The Scholes Marketing Blog

Convert Your Trade Show Leads into Measurable Marketing ROI - Part One

Lisa O'Brien — Wed, 15 May 2013 14:56:00 GMT

So you have dug deep into your marketing budget and picked THE industry trade show or event that you just KNOW your company needs to be a part of…the one with your competition and the one that your key customer base attends every year. So now what?

There are dozens, maybe even hundreds of sponsoring companies just like yours, vying for the attention of those precious attendees, who are ready to buy or at least willing to learn more about you and what you do to bring back to their organization. How do you make sure you stand out from the pack?

Marketing for a trade show is a very strategic process that must begin months in advance to make sure you get the most bang for your buck.

From planning your pre-event strategy - to your booth messaging - to your post-show follow-up, you must make sure your messaging relates to your overall business goals.

First up: Pre-event Promotion: (stay tuned for our related posts on onsite promotion, booth messaging and post-event marketing.)

Know the Attendees - Know the Event: Who are the folks that are attending this trade show or event and how can you capture their attention BEFORE the event even begins? Most events should have demographics from previous years' attendees so make sure you do your homework on how your pre-event messaging should be worded...

Does the show draw a high-level crowd? Are they the right target? Is it a mix of executives with purchasing power or somewhat unqualified folks?
In a large trade show, there are also many folks that are ‘tchotchke-grabbers’ and may only be interested in what everyone is giving away.

Leverage email, create custom landing pages and TRACK your results:

Does your sponsorship include pre-event promotion opportunities? Make sure you take advantage of them, that your messaging is personal and offers an incentive. Invite folks to a product demo or provide them with a special gift for visiting your booth. Always include your booth number, website, CTA (linking to an unique landing page - more on this later), a point of contact and a chance to book an appointment ahead of the show!
If your sponsorship does not include a pre-show list of attendees, promote the event to your current house list of customer and prospects. Most shows will offer some type of promotion discount for sponsors to promote the event to their own lists.
Have your sales managers send out personalized invites to their customer base and explain why the event will touch upon their challenges and pain points. Have your sales team use the show as an opportunity to have face-to-face time with your best clients.
Create a call-to-action for EVERY promotion that is sent out, linked to a custom landing page that is unique to the event. This will allow you to track behavior of interested leads, gather information from them, ask pre-event questions and to nurture them properly. You can track conversion rates on the landing page and continually add items to gather additional interest.

Get more involved with the event itself (think outside the booth):

Get your best potential clients away from the trade show floor for focused meetings if possible: Check to see if the show offers venues for you to privately meet with your customers or potential clients. Of course, this is something that you will need to reserve (and it may incur additional cost) ahead of time, as these types of spaces are most always in very high demand. Use these meetings for a special product demonstration reserved only for your best customer or potential clients. Book these times as exclusive opportunities before the show kicks-off. If show management doesn't offer private suites to rent, go rogue and find a nearby hotel and rent a space there.
Become part of the agenda: See if one of your top executives (and dynamic speaker) can be part of the program agenda. There may be an opportunity to speak on a panel or lead a lunchtime discussion. This will provide you with focused exposure, more brand recognition and also position your speaker as a thought leader in the industry. You will also have something unique to promote prior to show kick-off!

Promote, Promote, Promote:

Offer the right incentive - launch a new product! You, of course, will have the nicely designed collateral available at your booth with the who, what and where of your company (and CTA). But a trade show is a great opportunity to launch a new product or solution and to create buzz BEFORE the event. Make sure you plan in advance to have an impressive product demo at your booth and that you offer special promotions and giveaways to the attendees that offers sign up prior to show time.
Social media outreach: Social media gives you the opportunity to further complement the promotions you are also doing on your website, blog, press releases, etc. Make sure you and your team promote the show and what you will be showcasing on all social media channels (Twitter, LinkedIN, Facebook, Google+). Be responsive to folks that post questions so they know you are engaged with them.
Blog about it: Write about the show theme and how it relates to your product/services. Announce your product launch in a blog post. If you have a speaker on the program, have them write the blog directly focusing on their presentation. Make it easy for your readers to share the blog with their networks by including social buttons (with counts) on all of your blog posts.

In a nutshell, make sure you take advantage of every opportunity to promote your presence at the show in the months leading up to showtime.

Strategize and make it easy for your sales and PR teams (create email messaging, show landing pages, etc.) to reach out to their customer base. By planning ahead, you will have time to respond quickly as you learn and test results. Based on your performance, you will confidently know what is working and what is not and will have time to adjust your pre-event promotions accordingly.

Next Up – Part-Two: How to make your booth and your onsite messaging stand out amongst the herd.

Lead Scoring – It’s about Quality, not Quantity

Jeff Scholes — Thu, 02 May 2013 16:01:00 GMT

Lead scoring (aka lead measuring, lead ranking) has come quite a long way.

Marketing automation packages that integrate with CRM systems, like Salesforce, have sort of led the charge in this regard. Often, lead scoring can conger up icky feelings like “oh boy, do we really want to go there?” That’s due in large part to marketing and sales teams overthinking the process, the scoring criteria, and making it too complicated for major primetime. But the climate has changed, as has lead scoring adoption, and it’s largely to do with marketing automation packages evolving and making it way easier to deploy, adapt and adjust.

A well thought-out lead scoring initiative, if done right and with the right tools, can increase marketing and sales efficiency, effectiveness and ultimately result in increased revenue.

By focusing your sales team on the ‘right leads at the right time’ - the leads that your organization deems the most valuable - your sales reps will spend less time and effort on the ones that have a lower chance of closing.

If you haven’t already, invest in a marketing automation solution that integrates with your existing CRM (customer relationship management) infrastructure.

There are several products available to help you manage lead scoring. Marketo, Eloqua and HubSpot are a few of the well-known ones and each can help you make this important process easier.

Of course, the marketing software you have will ultimately determine what factors you are able to score on, but here are some broad ideas of what to look for when determining which leads should be worked first.

Factors to consider when formulating lead scoring:

Depending on your business, lead qualities, lead behaviors and lead activities can vary, but here are some ideas to help you determine the right software to go with and scoring system criteria. You should also think about which lead characteristics should result in a negative score.

Contact and Company CRM Data and Properties:

Roles: who are the prospects that have the purchasing authority? Which job role or function ultimately decides if they are going to spend money on your product or service?
Ideal organization: what is your target company annual revenue? Are they in your target industry and how far along the sales pipeline are they?
Budget: are the companies with devoted budgets who can purchase your goods/services marked appropriately?
Geography: are you only selling to certain geographic areas? Lead scoring will assign a negative score to folks that reside outside your preferred geographic area (you can score on zip code, region, state).

Website Form Downloads and Requests:

Has the lead requested a formal product demonstration? These folks should likely receive a higher score than say a lead who has only downloaded one white paper.
Have they registered and attended a recent webinar or a series a webinars? This shows they are coming back to you for the information, which could warrant a higher point value.
How often have they requested/downloaded something from you? Five or more in the last month, then make sure their lead score reflects that.

Who is Seeking You Out at Industry Events and Tradeshows?

Has a person visited your booth at a recent tradeshow? Better yet, did they request a one-on-one meeting or product demo at the show or after? Well, then give them points.

Which and How Many Pages on Your Site have Your Leads Visited?

Has the lead visited several key pages in the last month or quarter? Have they visited five pages or 25? A higher score value can be placed on leads that have visited a high number of pages or specific pages. A demo page visit might be worth more to you than an “about us” visit.

Email Interaction: How engaged are your leads?

