South Florida Inbound Marketing Blog

Is your team helping with your internet marketing strategy?

Ramon Trujillo — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 14:29:00 GMT

There are several pieces that tie together an Internet Marketing Strategy, that is why is so important to have a methodology that allow you to consistently produce measurable results, on the other hand, marketing your company, is no longer a job of the marketing department alone. We live in a social era, were relationships are created outside your private networks.

I have always said that systems don’t make companies successful what makes a company successful is their people and their willingness to evolve and embrace new things.

I mentioned that your company marketing is no longer a job for the marketing department alone.

So in this new marketing era let’s find out:

Is your company using social media?
Is your team participating on social media?
Does your company have a blog?
How often do you blog?
Is your team helping promote your content?

Your company has a marketing department and you have a website, so you are all set right? Well let me ask you something, do you know?

What is your website traffic?
Is it growing?
Is your website generating a healthy stream of lead?
Are you converting those leads into customers?

Because at the end of the day, you cannot manage what you cannot measure, do you have defined goals of what you want to get from your internet marketing? If you don’t, how can you measure the ROI of your Internet marketing efforts? How can you measure social media ROI?

Customer Service blunders in a Social Media Era and what to do

Ramon Trujillo — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 19:29:00 GMT

I don’t want these post to be mistaken for a rant. If I did I would have disclosed the name of the Institution but instead a starting point of a discussion of what to do when things go wrong.

Yesterday at 4:45pm I received an email from a Financial Institution, this is not one of those scam alerts, and the lady was informing their customers from that particular office that some documents were going to be available on their website, the title included something about going green, when I opened, big surprise, instead of the bcc the Lady used the cc field of the email system and now the email that I shared with the institution along with the ones from the customers are all there, so I have a list of all the active customers for that branch.

Immediately, I called their office and nobody answered the phone, it was before 5:00pm, so I decided to send an email back to inform them of the situation, didn’t heard from them so I sent an email to the Senior Vice President’s at 5:47pm. I didn’t hear back from them until this morning at 9:10am, when the Senior VP called me to apologize, finally at 9:55am I received an apology from the Lady that sent the email on the first place.

Everything would have been good, but noooo, they were up to fix the problem, the Lady in question decided to “recall the email” guess what, I received the list of ALL the customers AGAIN, I called back, again I left a message and they called me back, this time I demanded that they keep these Lady away from their email system until she gets retrained in the use of a computer.

Here are some points that I will recommend for any Small to Medium Business (SMB) to take into consideration:

eMail on your mobile device is not a “hip thing” anymore

You need to be able to access your email ALL the time, not only your personal stuff but your professional email system (I really hope you have them separate), you need to give your customers the importance that they deserve, people appreciate this.

You don’t need to know the answer

But as soon as something happens, you need to put yourself in front of the problem, if anything, to assure your customers that even when you don’t have all the details yet, you will investigate what is going on and that you will correct the situation.

This also apply to Social Media

You cannot prevent bad customer service situations from happening but there are plenty of companies out there big and small that are doing a great job to monitor and respond immediately when this things happen.

Do you have your own Customer Service blunt to share?, or do you want to share another point, please leave us a comment.

(names were changed for now, but I’ll make certain that all the people involved receive a link back to this post)

How to improve your social media presence?

Ramon Trujillo — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 12:15:00 GMT

You can’t deny the importance of Social Media to promote your content as part of an Inbound Marketing Strategy (IMS). But before you can develop a relationship with your potential customers through Social Media, you need to understand the do’s and do not’s

First of all, you must understand that Social Media is a 2-way communication channel and you need to be ready to engage in conversations. Another important thing is that you need to be authentic, people can see you from a mile away, so don’t be afraid to recognize that you don’t know all the answers and that your products and or services may not be a fit for everybody, (yes I know, what a shocker right?)

So here are some tips that will help you improve your Social Media Presence.

Listen to your Audience

Just like you, people don’t like people that talk about themselves all the time, you need to shut up and listen to the conversations that are happening in the socialsphere, what motivates your target audience? what are they asking?, what is their need of information?. If you can figure this one out, you will have more than half of the battle gained already.

Create new content

New content has 2 desirable side effects for your IMS, on one hand the search engines love fresh content but on the other hand it helps to improve your website traffic once promoted on Social Sites.

Make it worth share

If you were listening to what your target audience is talking about and you read our first tip, you shouldn’t have any problem to come up with some interesting and remarkable content that your audience is willing to share, with the people that have the same interest that they do and that may not be part of the people that you reach directly.

Make it easy to bookmark and share

If the software you are using on your website doesn’t have it and you don’t know how to put it on, find someone that can add those share buttons pronto, which one is best?, it depends on your strategy. You'll be surprised to find out how people is willing to share relevant, remarkable content.

