

How Do You Know What’s Compelling?

Your website is your lifeline to growing your business. If you are like most businesses, you have an office that you work at, but it is not a storefront in which you want prospects and clients to visit you everyday because it would be disruptive to you and your employees. That’s the purpose of your website and it’s where you want your prospects and clients to visit everyday.

Find out what your client’s need and develop compelling offers and call-to-action on your website to meet their needs. Just remember, a compelling offer and call-to-action that works for one type of business, may not necessarily work for another business.

Marketing focused on selling to target audiences with little concern for the people in that audience. From TV and Radio, to Print, Direct Mail and Telemarketing, sales and marketing digressed to a numbers game obsessed with creating campaigns and measuring return.

Thanks to changes in the social and geographic make-up of our country since the early days of the technological revolution, generalized message driven marketing did not seem out-of-place as we all grew apart.

We moved to cul-de-sacs in the ‘burbs, chose to watch TV, play video games and surf the web rather than personally interact. We built fences, closed drapes and ordered in. We created our own interactive worlds within our physical communities – only to become punch drunk by the never ending value added messaging we received as people tried to reach us through every channel imaginable.

Businesses marketed to reach a demographic, playing the numbers game – reach many, convert a few, dial to style. Individuals were being removed from the equation.

Now advancements in technology have allowed us all to come full circle. We have rejected the mass marketing game. We are headed back to a time when we chose vendors based on personal integrity and not on marketing prowess. Back when who said it was more important than what was said.

Business is becoming human again and I welcome it. The world class, best of breed, new paradigm, next generation solution is being replaced by the experienced qualified person with a name and face and an easily research-able, valid, professional online profile.

The very technology that, in its infancy separated us from each other, has now matured enough to connect us all back together again. In the age of research-buying, people are again doing business with people.

As developers bulldoze entire unoccupied cul-de-sac developments in Las Vegas, I can’t help but wonder if a sense of real community will come back – developing offline as it has online. After all, we have seen some trickle over with Tweet Ups, Linkedin meetings and breakfast events. Time will tell.

Title Tag Format

SEOmoz Best Practice:

Primary Keyword – Secondary Keywords | Brand
Or
Brand Name | Primary Keyword and Secondary Keywords

Reasoning:

According to their first round of intensive search engine ranking factors correlation testing, it was clear to SEOmoz that if you are trying to rank for a very competitive term, it is best to include the keyword at the beginning of the title tag. If your brand can make a difference in CTR and your terms are less competitive, it is best to put the brand name first.

My Stance:

I agree with the above formats and implement them on an individual client basis. If my client’s company has a well-known name that people would search for, then the second format works best. However, the majority of my clients are searched for by targeted keywords, in which case I use the first format.

H1 Tags

SEOmoz Best Practice:

H1s are important for users but now less so for Search Engines.

Reasoning:

SEOmoz correlation data shows that H1 tags do not carry the same ranking weight that had been originally presumed. The importance of this tag seems to be in establishing information hierarchy and helping with algorithmically determined semantics, not in search engine optimization.

In August 2008, Michael Martin had a conversation with Google’s Matt Cutts at SMX Advanced and he indicated that Google doesn’t weigh the H1 tag any heavier than an H2 or H4, but it shouldn’t be used more than once.

My Stance:

It is (and currently continues to be) my practice to use a variation of the primary and secondary keywords in the H1. This SEOmoz finding has piqued my interest, however, and I’ll be doing my own internal testing on the H1’s ranking weight.

Meta Keywords Tag

SEOmoz Best Practice:

Contrary to what SEOMoz recommended in the past, they now find this tag useful in ranking for Yahoo.

Reasoning:

Initially SEOmoz did not recommend using a meta keywords tag at all due to the abuse it suffered in the early days of the internet; they thought these tags were not used by the modern search engines. After running some very preliminary tests at the prompting of DJ Paisley it was noted that Yahoo does indeed use this tag for ranking although it is a minor factor. However, it is their stance that Google and Bing ignore this tag and it doesn’t affect their rankings.