Who has recently opted-in to receive email communications or product announcements from you?
How many times have they opened an email or clicked a particular link? Over 10? This level of interest could warrant more points. Are they in a digital nurture campaign but never click or open your emails? You may want to rank them lower.

Where did the lead actually come from? Was it your blog, organic search, paid advertising, social media?

A lead from a direct search may show more interest in your company, as that person is actively seeking information now. Conversely, a lead from a paid advertisement may be more top of the funnel and just looking for some preliminary information.

Lead scoring can help your team focus on the the most qualified and sales-ready leads now. And most sales folks we work with tell us it’s about quality, not quantity.

Lead scoring will also result in stronger sales and marketing alignment.

Sales looks to marketing to make sure they are getting the right kinds of leads and not focusing on the junk. Your sales team will be even more successful when they are equipped with in-depth knowledge of who they are calling and who they should be focusing their time on.

And your company will be awarded with more sales and increased revenue.

Lead Nurturing and Marketing Automation - All Paths Lead to Revenue

Lisa O'Brien — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 15:50:00 GMT

So all marketers know about it and that we need to do it...

Lead nurturing (aka Marketing Automation, Digital Lead Nurturing, etc.) is, regardless of the term used to label it, a marketing process for building relationships with potential or existing customers. It can be used for engaging leads in your CRM system that aren’t necessarily looking to buy a service or product right now (top of the funnel), for leads that are “warmer” (have expressed interest in some way and are qualified prospects - middle of the funnel), or to reach out to existing customers that might not know about additional products and services that could be beneficial to them.

In one sense, lead nurturing can help your company stay top of mind with potential customers so that they will come to you when they are ready to try or buy. Put another way, lead nurturing helps marketing and sales stay in front prospective customers, move leads at various stages along the sales pipeline, ultimately leading to revenue.

So what are some things to keep in mind in making your lead nurturing campaigns effective, engaging and ultimately revenue producing?

Invest in a marketing automation solution that integrates with your existing marketing infrastructure: There are several products available to manage your marketing automation. Marketo, Eloqua and HubSpot are a few biggies. If you haven’t already, invest in a marketing automation solution that’s integrated with your website and CRM system.

Regardless of the program used, it should allow you to easily set up your lead nurturing workflows, set them up based on a variety of triggers such as assests they’ve downloaded (white papers), or by behavior (what pages have they visited on your website), or by role or title, etc. You should be able to analyze the overall performance of each of your lead nurturing programs and adapt/adjust your programs accordingly.
Know your customer: Make sure each nurturing email message is targeted and based on things like a job role, function, an action taken (did they download a white paper or article, attend a webinar, visit your booth at a trade show?). This will allow for improved performance because you’re providing relevant content they care about.
Make sure your subject lines are engaging: Be sure to test different subject lines for each follow-up email. Be creative and try different subject lines. Your marketing automation tool should allow for variable testing and A/B testing to see what works better.
Always include a call to action: Include a product demo form, a complimentary white paper, invitation to a webinar, an easy way to contact you and request a call back, etc. Whatever action you decide to deliver through email should be tied to or related to previous actions they’ve taken.
Test the timing and offers of each follow-up message: Pay attention to the timing between each communication. Should it be two week, three week intervals or monthly? You want to be mindful that you are not over-burdening (and thus annoying) your prospects and customers with too much content and communications. As a general rule, you should send content when it is rich and useful to who you’re sending it to. Not when you “think” it might be useful.
Make sure there is REAL CONTENT in each message so that you are not just hitting your targets over the head with a sales pitch. If you provide related content of interest (whitepapers, webinars, article, featured research, blog articles) in your messaging, your leads will continue to be engaged.
Don’t just rely on email offers alone: Include a variety of ways for folks to connect with you. For example, you should include social media options to engage and share with you on LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. Whichever social media accounts work best for your particular business.
TRACK, TRACK, TRACK: Analyze your results, make adjustments based on your conversion rates and emphasize what is working in follow-up campaigns. Conduct an analysis of the offers, promotions, white paper downloads to determine what content is performing the best. Take a close look at look at clicks, conversion rates and adjust accordingly. If integrated with your CRM system, you should be able to report on where these activities and actions fall in your company’s sales and opportunity pipeline.

Lead nurturing is not just a ‘set it and forget it’ initiative.

Marketers must be diligent in continually tracking results and making appropriate adjustments to messaging and content. The beauty of lead nurturing is that you can easily pivot as you learn and test results. Based on your performance, you will confidently know whether changes should be made to messaging, timing, format and content, thus turning your prospects at various stages of the sales pipeline into happy customers, and generating revenue along the way!

Optimize Your Email Marketing Templates and Designs

Jillian Stira — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 11:58:00 GMT

There's no doubt that email marketing is an effective and vital asset to your overall marketing strategy. While email accounts are relatively inexpensive, it doesn’t always pay to be cheap with an email template design that is subpar. One goal of your email template design should be to have a clean, eye-catching design or treatment that amplifies the importance of your offering and also helps cut through inbox clutter. An email design should clearly and obviously illustrate the value of the offer or product, with a clear call to action that maximizes email conversion rates. Put simply, give your reader a good reason to click and visit your website.

Simple and Effective Email Template Design Tips

Use an uncomplicated template or design your own. Choosing a layout that's too flashy or too busy isn’t necessarily going to help better convey your main message. It can distract your reader. Be sure to use an email design that's compatible with most service providers such as Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo, etc.
TIP: The width of your email template should be about 600px – anything wider will cause your reader to need to scroll left and right to view the entire email (especially on a mobile device).
Avoid writing long, wordy emails. Most people won’t take the time to read them. Using short, summarized bits of information will get your point across much more effectively. Use links like “Read More” or "Learn More" to direct your reader to the full story on your website landing page. And do not put all of your text in an image which might load slowly or, even worse, won't load at all.
Maintaining a balance between content and images is important. Don’t over complicate your email. Like I mentioned in email marketing campaign lessons, there is no de facto guideline, but I like to set a limit of 3-4 images per email. That includes header and footer images. Keep in mind that most images won’t typically be visible to all readers when they first receive the email, requiring the user to click "download images" or "allow images." With that in mind, use descriptive text to name your images so that if an image doesn't load, at least they'll see what the image is about. So do this: "fabulous-email-templates" and not this: ".image9407234." Bottom line – focus on your content, images should be an enhancer.
Always include a call to action. The goal of email marketing is to bring your reader to a specific website landing page and get them to do something. Whether it's an icon or button that reads "find out more" or hyperlinked text, keep it up high in your email so that your readers don’t need to scroll down too far to see it.
TIP: If you use an image as a call to action, be sure to include the descriptive image text in case your image doesn't load!
A final tip is to create a text version of your email. You may have created and designed the most amazing HTML email template but there are people who choose to not recieve HTML email and instead set their email to text only. It's pretty easy to do and most 3rd party email apps require them anyway. Do that and you'll feel better knowing your email is set for maximum distribution!

Need help designing your email template?

Check out some of our email template designs samples >

Need to Extend Your Marketing Performance and Analytics Capabilities? APIs can help!

Jeff Scholes — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 13:06:00 GMT

A number of our clients find themselves in the common situation of promoting marketing activities via disparate marketing tools: Marketing automation and analytics (HubSpot, Marketo, Eloqua, etc.), email campaign software (Constant Contact, MailChimp, Vertical Response, etc.), webinar management (GoToWebinar, Webex), website analytics (Google Analytics), and on. These are common tools that serve very specific purposes, and for the most part they work great at what they are intended to do. However, you may find that you are spending too much time getting data together in an organized way via these channels and translating/consolidating data to your CRM system for reporting and sales. Often the result is constantly having to manage duplicate records and systems, working to combine and roll up activities between records that you hope are probably related to the same lead, and needing to sort out that information for your sales team, rather than focusing more time on your great marketing campaigns and lead generation activities. There really is a better way.