Participate in the Conversation

Don’t be afraid to engage in conversations with your target audience, be honest and do not participate in sterile conversations, you are not a golden nugget to be liked by everyone. If you know the answer, share it! Comment on other peoples blogs be constructive not simply “Good Information!” and share their postings, they will pay forward, (most of the time)

Do you have another tip you may want to share? Remember to participate in the Conversation.

Is Social Media the Solution?

Ramon Trujillo — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 13:41:00 GMT

This was the 2008 IBM's vision of Social Media, it is amazing how times change and the beauty of it all is how a great company can evolve and adapt to times.

We have seen the new push from IBM to get their Business partners to use Social Media, but is Social Media the panacea that will fix all the marketing problems? If it is not part of an integrated Internet Marketing strategy, I doubt it.

When I said that I doubt that Social media per se will fix your marketing problems is because for starters, it s just one piece of the New Marketing puzzle, you still need to identify who your buyer personas are, you need to figure out where they hang out on the internet and how you are going to attract them to your site and you need to have in place procedures to create fresh content to keep the attention of the visitors generated by social media. Further more, you need to share internal knowledge and no one better than you and your employees to do that.

You need to get better results from your website as a part of a comprehensive Internet Marketing strategy, it is without a doubt the 24 by 7 connection between your company and the world, are you taking advantage of that?

On the other hand you and your team need to think about Search Engine Optimization SEO, you have to make certain that all the pages on your website are properly structured so that the Google's and the Bing's crawlers can pickup and index correctly your content.

Basically you need to start following an Inbound Marketing methodology for your Internet Marketing efforts and educate your employees on this new 2-way marketing schema, is no longer you pushing your message out and everybody has to listen, but instead establishing conversations with real people who expect to talk to real people.

In today's information age of Marketing and web 2.0, a company’s website is the key to their entire business.

Marcus Sheridan-AUTHOR OF THE SALES LION BLOG MARKETING SPEAKER

Magnetic Internet Marketing

Ramon Trujillo — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 19:42:00 GMT

I don’t understand how people and Bussinesses (SMB), think that by having 25 to a 100 half baked micro websites with obscure keywords stuffed on the domain name will benefit their Internet Marketing efforts.

I’m happy to hear the Google is cracking down on low-quality sites; this is a wake up call for those that were convinced by these so called “Magnet Sites Programs”.

As per the official Google blog:

“This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites; sites which are low-value for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites; sites with original content and information such as research, in depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.”

When you use these services, what you are actually doing is diluting your authority and competing against your own website. You would have been better served if you have just created more relevant unique content with the keywords that you were after.

You have your company domain and you have had your website up and running for a long period of time, let’s say that your company is on the travel industry “flybynight.com” and now you want to promote travel to “thenewspot”. Instead of opening a bunch of small micro web sites using domains like flythenewspot.com, gotothenewspot.com, cheapflytothenewspot.com……you could have just created either thenewspot.flybynight.com or flybynight.com/thenewspot and it will have probably increased your authority when someone search for thenewspot because your main domain “flybynight.com” is already considered the authority for the travel industry.

There are neither shortcuts nor magic dust for a successful Internet Marketing strategy you need to follow a methodology and stick to it.

What I have learned from the Horoscope and Inbound Marketing

Ramon Trujillo — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 19:12:00 GMT

Lately I have found myself checking my horoscope more frequently than ever before and of course I have found that:

“I should move forward but cannot forget the past”, “that the planets are aligned to help me as long as I don’t expect help”, “that my partner is willing to help me as long as I don’t piss her off” (duh).

I guess that my sudden fanaticism should be attributed to the story in the news about the horoscope change, which by the way I wonder how it started.

My theory is that organization that covers the entire Horoscope writers association, meet and determined that they needed to do something drastic and developed a marketing plan to make more people interested and read their horoscopes. So what a better way than drop an statement that because is so controversial causes people to start talking about it and make remarks about it, which in turn makes people read their horoscope more often than they did ever before.

So that’s it, when are you going to do something controversial?. Something that get people to talk about your Company….your Industry?

I don’t know about you, but I’m going to keep expressing my ideas because my horoscope for today says that:

“It's challenging to keep your ideas to yourself today because there are things you want to do and the support of others can be the key to your success.”

What is your take on this one? Let me know!

photo credit by austinevan

5 tips to promote and share your blog content

Ramon Trujillo — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 13:28:00 GMT

We have talked about the need to create remarkable unique content as a way to attract people to your website. Today we'll take a look at how to improve the chances that your awesome content gets shared.

It is important to understand the influence that Social Media and specifically twitter and facebook have in search results, while the big Search Engines Google & Bing still maintain that they only look to it for Social Search, it is undeniable the role that it may play in the future specially to determine authority. You can read more about it here.

So what can you do to promote your content?