My Stance:

I always include the keywords tag as part of my client’s overall organic search strategy. I use roughly 3-5 targeted and appropriate keywords from my keyword research that are page-specific. While it may only be providing a positive effect with Yahoo, the tag has never shown me to work against a page’s rank in any of the search engines.

Takeaways:

The landscape of SEO is ever-changing and it’s always crucial to look out for new research, even on the old standbys. Staying on top of search engine news and constantly tweaking and reworking my organic search strategies is the name of the game for me. It’s absolutely beneficial for everyone with a website to test theories, see what’s working for you (or against you) in the rankings, and most importantly, keep trying.

Then, one mid week day last week… CABLAMO! Our Feedburners subscribers TRIPLED in one day.

What happened? Did the Jonas Brothers say they read our blog? Did an influential blogger link to our blog for something witty and amazing that I had written?

I searched the Interwebs and no one else was chatting about it so I chalked it up to a glitch. Later that afternoon there was finally some chatter and Friendfeed made a statement about it.

What does it mean?

If you’re already using Feedburner, you’re familiar with how it tracks the number of your RSS subscribers.  In the past, Feedburner counted a subscriber as someone who subscribed to your blog through iTunes, Google Feedcatcher (like Google Reader), Windows RSS, Firefox Bookmarks, RSS to email (Outlook, Thunderbird), etc.  Now they’ve added FriendFeed.

What is FriendFeed? Friendfeed is a social networking aggregator that shows you in real time all entries, tweets, status updates and more of the people you choose to ’subscribe to’. It is a super handy way to stay up to date on all updates from the people you want to hear the most from on all the social networks they participate in. You can even create separate feeds for professional, personal, favorites and home feed. It’s handy but I have to admit I don’t use it that often.

What does it do to my blog subscribers? Well with most people I have talked to it blows your numbers through the roof. Your subscriber chart now looks like Pac Man or Ms. Pac Man. With FriendFeed being the largest slice of the pie.

So is this good?

This is good if:

• You personally and your company blog are one – People subscribe to people on Friendfeed. Real live people. You subscribe to everything Amanda puts on the internet, everything Matt puts on Facebook, everytime Kyle updates his Twitter status etc. If your blog is personal to you then this could be good for you.
• Big numbers make your life easier – Your form of validation is bigger numbers to show the guys in the corner office.  So tripling your blog subscribers without tripling engagement is A-OK with you!
• There is an opportunity for growth – When your content is on Friendfeed someone who is subscribed to you can ‘Like” your post and then the post will show up in that person’s stream so anyone who is subscribed to them will now see your post.

I know FriendFeed can drive some good traffic to the blog, but returning a subscriber count for the blog does not seem quite right. FriendFeed is an aggregator, so my subscribers are really subscribing to me, not my blog. – Rob Diana

So is this bad?

It could be bad, or it could be inaccurate, or it could be senseless padding or you could just need to find a new tool other than Feedburner…

Some issues I have:

• You write for a company blog with multiple authors – Like Rob Diana’s quote above says, people subscribe to YOU. You could be one of multiple contributors to a blog. I personally have over 200 people subscribed to my Friendfeed. Of this two hundred people… sure, a few of them read our blog.  But some are my Facebook friends who want to see photos and status updates, some are Twitter followers, some are LinkedIn connections. The point is they subscribed to me, not our company blog. If they wanted to subscribe to our company blog, they probably would have by now.
• Not a captive audience – When someone sees our blog in Google reader they see the whole blog entry and pictures. When they see a blog entry in FriendFeed they only see the title.  So yes, the feed was pulled, but did any of those people actually click to open the blog and read it? We don’t know.
• It could get worse – Where do we go from here? Do we start counting aggregators as subscribers?  Are all Twitter followers and Facebook friends next to be counted? Louis Grey has more concerns about this.