Want more actionable data and fewer dupes? The first place to start for streamlined marketing automation is your primary CRM. What plugins are available? Are there any 3^rd party offerings that map exactly to the services you need? For example, SalesForce already has an AppExchange connection for Vertical Response. But what about MailChimp? Yep, there’s a MailChimp app for that as well. This is also the case for a Constant Contact account. So bear in mind that if you haven’t made these commitments yet, whether there is a plug and play option may (and probably should) affect your marketplace choices. Of course, HubSpot integrates quite well with SalesForce and some of the email apps already mentioned. If you’re using a webinar tool like GoToWebinar, you can sometimes have your work cut out for you, but you can easily enlist some professional programming assistance. GoToWebinar has an API available, which simply means that in order to leverage the GTW registration in a way that integrates with your SalesForce and marketing analytics/campaign management workflow, you might need a programming platform (.NET/PHP) and a programmer with the skills to assist. But there are always new, helpful apps that automate this multi-system integration where you don’t necessarily need heavy programming resources, like this new app in the HubSpot app marketplace that integrates GTW with HubSpot and Salesforce.

Me and the team here do lots of specialty integrations like the ones I’ve mentioned and can help you in this regard. So if you’ve got any questions, please just contact us.

Adding Google+ to Your Social Media Marketing Plan

Jillian Stira — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 18:16:00 GMT

Back in June 2011, Google officially joined the social networking world and launched Google+, yet another social media platform for businesses to get involved in. Until a few months ago, we were pretty much letting it play out some before going full-bore with recommending that our B2B customers dive into it. Social media strategies and successful execution and management of it already pose some internal bandwidth issues and perceived value to B2B companies. Throwing another account into the mix wasn't something we were keen on. Especially with the uncertainty around the lead generation/revenue value it would bring versus the other big ones like Twitter, LinkedIn and so forth.

Not until the November release of Google+ pages for business, products, brands and organizations did Google+ make a relevant splash in the social media world from a business use case perspective. And still, many find themselves asking "what is Google+ exactly and should we jump in?"

What we do know for certain is that it does make your business more visible in search results and online. And according to this Social Media Examiner survey, only 40% of marketers are using it today but that's expected to change. This article does a good job of outlining why things will change and how to optimize particular sections of a Google+ business page with some illustrative examples. Google+ will inevitably be a key platform for marketers to add to their social media plans. That said, here are a few tips to consider when setting up your Google+ business page:

Google+ Business Page To-Do List:

Complete setup. Fill in as much detailed information as possible so that people in your group and circles know exactly what you are all about. Think of it as making a mini version of your website. You never know, the next person to view your Google+ page could be a potential lead/customer – give them all of the information they should know!
Link away. Make use of the recommended link section. Add links to blog articles, landing pages, or any area of your website where you want to bring in more traffic, leads and potential customers.
Seeing is believing. Post photos and post lots of them since people are increasingly being drawn by visuals online. Customize your profile picture, photo strip, and add videos! Great visuals could be the one factor that makes you stand out against your competition. This platform is built for sharing. Posting great and interesting images will spark their interest and sharing.
Spread the word. Once your page is completely set up, click the “spread the word” button in the right hand column to share your fabulous new Google+ page with your circles. It’s time you catch people’s attention and engage in conversations. Comment freely and give a "+" to content you like or enjoy to establish your thought leadership.

Set it up, use it, and embrace it! Your Google+ page and status updates will appear in Google searches, making not only the content of your profile searchable, but each and every post. Using smart keyword phrases in your activities will undoubtedly help you come up even more in search results.

Not sure how to get started or need someone to help? Contact us and we’ll get you and your social media accounts on the right track!

Add Scholes Marketing to Your Google+ Circle!

Four Key Ways to Create a Closed-Loop Marketing Analytics System

Jeff Scholes — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 16:46:00 GMT

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you may have noticed that there is a huge amount of “free advice” out there on how to best take advantage of various online tools in order to achieve your marketing analytics goals. Because many people have been born and bred with a traditional marketing model, this advice takes advantage of the huge amount of fear, uncertainty and doubt in order to “plug” the latest-greatest solution.

It’s actually just not that complicated. What we find “works” in today’s landscape, as dynamic as it seems, is to implement an approach that takes advantage of permission-based marketing outreach. We have had great success to report with our clients using some key tactics that utilize a powerful combination of tools: HubSpot, Salesforce CRM and integrated email marketing campaign applications with marketing automation.

HubSpot Inbound Marketing Software

The HubSpot methodology is designed around the idea of getting found through "inbound" practices, including on-page and off-page search engine optimization (SEO), and other methods. For example, HubSpot utilizes your established keywords to make recommendations on blog topics and to suggest certain places to carefully plop them throughout your site, blog, etc. HubSpot CMS pages (if you are using their content management systems) are constructed using proper heading tags – these headings used within your pages and blog articles give your keywords further “weight.” Of course, it is up to you what you choose, but you know your business best. With HubSpot’s help, you pick the “right” keywords for page titles and content headings based on a variety of factors. Hubspot CMS is preloaded with the ability to use these SEO elements to your advantage and can give Google just what it needs to know for your pages to rate well. The short lesson here, though, is that you need to be found via search and HubSpot is great for that! In addition to the basic infrastructure capabilities of HubSpot, you’ll find that it is bundled with a suite of powerful tools like: Page Grader, Link Grader, Key Word Analyzer and Competitor Tracker. It’s a gold mine of capability that will give you much more control over your inbound efforts.

Combine HubSpot and Salesforce CRM in order to attract, capture, convert and analyze

The idea is to nudge traffic and visitors along the spectrum to customer status. Conversions are not magic and in a closed-loop marketing system they happen by permission. This permission-based marketing uses the “give to get” principle: we introduce something of value to our prospective customer via calls-to-action as “the give,” and they, in turn, permit us to use that information for our additional marketing activities, that’s our “get.” Quite often, a case study paper/download, video demo, etc. works very well as the offer. The content obviously needs to be something of keen interest to your prospects, but also for your own success the process is key. For example, with the combination of HubSpot and Salesforce, we nearly eliminate the chance of “duping” a lead record. When prospects revisit, the subsequent visits are simply added to the history record rather than creating a dupe and unnecessary work for you (and angry sales folk). Not only does that intelligence save you the work of de-duping, but it gives you a better sense of your campaign performance when lead history and tracking can be taken into account.

Outbound email tools can and should be employed to fit your needs

Many email apps are available in this very active marketplace. Investigate tools like: MailChimp, Vertical Response, iContact, HubSpot email tools, or countless others which will allow for lead targeting, testing, nurturing. Tools like these, combined with SalesForce CRM and HubSpot can be a powerful combination to keep you tuned in to those repeat lead activities. Choose a solution that will give you click-through rates and campaign performance, both. Also know that combining an email campaign with HubSpot can allow you to create nurturing campaigns – nurturing campaigns are follow-up outbound actions based on previous activity and behavior. (Look for future articles on this topic!) By nurturing, we specifically target prospects at varying stages of the lead lifecycle that have previously responded to other related promotions. It’s the kind of intelligent action that you want to put to work in a closed-loop marketing approach.