1.- Allow people to easily share your content: While it may look like an obvious thing to do, many people still missing the train on this one, make certain that you have share buttons to twitter, facebook like, facebook share and maybe linkedin on your blog, make certain that you have and RSS of your blog postings and finally that you have a way for people to subscribe by e-mail to your blog.

2.- Use your network: Ask your friends, employees and maybe customers to tweet, share and like your content, encourage them to participate. A person is more willing to share content and tweet about it when they see a big number of retweets and/or likes. Besides they are your friends isn't that what friends are for?

3.- Are you sharing your blog on your emails? Google has a headline animator that generates an animated banner that cycles through your feed's five most recent items and can be embedded on your email signature.

4.- Participate on Social Media and comment on blogs: Many modern blogs use the “nofollow” tag on the anchor links that people enter when posting a comment on a blog, but when you participate and comment on other blogs you also get noticed not only by the author of the blog but also for the people that follow that particular blog, if your comments are not just “I like your post” or “I Agree”, but a meaningful note, you get noticed and people that may share your point of view will gravitate toward and check the link back to you.

5.- Remind your contacts about your content: Sometimes people miss your post, one way to reach out could be to include a teaser of your post in your newsletter, if the subject is of their interest they may click back to your site and read the story.

There are many other ways to accomplish this, but these are the basic ones that you should be doing and the ones that have worked for me. Finally don’t be afraid to ask for what you want if it is comments, ask people to comment if you want them to subscribe by mail just ask them.

Breaking the Pay Per Click cycle.

Ramon Trujillo — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 23:06:00 GMT

People find hard to understand at times… How is inbound marketing going to help? And how are we going to get people to go to our website if we are not going to pay for the traffic?

Well here is the beauty of how this works, if you are creating relevant content tailored to the people or group of people in your target market, you don't need (or will increasingly lower the need) to pay for clicks to drive traffic to your website.

The reason is quite simple, the more relevant content you have the more chances you will have to show up in the organic results when people are searching for your products and services. Organic results are free, not only that, but good content becomes remarkable content that people are more likely to share with colleagues and friends.

What only thing you need to understand is that when it comes to content, the more the merrier! However, if you copy and paste from other places, it can damage instead of help. Original content is best, you might think that with all the blogs and websites out there you may have little to bring to the table (well, think again my friend) people want to hear your personal perspective. They also want to research your knowledge, ethics and professionalism on whatever it is that you are trying to convince them to do or get from you.

So, it is not that hard, but you need to dedicate the time and the effort to generate the synergy that will eventually allow your target market to participate and create a relationship with the inner voice that they identify with and you create this through your content.

Go ahead and take the steps to rip off the PPC band-aid and start concentrating in good old remarkable content.

Is Social Media a "Freedom of Speech" Killer?

Ramon Trujillo — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 14:51:00 GMT

A quality that differentiates humans from animals is our ability to reason. With that, we have a set of rules that help us coexist in harmony, (most of the time).

I have always loved the openness of the Internet and when asked, I am always on the side of deregulation. I compare it to life, you take what you want and you ban what you don't want. And I will not dare to be the one choosing what is good for you. Which brings me to my next point; I had a conversation the other night with a group of friends. I was talking about social media, and how I do not believe in doing things just because it is “allowed” or legal, especially when it comes to the internet.

Freedom of Speech

Many people argue that you have the “right” to say what you want. We have seen countless examples of the consequences of expressing opinions about “the company,” and have learned that it can be a bad career move. And yet once in a while you’ll hear about the guy that spent a sick day skiing in Colorado, and was caught because he updated his status on facebook or twitter.

Privacy vs. Anonymity

Many people confuse privacy with anonymity. They want to be able to express their opinion in a selective manner. After all, we are all responsible for the actions we take, especially in information era. The public must be aware of one fact- Anything you post on the internet can and will be used against you. Social media sites have begun to index anything you post. This means everything is picked up by search engines, and visible to the public. This could come back to haunt you at the worst moment.

Privacy vs. Security

Another key issue is sharing more information than wanted by omission. Many times we give more than we should by not being educated. The U.S. Army does a great job not only by embracing Social Media, but also by educating their members on how to use it properly. Their Presentation on “Geotags and Location-Based Social Networking,” even when it relates more to security than privacy, explains the risk and how their personnel could be inadvertently broadcasting their position by posting pictures to Social Sites and the steps necessary to correct it.

I always tell my kids that they should always be careful and think through what they say before they say it, once it is out, you can't take it back.

So what do you think? Can we expect to express our inner thoughts without fear of any consequences, or has that ship already sailed?

Internet Marketing, what's next?

Ramon Trujillo — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 18:23:00 GMT

It seems to me that there is a group that got a clue on this internet marketing thing and another group that it is so busy trying to stay afloat that doesn’t have the time to actually get it.