So now what?

To give the age old answer – It depends. It depends on your audience, your personal branding, your company branding and many other factors. Do you need to pay more attention to Friendfeed and get more subscribers? Maybe. Do you need to rethink how you measure your blog subscribers? Maybe. It is up to you.

Audience versus Subscribers

photo credit: pfctdayelise

This whole thing has sparked an interesting conversation on the blogoshere. Is ’subscriber’ a washed up term? Have we moved passed that? Perhaps we should be measuring our Audience instead.

If so, then the Feedburner/Friendfeed combo is perfect. Maybe we should be measuring each person our messages touches even if it is just a brief encounter. Before, subscribers were easy to measure – it was the amount of people that actively chose to subscribe to your blog. Now with Twitter, Facebook, Social aggregators (like Feedburner) things get a bit more complicated.  People are not stopping the use of RSS but they do seem to be adopting other methods to view the content that is important to them.

I am curious to see what you think of the change.  Has it helped you? Frustrated you? Does it not even matter? I know what it has done to my little world. What has it done to yours?

How you market your video is a unique representing of the type of video you choose to create. For example, there’s not much point in Christopher Penn marketing his welcome to my website video. Certain kinds of videos are meant to be shared and spread, others are intended to be more utilitarian.

So what are some of the types of videos you can make, and what’s the appropriate way to market them?

• Success Stories – Success story videos are excellent. They tell about your company in the words of your customer, helping prospects relate and building a trust relationship that is hard to tell in words alone. But are they going to get 1,000,000 hits in YouTube? Probably not. Put a success story video on your website, absolutely, and get the word out to people who will care about it. Put it in your company newsletter or highlight it on your blog. Make links to it prominent so that your website visitors will get to it. Maybe even burn a DVD to send to prospects who aren’t as web-savvy… it’s worth it!
• President’s Message – This kind of message should be prominently featured on your website, easy to find and concise. Sure, you can put it on YouTube, but without being on your site and being interested in your story, who is likely to care? Again, this kind of video is best suited to permission-based communications with people who are already interested in you.
• Viral Videos – What makes a viral video a hit is a combination of art, science, and good old-fashioned luck (okay, maybe timing has more to do with it). Unlike videos that are intended to go out to customers who are pre-qualified to enjoy your message, the very intent of a viral video means it has broad appeal. Instead of trying to influence the opinions of a chosen few, a viral video is meant to amuse the masses. NOW you can post it on YouTube, tell all your friends, tweet it, StumbleIt, Digg it… Start with the network of people who care about what you say, and then try to get that network to share it with their network, and soon you’ll truly have a viral hit. If your viral video doesn’t resonate well enough with people to get shared — well, take a coffee break, shrug, and get back to the drawing board.

As is the nature of online media, the way you get the word out about your video is a unique outcropping of what you have to say. Measuring success by hundreds of thousands of views doesn’t make sense for a product demonstration. More important is engagement. Whether people care.

We’ll revisit this topic soon and discuss some of the hard stuff — how you actually measure engagement and interest, and how you use that to modify your strategy. In the meantime, don’t miss Show Don’t Tell, Using Video to Tell Your Story!

photo credit: vancouverfilmschool

As I discussed last week, web video doesn’t require the same kind of equipment you need to shoot an amazing indie short. However, that doesn’t mean you get to skimp on the creativity!

The blessing and curse of web video is that you have only 2-5 minutes to say what you’ve got to say. You don’t need to try and make a two hour long story make sense, like a filmmaker does, but instead you have to compete with a dazzling world of distraction — email, Twitter, other websites, etc. Your video needs to come on strong and stay strong.

So how do you do this? There are many tried and true forms, and when it comes to business-to-business, you have the added advantage that viewers are not as entertainment hungry as the typical YouTube crowd. You can focus on more informative resources such as a message from the President, a testimonial from a customer, or just a description of what you do in a slightly more entertaining way. One particularly nice touch I like is Christopher Penn’s opening to FinancialAidPodcast.com.