HubSpot Analytics

If integrated with SalesForce – with high-level reporting, you can easily gain a solid understanding of campaign performance. What is working, and from what sources you are seeing the best results. HubSpot calls this approach “Actionable Marketing Analytics”: from traffic visitors, to lead acquisition, through converting these opportunities to customers, the analytics tools available from HubSpot are there for you. How did the prospect initially find you? What nurturing steps were successful? What email campaigns outperformed others and what is the ROI? How can we “rate” a given lead? All these questions are addressed through this integrated analytics approach.

The value proposition of these complimentary tools is that, taken together, they offer a smart method to efficiently manage a complete workflow for your organization to achieve your sales and marketing success. Please note that both HubSpot and Salesforce offer packages “right-sized” for your needs, whether a start-up, mid-sized or larger – both in terms of cost and technical scale. As a HubSpot Partner, feel free to contact us if you would like to discuss which ones would work best for you.

Five Free Tools for SEO Success

Jeff Scholes — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 15:30:00 GMT

Before hitting this list, be sure you’ve done your keywords homework. It’s really pretty simple: make a list of the keywords relevant to your product or service. These are the words used to describe what you are offering and the words and phrases prospective customers are putting into search engines to find you. That’s really the long and short of it. What are you selling that you want people to find and which keywords do you stand a chance of placing for organically. Answer that question with your keywords. When answering, bear in mind that there may be many a number of common words or phrases that apply! For example if you are selling USB storage devices, “aka flash drives,” you may also want to include such common words as “data stick,” “thumb drive,” USB key,” and the like. So look for these word clusters.

Now, having said that, it is important to note that you are likely to have competition for your keywords. The less competition, the more unique your keywords are, the more likely you are to rank well if you follow standard SEO practices on your website. So it is a bit of a trade-off. The more popular and competitive your keywords are, the more difficult it will be to rank well. But here are some important tools that will help:

1) Google Keywords Tool. In the world of SEO, who’s your daddy? Of course, Google. And Google has a keywords tool that is free to use. While this is tied to AdWords, it can serve as a guide for you to build your SEO strategy. Plus, it’s great for generating related keywords that you probably haven’t considered. And for sure, it can inform a paid advert campaign if you decide you want to take it to the next level, eg., beyond just “organic” search term ranking. We talked about the potential “Catch 22” of keyword competition, right? This tool will give you insights. See our example below from this tool where we’ve plugged in “SEO marketing development” for our keywords. We’ve set the option for the matches to be “loose” instead of “closely related,” and we can see that terms like “SEO Marketing Blog” have low competition but also relatively low monthly searches:

Meanwhile, we have our work cut out for us, if we want to compete for keywords like “SEO Services:”

2) If you’ve already established keywords and want to find out how your SEO strategy is working, the free Search Engine Genie tool is a must. Rankings for keywords tells you how you are doing compared to the competition. If you still have work to do, then it is time to pull out the heavy equipment and reassess your techniques. That’s what the next freebie does.

3) Not sure if your site is up to snuff with SEO practices? Again Google comes to the rescue with Webmaster Tools. This essential service reports on site health and will allow you to tame both title tags, H tags and meta descriptions. You already know that you should be using keywords in your URLs, page titles, etc., right? See the example below where redundant title tags are run amok:

As an added bonus, now Webmaster Tools works hand-in-hand with Google Analytics. To get started, you just need a Google login and to paste a small piece of “verification” code into your site. After the tool has had a chance to crawl your site, just use the reports and then find and fix these title tags by plugging in more specific key words for your content and you’ll soon be on your way to SEO success.

4) If you want to find out more details about how to write content and create links that will put your results higher in those coveted search result listings, you can’t do any better by following the free SEO starter guide. Many of the techniques we’ve already mentioned in previous posts such as using keywords in building page titles, headings and links.

The additional tips and tricks provided by this guide are an invaluable resource. Get this guide! Read it, study it, follow it – even print out all 32 wonderful pages if you must.

5) As we’ve enumerated here, there are just a TON of available resources to get you on your way to SEO splendor, but one offer you can’t beat comes from HubSpot, their blog and CRM integration tools will show you how to take your site to the next level, so if you dare to endure a Free Assessment, be sure and check out their free website evaluation offering.

Okay, check out all the great SEO tools listed above. If you have any questions afterward, of course we’d be happy to help you implement an on-page website search engine optimization strategy!

Is your website getting found?

Download our Internet Marketing Essentials Website Optimization eBook >

Email Marketing Campaign Lessons: Back to Basics

Jillian Stira — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 14:51:00 GMT

Email remains one of the best ways to promote your products and services and nurture your prospective customers. All too often I see customers creating emails—or I get them myself—with some basic mistakes that may lead to big performance issues. Here are a handful of important things to keep your eye on when creating your next email campaign.

(1) Create a Bulletproof Email Design

When designing the layout of an email I think of two major things: keep the message simple and on target and regularly test your designs in different email clients. Just because your design and layout comes through as intended in Outlook doesn’t mean it will look okay in gmail or another email client. Whether it is just a simple email with one offer and call to action or a newsletter, here are some tips for a bullet-proof email design:

Maintain a balance between content and images. There is no specific rule or guideline, but I like to set a limit of 3-4 images. An important thing to remember is that images won’t typically be visible to all readers when they get your email. Stay focused on your content and let images be an enhancer. Having an image not show and the description reading something like “.img0593204” will do no good to the reader so always set a descriptive alt text so if the image isn’t viewable, your copy will be.
Which brings me to my next tip – always offer a text version of your email. Not all devices or programs will support an HTML email design. A text version will ensure that more recipients will be able to view your email.
Email should always contain a clear call-to-action. One compelling offer will help drive qualified traffic to your website or particular landing page. One exception might be newsletters but it’s appropriate since newsletters are usually pretty packed anyway and don’t come out as often.

(2) Proofread and Proofread Some More

Broken links and spelling/grammatical errors in an email of any form can be deadly. My suggestion is to proofread and proofread some more. Over editing never hurts.

“Dear <First Name>”…Nothing could be worse than receiving an email that starts with this as a greeting rather than the recipient’s actual name. Make sure that you check your greetings, that the correct values are set and TEST, TEST, TEST!!!

If you have an email list that may be missing some information such as your lead or contact’s first name, create a back-up, secondary greeting such as, “Greetings!” or “To our awesome customers,”. Again, send multiple test emails to double and triple check that your greeting is set up correctly since you’ll want to start out your email engagement on the correct footing!

URLs in your emails are obviously important. Along with content, they are the driving force to send the reader to your website or landing page to take action. That said, test all of your links multiple times. And always be sure to create unique tracking URLs to help determine the effectiveness of your email campaigns!

Typos – not so cool for professional emails where you’re trying to be taken seriously. Avoid typos and spelling errors by taking your time proofreading. Sometimes I just walk away from it for a time and then relook at my content with fresh eyes. Speed reading through your email can almost guarantee errors. Here are some tips to help avoid spelling and grammatical errors:

Do not rely on spellcheck; words like “there” “their” and “they’re” will not be noticed!
Read your email out loud, hearing something that doesn’t sound right will help you catch grammatical errors.
Lastly, when you think you’ve corrected all spelling and grammar errors, take a small break from it and give your mind a rest. Clearing your head will help you catch any remaining errors.

(3) Keep it Focused

When creating the content of your email, stay focused on the main message/offer you are trying to get across and without being too pushy, boring, or narrow-minded. Don’t just email for the sake of emailing. Have a valid purpose and only bug your database assets when you have valuable content to share. Customers often ask “how often should I email people?” My reply is always “when you have great content they will find useful.”

Constantly pushing an obvious sales pitch can get old fast and turn off your readers. Try something different by telling a related story that’s personalized, talk about industry related topics giving your viewpoint, share recent blog articles or announce upcoming events to keep things as interesting as possible.

Simple and easy - keep it focused, interesting and to the point.

(4) Avoid Spam Filters

All email marketers inevitably run into spam-filter issues, making some of your emails lost somewhere in cyberspace. Given varying company spam filter/security settings and multiple platforms, there is no guaranteed way to avoid your email from being junked but there are some helpful tips you can follow to minimize it:

Never use all CAPS in a subject line
Avoid spelling errors in your subject line at all costs
Avoid using words like FREE, Click Here, Apply Now…Often, your email creation tool will provide lists of words to avoid. Pay attention to them
Creating an HTML email that is just one big image with little to no text
Use a spam checker before sending out your email – these are available in most email apps.

Need a Custom Designed Email Template or Email Marketing Plan?

Let Us Help Build Your Next Email or Email Campaign Plan>

Make Your Twitter an SEO Machine

Jillian Stira — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 12:41:00 GMT

Social media for most companies is no longer an option, it’s a necessity. While Google has ended its Realtime Search deal with Twitter, search engines are still using social media sites for ranking purposes. Twitter has pulled ahead of many other social media platforms, becoming a critical source for search engine optimization (SEO). Using Twitter correctly can help boost search engine traffic to your website or blog. Here are 5 tips to help you make your Twitter an SEO machine.

Choose Your Names Wisely

On Twitter you have two different names; your real name and your user name. It is important to choose both of these wisely. They can both be virtually anything you would like them to be.

Real Name:

Your real name does have to be your actual name; it can be whatever you choose, under the stipulation that it falls under 20 characters. Choosing your real name is one of the most important things you will set for your profile. When deciding on your real name, keep in mind that it is what appears in Google’s link to your profile, you’ll want it to be highly searchable, relevant to you or your business, and something people are likely to search.

To edit your real name go to: profile> edit your profile> and change “name.”

User Name:

Another important thing you will set is your user name, which I relate to what would be your twitter domain address. The limit on Twitter user names is 15 characters, so it’s best to make it short and memorable. If your company name is long, consider using abbreviations, keeping the most relevant word whole. For example if your business name is Northeast Gymnastics Center try a user name like @NGCgymnastics.

To edit your user name go to: profile>edit your profile>account>and change “username.”

TIP: When choosing your real name and user name, avoid using underscores and numbers.

Fill Out Your Twitter Bio

After someone has landed on your Twitter page, chances are the first thing they will read is your bio – which will lead them to either follow, or not follow you. Twitter allows you a short 160 characters to use, and you should use them all. Research shows that users with a bio have 8 times more followers than those without! If your bio is not filled out or not descriptive you are losing out on numerous potential followers.

Think of your bio as you would your meta description on your website, it is SEO for Twitter – select and use your keywords wisely. Take time to create a bio that reflects you and your business. 160 characters is not a lot to work with, I know, but try to keep a happy medium between creative content and keywords that best describe you.

Think Before You Tweet

When tweeting for business, keep in mind that you want to stay relevant to your blog or website and stay focused. Sure, have fun with tweets and explore, but remember, some may not care what you had for dinner or “OMG it’s snowing” type tweets. More tweets do not equal more followers, quality over quantity is key.

When optimizing your tweets it is vital that you use relevant keywords and #hashtags to warrant more visibility on search results for the terms important to your business. Before posting, sit down and think of the keywords that you would like to include in your tweet. Like everything else on Twitter, your space is limited and you have a short 140 characters to get your point across.

#hashtags

The # symbol is called a hashtag and is used to mark and make keywords clickable in your tweet. It is a way for Twitter to organize and categorize messages and is a way to reach others that aren’t following you yet. I like to think of a hashtag as an emphasized keyword. Use them and use them wisely.

Think before you tweet. If you have a ton of valuable content by all means tweet often, add keywords, add links, you name it. BUT if you’re tweeting about personal information, vacations, daily routines, etc., that’s all fine and good but it probably won’t help you build a presence for your company, blog, or whatever you are trying to promote.

Link Often and Link to Your Real URLs

After you’ve come up with your amazing tweet, packed full of keywords, and hashtags, it’s time to add your links. Unfortunately, links in your tweets offer no SEO authority, but your keywords should already be doing that job for you. Regardless of links offering no SEO authority, they will in fact drive people to your website, which was your ultimate goal of joining Twitter in the first place, correct?

Once again, Twitter restricts you on the length of your tweet (seeing a pattern here?). In order to get your long link to fit in, a lot of URL shortening tools have popped up all over the web. But links that don’t look like your own can sometimes bring skepticism, which is the last thing you need. Luckily now, if you paste your link into Twitter, it automatically shortens your link for you and looks something like the link below— it’s credible looking and just adds a “…” to the end, rather than something totally random like this “http://bit.ly/o6KsTR.” People trust YOUR link so use it.

Build a Following

Now that you’ve chosen your real name and user name, set up your bio, and learned how to tweet effectively, it’s time to get followers. Tweeting relevant and useful information will certainly begin to rack up followers but you too need to follow people and companies too. Each person that follows you is another person reading your tweets, clicking your links, or even better – retweeting.

One very common mistake people make when following people is they only follow “important” people, wrong! Yes, it is okay to follow them but you must also follow regular users like yourself. Twitter is a two-way street, follow and be followed. Who knows, that “regular” person could possibly turn into a customer one day!

Follow these tips to help transform your Twitter account into an SEO machine. Don’t have the time? Scholes Marketing offers Social Media Marketing Services. Contact us today for help with your social media accounts.

4 Steps to Put You on the Path to Closed-Loop Marketing Bliss

Jeff Scholes — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 13:00:00 GMT

Here's an article I recently wrote as a guest post on the Hubspot Internet Marketing Blog.

Many businesses I come across truly intend to do the right thing as far as optimizing their websites for lead generation. However, even though they do their best to drive more traffic and execute Internet marketing campaigns that will capture and convert more leads, many of them end up in one of two buckets:

Bucket 1: "We have no idea where to start given the crushing amount of available tools, opinions and advice."
Bucket 2: "We have all the bells and whistles (we think, anyway) but we can't seem to tie them all together so they work for us."

Both scenarios are very different, but there's one common, critical component that is almost always missing from both buckets: the up-front planning and thinking needed to create an ideal marketing engine.

When funding or budget approvals are coupled with time and resource pressures, the businesses in Bucket 1 jump right in and start frenetically implementing whatever tools they can get their hands on. These tools are often a blend of CRM apps, email campaign tools, website CMS packages, analytics packages, lead intelligence apps, etc.

Meanwhile, businesses in Bucket 2 are busy buying up all the latest fancy tools as they come along because they can afford to at the time. The tools become immediately disparate because folks using them can't get what they need out of them and frustration ensues between marketing, sales and management.

If you happen to fall into one of these buckets, here's a 4-step planning approach that will put you back on the path to closed-loop marketing bliss and yield the long-term payback your business needs.

Step 1: "WHO'S IN?" - Pick a Team and Assign Roles

Get a representative from each functional area to participate (sales, marketing, web support, IT, executive sponsor). Involving whoever you can in the decision-making process tends to make them care a lot more about the outcome.

Define what success means: establish clear goals, metrics and responsibilities around web stats, campaigns, lead generation & nurturing, sales cycles and pipelines, what to track and report on, etc.