Of course, an idea does not a video make. You need to turn the idea into words and images, and this is where even the simplest web video requires a touch of art. Turning on the camera and letting it run just isn’t going to work. You need to plan out what the video will be in as much detail as possible before you even think about trying to record it.

This is the process in filmmaking called pre-production, and as many a seasoned videographer will tell you, the more time you spend in this process the easier the recording will go, and the finer the finished product will be.

So what do you need in pre-production? These specifics will get you going:

• A script – Fancy software that uses the Hollywood screenplay standard is probably not needed. Instead, a simple two column format works. I tend to write it like play dialogue — SOANDSO says something, then paragraphs describe the visuals. A storyboard consisting of doodles of the frames that accompany the audio can help.
• The actors – Who’s going to be in the video? Are they willing to do it? Do they need to memorize their lines? What outfits does your script call for?
• A place to shoot – It all depends on your script, and there are trade-offs no matter where you choose to shoot. Interiors can be quieter, but are hard to light adequately. Shooting outside can get a very crisp shot with little effort, but you’ll be forced to deal with wind and possibly traffic noise fuzzing with your audio.
• Props – Flying monkeys? Check.
• A date and time – Once you’ve figure out what you want to shoot, who will be in it, and where you’ll do it, now you just need to get all of those elements into the same place at the same time. It’s not as easy as it sounds!

Even with the best of planning, a video shoot can be tedious and frustrating (Why DOES that plane keep flying by?!?!), but the more effort you put into the front-end, the smoother the process will go in the end. In reality, a good professional video team is more than just a bunch of guys who can wield a camera — it’s an organized, artistic company that can manage the logistics of a complex project, show endless patience as they do and re-do their work, master all of this technical gobbledeegook and use all this technology to convey a cohesive marketing message.

Next week we’ll talk a little about how to get your video out there once it’s done. Until then, have fun! And don’t miss my upcoming webinar on using web video to tell your story.

Outbound marketing is the term for interruption based marketing like television commercials, radio ads, newspaper articles, telemarketing etc. All of these marketing methods are built to interrupt people while they are trying to do something else, like watch their favorite TV program. Humans, as clever as we are, have found different ways to ignore these outbound marketing efforts:

• TV commercials – Meet the DVR Fast forward please
• Radio Ads – Satellite radio, Internet radio, portable music devices like iPods Turn it up!
• Newspaper ads – Our eyes are trained to look at the content not the side bars or full page ads Who still reads the paper?
• Telemarketing – Caller ID Unknown caller – no thank you
• Direct Mail – aka Junk Mail is promptly thrown away. Mine doesn’t even make it in our house Recycle bin right next to mailbox

Why are you wasting your marketing dollars on suffering marketing mediums?

Because it is safe and what we have always done. STOP. The power has shifted back to the customer you can either hop on now or be left behind. Your customers are researching products and services before they contact you. They know about your company, your competitor, maybe even your employees (a website’s About Us page is usually the second most viewed page on a website). They want a conversation, not to have someone shouting at them through traditional marketing channels.

Be found when your customers are looking!

Inbound Marketing efforts focus on you being found when your potential clients or customers are looking for answers or more information. There are lots of places to reach people but here are the biggest examples of Inbound Marketing tools:

• Blogging – Blogs are a great way to constantly be adding targeted new information to your website. You can easily add a blog to your current website or have it separate from your site. Blogs can tackle difficult questions, discuss industry news and so much more. Blogs are also very share-able and many people bookmark good blogs to refer black to.
• SEO and SEM – Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing and Organic Search are all positioning your website to be found for relevant searches. We live in Google’s world. People online search for everything under the sun. By doing a little research, some measurement and producing good content targeted correctly you can make sure your site is found when that search query is entered.
• Social Media – The Internet has gone social. People all over the world are participating in Social Networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and more. While on the sites they are discussing problems, solutions, products, services and more. If you are not participating and being able to contribute, you are missing out on an opportunity. There are thousands of online social networks. It is your job to find the communities that matter to your business and participate in them accordingly.
• Online Videos – Why tell people in words what you can show them in video? How to Videos, viral videos, and video blogs are very popular and a great way to reach out to consumers. Video production no longer takes a huge studio and camera crew. If you have a little bit of time, talent, and the will to do it, you too can produce good video content! Once your videos are online they are easy to share, comment on and ask for more information