Step 2: "AS IS" - Assess What's Happening Right Now

Internal issues typically include:

Lack of Automation. This mostly stems from disparate systems (such as your website, campaigns, conversion forms, CRM system, lead nurturing practices and analytics) not working in harmony.

Mis-Aligned business processes. Is sales and marketing working in unison?
Un-Standardized processes: Are you agreed on lead workflows, opportunity pipelines, lead follow up procedures?
Dis-Integrated systems: do you have island solutions that don't talk to each other?

Data, not Information: can you gather data intelligence (not just data) so you know what programs to do more or less of?
Un-Informed business decisions: are you able to measure, track and report on the data that's important to all parties in your organization?

Step 3: "TO BE" - Determine What's Possible

Build out your requirements for each stakeholder or business area in the organization (sales, marketing, management, etc.).
Map out all of your current processes so you can start to uncover where some of the breakdowns occur.

Investigate and decide on which tools you want to implement based on need-to-haves vs. have-to-haves, making sure that whatever you do pick is scalable to the needs of your organization.

Step 4: "GO"- Put the Plan in Motion

Map out an implementation and roll-out timeline keeping things to short and focused projects with clear milestones so things don't drag on and get off course.
Training: whatever you do, make sure that whoever is responsible for using a particular tool (CRM, Internet marketing, etc.) gets the appropriate training to maximize its usefulness. Otherwise, things can quickly get stale and people unmotivated.

Test, test, test. It's a lot easier to fix things at the front end versus when things get seemingly too broken to bother fixing.
Finally, stick to your plan! With the right amount of planning, the right tools in place, and the right data intelligence to pull from, you will be positioned to quickly make informed decisions and confidently know when your marketing efforts need to be fine-tuned, repeated or ended. Truly some closed-loop marketing euphoria.

Blogging for your Business is easier than driving a car!

Jeff Scholes — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 12:13:00 GMT

When I speak with small business owners and marketers, one of the persistent obstacles to creating a blog presence often are expressed as two key points:

1) We don't have time to write regularly.

2) We don't have the ability to write regularly.

That seems like a non-starter, right? If you find this is your situation, please think again, as you are missing a key opportunity - since, as mentioned in an earlier business blogging article, YOU are the expert in your field.

Vehicles, Blog sites and Web sites

Think about what you do every day. And bare with the drama but... you likely get into a multi-thousand-point vehicle powered with explosive gasses, you head down the road with other similar vehicles, risking life and limb to get to and from work, the store, home, and road trips. Driving a car is a pretty risky thing with special attention and skills required to avoid disaster. But we all do this regularly, and one reason why is because we HAVE TO. Another reason is we get real advantages from being able to transport ourselves here and there. In short, it is worth it and necessary. The same thing can be said about creating a blog-based presence for your business. In fact, to stretch a metaphor even further - let's think of your standard minivan as somewhat akin to your main web site. So if your www.company.com is a minivan, what of your blog? Ahh, truly it is a turbo-powered sports car!

You need your regular web site to represent your business, your products, who stands behind the business, investors, contact information and the like. You don't always change content on it super-quickly, you just need it, above all, to be accurate, current, reliable, somewhat attractive and optimized for getting found online. Okay, so we might question whether a minivan is attractive, but you get the idea! You need your primary web site to take you places and live up to the expectations and needs of a broad audience. But is that enough? In order to be competitive, and get found online, a blog site can provide you with the more nimble capability to present your products and related knowledge, maneuvering in ways that your minivan web site can't.

Drive traffic and generate leads: blog sites are built with search optimization in mind. You can use your knowledge (and hyperlinks!) to create a high-octane traffic-driving machine. That's one major way your blog is supposed to function! Increasing conversions is key to building your business, and your blog can play a crucial role of increasing interested and qualified traffic.
Engaging and Building Connections: blog sites are created to be interactive. Each article is an opportunity to share information, get feedback and engage in dialog with those customers, prospects and industry experts who care about what you care about.
Test Drive Ideas: A blog site can also be an opportunity to share ideas about new or possible initiatives. This can be invaluable interaction about future directions.

Here's an experiment to try: take the name of your own industry, for example, "draperies." Google it: "Draperies and blogs." Results: what your competition is doing. So it could be that while you've been functioning using the ol' minivan, your competition has been zipping-by using their own speedier on-line vehicles. Yikes!

Again the good news is that the technology part can be quite easy. Low technology barriers to entry for the blog sphere are a fact. And we know your blog site can be well positioned to contribute to your business growth. Given this, it seems that the old excuses will fix themselves!

Why does everyone want to be your SEO BFF?

Jeff Scholes — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 14:50:00 GMT

If you are like me, you are regularly receiving unsolicited email from various quarters, telling you about the latest and greatest SEO solutions on the planet. Just buy the book, or guide, or download the promotional whitepaper and this expert will offer you the latest "Secrets" to search engine success. Google it. At last count I saw millions of results! Well, it's not a very well-kept secret anyway.

One reason for the mysterious "secret" is simple: Google and other search engines do not publish their algorithms, and they are known to change without notification. Another reason, of course, that everyone is clamoring for the top spot, is because that's where the eyeballs track. Plus, if you monitor your placement closely, you'll find that it will change at least somewhat, even from one day to the next.

That said, practicing good SEO is not mysterious. A secret you only share with a BFF? Hardly. Good SEO is a combination of good standards-based web design and using your keywords intelligently, plus (and here's the tough one) getting good quality inbound links, as has been mentioned in "Business Blogging: the Value of Adding a Blog to Your B2B Mix."

Of course, aside from your own blog, your ability to add in-bound links can be limited, but here are some principles you should stick to that will make a difference right off the bat:

Make sure your web site or blog uses CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) rather than "inline styles." In short, inline styles (boo, hiss!) clutter your content pages with information that should be tucked away in a style.css file. Google only cares about your content, not what fonts and colors you are using.

Use key words in your page titles, headings and links to other content in your site. We know that Google "weighs these" as part of the keyword density of your site. Of course this assumes that you have a handle on your keywords, and this certainly takes some thought and analysis. Likewise, you want to avoid so-called keyword stuffing, as Googlebot has been around the block a time or two and can sniff it out and penalize you. It's really a common sense thing, don't try and trick the Google!

Whenever possible, use keywords in your URLs. Sounds easy, right? It may not be if you are using an outdated CMS or blog system that builds links that are full of squiggles and look like www.blahblah.com?p=1234&abdc. If your web site is built and linked manually, then it is easy, just www.blahblah.com/my-important-keywords. The standard preference is to use a "-" hyphen between words rather than an underscore or a space.

You almost never want to only put keyword text as an image. It not only makes it a pain to update them in the future, but it is completely opaque to search engines. Seems like common sense? Maybe, but there are cases when particular graphics fall into the "I absolutely must have them or I will just die" category. In these cases, you should label it with an "alt" tag. The general idea is that alt tags function to describe the image and they can contain your keywords. Keep in mind, though, that alt tags aren't "weighed" in the same way as paragraph headings and other parts of your site.

Again, you don't need an SEO secrets BFF to help you with basic principles. Just use some common sense website optimization considerations, and some analysis and footwork to get a good understanding of your marketing keywords. There are some great self-help tools available at www.seochat.com.

Success with a Sitemap!