Stay a part of the conversation after the purchase

One of my favorite aspects of Inbound Marketing is that you can also be a part of the conversation with your customers after the point of purchase. Lots of companies are using Social Media, Blogs etc. to tackle Customer Service requests, promote their brand, build trust and more. For this purpose I also like to add email marketing to the Inbound Marketing mix:

• Email Marketing – A well executed email marketing campaign can be one of the best ways to build trust and stay top of mind with your customers. A content rich, well targeted email can be sent to your customers’ Inbox and many people save them for future reference and share them with friends that they think will find them useful.

Let’s chat some more

I hope this was a good review on what Inbound Marketing is. I will tackle a little more in depth each of the topics I went over quickly here in the next few weeks. If you have any specific questions or feedback on a topic you would like to see discussed please comment below!

The nice thing about web video compared to, say, recording for home television viewing, is that you’re working on much smaller screen. This is great because you don’t need to invest in zany amounts of equipment in order to get started (as cool as that Canon XH A1 is!). People aren’t viewing a video on the web in order to get blown away by your stellar cinematography. They’re looking to be amused, learn something, or get more engaged in your site. And so the technical scrutiny is much lower than on a Hollywood movie set.

On the other hand, on the web you are in an insanely competitive environment for the viewer’s attention. Unlike the viewer trapped in the theater, or even the television viewer (who has to take the initiative to pick up the remote if they’re bored), on the web your audience is actively multitasking and your video has mere seconds to capture their attention.   So while you don’t need a million-dollar sound stage to produce a video for the web, you need truly interesting ideas.

Now, that idea doesn’t have to be smashing a Ford Focus into bits but it should be something tangible and valuable. It can be as simple as having the president of your company talk about what you do, or getting a customer to talk about their experience with your company.

Getting more adventurous, can you reveal a tip or trick about what you do in video? Interview an expert in your field? Provide web-based training? Or maybe just have a staff member get attacked by flying monkeys?

The important thing is to get an idea, kick it around with a few people to make sure it’s not completely insane, and then make it happen. Unlike TV or movies, which necessitate a massive output of resources to get a finished product, web video can be produced with style for reasonable amounts of money and time.

There are three key things you need to produce decent looking video:

• A camera – Obviously.  You need something to capture the actual video, and today the possibilities are endless and affordable.  Many web videographers stop their search here, but I urge you to buy more gear!   I said you didn’t need a Hollywood sound stage, but I didn’t say that grainy videos with audio that sounds like it was recorded at the bottom of the well was good, either…
• An external microphone – Please, please, please do not record video with the built-it microphone on your camera.  It will never sound that good.  It’s hard to find budget camcorders with an external mic-in jack anymore (why oh why is good audio so neglected in budget videography?), but you can also look into recording audio separately with a device like the Zoom H2.
• Lights – Ever notice how in lots of web videos the participants look like they’ve been stricken with vampirism?  That’s because interior lighting is terrible for video (if you really want to understand this, here’s a good article on lighting for video).  Outside shots can be acceptable without extra lights, but if you’re shooting in your office, do your videos the kindness of investing in a decent set of daylight-balanced lights.

Got your gear?  Great!  Now your video’s just going to fall together in your lap, right? … Well, not quite.  Next week, I’ll talk more about taking an idea and making it a reality.  Following that, we’ll talk about how to get your video out there once it’s complete.  And if you just want to talk to someone about your great idea, drop us an email.