Jeff Scholes — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 12:13:00 GMT

Four or five years ago if you said to your web guru, "let's make a site map!" You'd probably end up with a quaint-looking single web page that had a list of links and categories indexing your site. You can still find these from time to time. As it turns out, Apple still has one, go figure. As you may recall, this was yet another alternative to a search engine, to help visitors find your content. Not your grandfather's web code, the "site map" of the 21st century, however, is something a bit different but with the same goal of helping visitors find your content, albeit in a bit more "high tech" fashion.

It's XML not HTML

So we are talking XML sitemaps. These sitemaps are somewhat similar to the old-fashioned kind, they are a list of links and web pages, but in a special structured format, one that Yahoo! and Google know how to scoop right up. It takes search engines time to spider through your regular site menu, and you've just given them an easy shortcut, and they like you for that. Also, these files include time stamps and change frequency, this meta data also tells search bots how frequently they should revisit your site to check for updates. Pardon me while I sample a bit for you:

You are probably thinking, "yikes, does my techie guru have to keep that stuff updated?" The answer is yes, but the good news is really that no one need keep up your entire sitemap manually. There are many tools out there to generate these for you. Really -- don't ever even think about coding it manually!

Creating Sitemaps

If you are using blog software like Typepad or Wordpress, it's typically a built-in feature or an easy plug-in. Many hosted services like Hubspot provide this automatically, but if not, there is software that will generate the XML tags for you. After which, just upload the "sitemap.xml" to the root of your site. That's right, search engines are looking for "sitemap.xml" in the root of your web site. So when you are done, you should see: www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml which will yield a file that looks somewhat like the paste-in above. Google has a fabulous listing of sitemap resources, something I've returned to again and again. If you do have access to a web guru, he or she may want to look at programmatically automating using any of those items list in the "Server side programs" grouping. However, most running a small static site, without the benefit of automatic generation of sitemap.xml, may find any of the "Downloadable Tools" or "Online Generators" useful. In the past, I've had pretty good luck with GsiteCrawler, but don't take my word for it, try others and see what works for you. Also don't forget: if you are managing a static site, you'll want to submit your sitemap to Google via "Web Master Tools," a service that is a MUST for marketing and web professionals alike.

Sitemaps and SEO

It can take many days for a search engine to locate all the pages in a large site. Especially if your site employs Flash or fancy javascript drop-down menus. By creating a sitemap you can do quite a lot to address this challenge. But, having the sitemap in hand is also a chance to analyze your site in terms of Search Engine Optimization and your marketing keywords. So, once your site map has been generated, take a good look at it. Do you see any of your keywords as part of the URL's? Your marketing keywords should be part of your web link schema, and if not you are missing an opportunity. Think of it this way, if you've never seen that web page before, does the URL at least give a hint of what the web page is about? So the quick lesson here is that site maps should be presenting the search engine with your most important marketing keywords, as they will also contribute to your ranking and to the goal of helping visitors find your content.

Pin the Tail on the Social Media Icon

Jeff Scholes — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 12:14:00 GMT

You've seen them. You can see them on this site, those odd little widget-icons that grace the footers and headers of blog articles. These aren't graphical garnishes, but yet another avenue to get your content out of your own little blogosphere and into the social media networks. What do they do? In a nutshell, they create the potential for major traffic.

Go Viral

It's not rocket science. In case you haven't noticed, the web has been evolving lately. It is no longer just a one-way information channel. Social interaction, i.e., social networks on the internet have exploded in popularity in just the last few years. So, if you haven't already, it's really worthwhile to spend some time on some of the big players, especially in the social bookmarking arena: Digg, Reddit, Delicious, Stumbleupon, and others. This is where stories are submitted and ranked by the crowd. Get familiar with them and even participate. You'll notice that there is a real buzz, especially in the comments sections. Okay, so what do the icons have to do with the sites? Simple: the icons simply provide your visitor with a quick and easy way, a shortcut to submit your specific content to the crowd, so the potential is indeed huge. Likewise, Facebook users and Twitter users who are already logged into their accounts will post or Tweet your article out there.

As mentioned previously, inbound links are one of the most effective ways of improving your Google rankings. This is the good SEO stuff you really want! For example, if thousands are clicking links on Twitter or Digg about YOUR "5 Ways to Improve Window Cleaning Widgets" article and linking to YOUR blog, guess who benefits on Google when someone searches for "Improve Window Cleaning?"

Content is Still King, But..

Substance matters, it's true and unavoidable. Providing worthwhile, unique information that is interesting and relevant to your readers is probably the most important reason why someone would use those social icons. However, if you spend some time on bookmarking sites you will notice some elements that are common to many of the "most Dugg" stories.

Image courtesy of KnowTheBook

Business Blogging: the Value of Adding a Blog to Your B2B Mix

Jeff Scholes — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 13:06:00 GMT

Of course it is now a prerequisite to have a professional web presence for your business. More than likely, you spend time and treasure on this critical resource. But what about a blog? Blogging may just seem like a fad for techies (www.Gizmodo.com) or people that seem to have plenty of time on their hands, or people who have plenty to say, like researchers (www.researchbuzz.org). By now, having a companion blog site has become part of a comprehensive marketing program for many. Blogging, and other forms of social media, has become a de facto means of engagement for B2B companies. It's simply essential. Just as you would view in-person networking events as necessary to engaging with customers and partners, your blog site should be this as well. And while it may seem that a blog will cost you additional time (and that treasure), there are resources available to streamline blog publishing. More than this, your blog site can be well-positioned to feed visitors to your existing company web presence.

You are the expert

Want to create a buzz about your latest offerings or upcoming initiative? No one is better positioned to do this than you. Of course you have the latest vetted marketing copy on your official "www" site. You might be surprised to find that you've got plenty more to say. One of my colleagues who regularly writes on his own blog, finds it much easier to write in the more conversational style that is typical of blogging. It's less formal, less restrictive, approachable and believe it or not, it can be fun. Unlike traditional web copy, with blogging you have the option of getting reader feedback via comments. This feedback can give you the additional sense of satisfaction that someone is actually paying attention. More about that in a sec!

SEO Opportunity

Hyperlinking is the basic building block of the web. That's how it was conceived as a "web" of linked documents. Google ranks sites using various metrics, not the least among them are these inbound links. So why make this point? Because blogging is a great way to build a network of contextual links pointing back to your primary web. So that's key: don't forget to hyperlink as you write. If you are writing about your latest product -but not being pitchy-, be sure and hyperlink back to the relevant section of your main site. The idea is to take advantage of SEO goodness as Google will weigh those keywords in relation to that landing page. Also don't be shy about linking to other relevant B2B or industry resources. If you happen to link to another blog, for example, often the owner of that blog will get a "trackback" acknowledgement. This is an electronic "kudos" and you may just find that others are linking to your content, further upping your SEO worthiness.

Social Networking and RSS

As mentioned, unlike traditional web copy, blog sites tend to be more interactive. If you have enabled commenting, whether moderated or not, you now have the possibility of getting direct feedback from readers and creating a real "buzz" around your postings. Speaking of Buzz, if your blog software has the ability to add a social bookmarking widget to the footer of your articles, you have a great way of building inbound links from sites like Digg and Reddit. RSS has become a universal way of "syndicating" your content, offering the ability to have your content literally distributed anywhere online. Check out feedburner (recently acquired by Google), which offers some additional ways to get your blog content "out there," and has some great analytics tools to boot!

Low Barriers to Entry and ROI

Where you might pay thousands of dollars to get your traditional web site designed, configured and hosted, the barriers to entry for a blog site are relatively few. Free and/or inexpensive hosted options are plentiful (wordpress.com, blogger.com, typepad.com). Likewise, you may want to see the many success stories from Hubspot. For example, check out how this B2B supplier, Palomar Technologies leveraged their blog site to build authority for itself, increasing traffic some twenty-fold, nearly tripling their monthly lead program.

Photo Courtesy of Proniit.

So your website is optimized. Now what? Offer Landing Pages

Jeff Scholes — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 12:45:00 GMT

If you have been paying attention to SEO principles, and your site's keywords, and your Google ranking - give yourself a pat on the back! A lot of the battle of marketing on the web is simply getting found. If you are at this point, you may well be asking, "okay, so what's next?" In order to realize a return on investment for your efforts, you need to actually convert those web clicks to sales leads. It's not magic, it's a combination of building the right landing page, and then measuring, testing again, and measuring.

The Obvious Offer is Key

Don't kid yourself, there is precious little time to catch the attention of a prospect. In a matter of a very few seconds, your visitor must determine whether they are going to take action or whether they will contribute to your bounce rate. Is your offer clearly visible? The entire approach of building your page must take this into account. As a result, the featured offer should be the most obvious item on the page, above the fold. Don't overuse graphics, or you can run into the over-stimulated "Las Vegas effect." Simply remember that you have a fleeting chance to get the focus of a short attention span, so use these images judiciously.

Highlight Value Points

We've already answered the question: "What do I get?" Next we need to make the short and sweet "value points." It is much shorter than even the proverbial elevator pitch, much shorter. Bullet points that clearly relate some clear message that your targeted audience will understand and value. Keeping things concise and understandable is, in fact, quite challenging. But if we were asking someone to download some new "Widget for Cleaning Windows," we might point out:

See clearly through your windows like never before
Allows window cleaning without usual streaks
Easy application
Keeps windows clearer longer, less work

This is really about enough! This is truly one of those times when less is more.

Effective Elements of Call to Action

Don't Distract: If you are linking from a landing page to a form, be sure and link both text and images, and of course they all need to point to the same offer. And while you may have a standard menu or navigation for your site, bear in mind that your offer page serves a very specialized purpose. Consider removing that standard navigation, sidebars and such, as you want to avoid extraneous links as much a possible. We want to feed the funnel, and if we present the visitor with a network of pathways, we are defeating our own business purposes.

Minimal Field Requirements: We've all seen it happen: An offer form designed by consensus with dozens of fields and drop-down lists from which to choose. This is definitely what we don't want. Figure out what you minimally need. The user experience is just as important as the business need and if that user feels hassled by multiple questions, your own results will suffer. The rule is simple: ask for the minimum information you need to fulfill the business objective. Pay special attention to see whether your required fields make sense. Hopefully you can get away with something like: name, email, and perhaps phone number --whatever you need to be able to contact them. Consider linking to a clear privacy policy, particularly if you must ask for phone number details.

Measure and Test

Well, hopefully you've been using some kind of web analytics tool to measure traffic. Google Analytics is a free and powerful tool, so there's really no excuse. Plus, having web analytics in place is critical in getting to the next step: measuring and testing what works with Google Optimizer. Think of Google Optimizer as kind of a subset of Google Analytics, more specialized, but dependent upon it. The combination of these two products gives you the ability to see abandonment rates, what versions of a landing page work best, and even what other pages on your site are of interested to those key constituents who convert. Consider the A/B test: Say you have your standard version of your "Widget for Cleaning Windows" description (A), and another that includes a couple of customer testimonial quotes (B). Do the quotes truly add value to your offer? Run the A/B test, and Google optimizer will randomly present one or the other version of the form to your prospects. In addition, Google Optimizer will present you with a running tally of which version is the most successful at converting visitors.

Building landing pages is a combination of trying different approaches, testing the results and simply doing more of what is the most effective in feeding the funnel. The approaches that work require some common sense approaches and some real discipline around focused messaging and value propositions. With the kind of tools now available for measuring and reporting, you can substantially improve your marketing efforts.

photo credit John Smith's, UK

Is Your Website Getting Found? Website Optimization

Jeff Scholes — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 11:59:00 GMT

A quick background on Inbound Marketing

The truth is, that while more traditional marketing tactics and outbound-type campaigns still do have a place in the B2B
marketing mix, it's to a much lesser degree. Email marketing done right, for example, is still an effective way to nurture existing leads and contacts that have already opted in to receive your content. But, as far as getting new prospects, there's been a massive shift toward inbound marketing (getting found by potential customers).

David Meerman Scott describes inbound marketng best and recommends that marketers "publish their way in" (via blogs, social media, etc.) in contrast to outbound marketing where marketers used to have to "buy their way in" (via paid advertisements, direct mail, list rentals, etc.).

So, the first place to start is to turn your website into a lead magnet.

To help get you started, we put together a website optimization eBook that'll walk you through the basics of search engine optimization (SEO). The main goal is to show you how, with a little bit of effort, you can start to adjust or revamp your website to drive more traffic to it and begin making your Internet efforts more profitable -- without investing a fortune.

For those who are looking to enhance the marketing of your company website or feeling the pressure to increase website and online marketing performance, this eBook was put together to help get you started.

Learn how to:

- Quickly turn your website into an optimized, lead generating tool that gets your company found by qualified prospects.

- Implement effective natural (organic) search engine optimization (SEO) tactics in a few easy steps. If your site isn't receiving enough traffic, it might not be properly optimized.

- Apply keywords to your website and some best practices.

- Use linking to your advantage. Explains link popularity, PageRank and the importance of getting more links to your site.

Once you've had a chance to go through the eBook, let me know what you think by commenting on this article. There will be several more eBooks in this Internet Marketing Essentials series so we want to provide only information you'll find useful.

Internet Marketing Essentials: 4-Part Series

Jeff Scholes — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 15:40:00 GMT

Many B2B companies know that they should be incorporating an ongoing social media campaign into their arsenal of tactics to generate leads and sales. But, as a business owner or marketing professional, half the battle is trying to get your head around the social media wave, the crushing amount of information about it, where to even begin, and how to make it all fit into your marketing plans.

The great news is that being successful at Internet marketing does not need to be as complicated as others may sometimes make it out to be. It will, however, require some start-up time and dedication to get a solid working plan in place. Here's the thing. The key to effective and profitable Internet and online marketing requires an integrated approach, utilizing the right tools and applying them with consistent effort.

This 4-part series brings you up-to-speed with some practical things you can do to confidently get your results-driven website and Internet marketing campaign off the ground.

Part 1 - Fix the Foundation: Is your current website optimized for getting found? The first eBook of the series will help you quickly turn your website into an optimized, lead generating tool that gets your company found by qualified prospects.

Part 2 - Capture and Convert: Now that your website is optimized, is it set up to convert qualified prospects into leads? This eBook will outline ways to build great offer landing pages and calls to action that are optimized for converting traffic to leads and customers.

Part 3 - Spread the Word: Now that you've got a killer website and tools for converting, it's time to start promoting through social media channels and blogging -- delivering only meaningful content along the way. This eBook will give you the basics for why you need social media, how to get social media traffic and specific examples on how to set up your campaigns using some of the biggies -facebook, twitter, etc.

Part 4 - Analyze, Measure, Test and Pivot: Use analytics and tracking tools to measure the effectiveness of your efforts so you can confidently do more of what works, and less of what doesn't. This eBook will arm you with some of the best practices and and tools (some new, some older yet really effective) for measuring performance, tracking and reporting on your efforts.

For those of you who are looking to enhance the marketing of your company website or feeling the pressure to increase website and online marketing lead generation performance, this series will help get you on the right track.

What else do you think future Internet marketing Pros need to know?