Also, I think there is plenty of noise from people trying to take advantage of the situation to make a buck regardless of what happens later.

So how do you break the cycle? We already agreed that you can no longer buy attention by burning money on TV ads or full center pages on newspapers that nobody reads.

There is no secret that the economy, especially here in Florida is extremely slow with one of the highest unemployment rate, but I think there are signs that it may be starting to move in the right direction.

The local search market is growing, in particular the mobile search market, we have talked about Google Places, Did you know that 80% of searchers, research online before purchasing in a 10-20 miles radius? (*). Is your business going to show on those searches?

Why would you have a website that no one can find? The time of web presence without a Marketing Strategy is over

There are a lot of solutions out there for Web Sites for Small Businesses, must of the time you get what you pay for, I evaluated some of those solutions and the majority have some designs flaws, for $9.99 you get something that resembles a website and you can actually update it fairly ease but that’s it, if you want, “they can help you with Search Engine Optimization” (SEO) for a fee, if you want to add a blog, which is a must if you want to generate fresh content is another fee, and so on.

If you think that you can figure out everything by yourself and you are good at following directions, I have two links that could be useful for you in the future:

How to Change a Timing Belt: Car Maintenance and Repair

Surgical Removal of a Wisdom Tooth

Most of the time, when we try to explain what we do and how we can help companies get found on the Internet, when we get into details of buyer personas, Inbound Marketing Plans, Keyword Research etc, I can feel those huge snakes coming from the back of my head, reflected on their glazed eyes, not many things work without a plan an Internet Marketing is one of those that won’t work without one, that’s were you need someone with the knowledge and experience to help you delineate and execute your plan, many people expect websites to work just because it is published.

Website for Small Businesses Services

Pictures that make the blog!

Ramon Trujillo — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 16:06:00 GMT

We have been asked where you can get the pictures for your blog; it really depends, but most of the time you can get them for free.

There are several places where you can get high quality pictures for free, just by doing an attribute with a link back to the author of the picture. This is what is called Creative Commons and some author will give you the rights to use their work as long as you link back to their original work, you need to understand the license type and select accordingly, not a bad deal specially when you think about the quality of some of those pictures.

I normally look for pictures I can Use in Flickr and Google Images using the advance features and selecting labeled for reuse or labeled for commercial reuse.

Looking for inspiration for a blog I came across this posting from Seth Blog about "Where to find great ideas and arresting images (for free)" what is really interesting is the tool mentioned at the end of the post "[Greg sent along this tool, which is an amazing brainstorming aide. Check it out.]"

So next time you are going to post something on your blog, just take that extra time to look for the picture that closely match the idea and the story that you are trying to share.

photo credit by no3rdw Paul Gallo

Happy Thankgiving 2010!!

Ramon Trujillo — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 20:13:00 GMT

I wanted to take just a brief moment to wish everyone a very Happy Thanksgiving. A recent survey showed that Thanksgiving is actually America's favorite holiday. No presents, no lavish holiday parties, just simply family and friends spending time together, giving thanks. (Plus a lot of food and football).

Take the long holiday weekend to rest up and spend time with those that mean so much to you, in many cases, they are the reason we work so hard day after day.

It has been a tough year. But let not complain about what you did not accomplish. Rather, let’s celebrate and honor the many wonderful things we have achieved.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Buyer Persona. What is it? Who needs it?

Ramon Trujillo — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 16:00:00 GMT

I have been talking about buyer personas in several posting, there are plenty of definitions out there, but it is basically an in depth profile representation of the buyer audience that can influence the purchasing decision of the product and services that you are trying to market.

It is used to set the tone of the message that you want to convey to different representation of a real group of people. This is how you can craft your message (s ) explaining how your products and/or services can solve your buyer personas problems.

For instance a politician can identify several target segments, the easy ones are voters and financers under voters you may identify buyer persona: young voters, buyer persona: elderly voters, buyer persona: women … and so on. A hotel should not only craft their messages to show the beds and pillows, there are several buyer personas like the brides that want to celebrate their weddings, the travel warrior that looks for a place where they can exercise and have internet access and a good breakfast.

By identifying your buyer personas you can generate content with valuable information that will help that specific group of buyers to find you and incline them to share it with other people with the same interest therefore spreading your message.

The definition of insanity according to Albert Einstein is “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results” you are no longer marketing to the masses you need to know and describe specifics of your buyer persona so when you are crafting your message you can talk to that person.

A buyer persona profile is like a biography of a typical customer, it will be something like:

Buyer Persona Name “IT John”

Positions: IT do it all/anything

Pains: Not enough hours in the day to catch up with the daily fires

Archiving
Backups
Networks
Virus & Security attacks
Email downtime
Licensing
Maintenance

He is 32 years old with a degree form Wallden University, last time he saw his children after the Sunday game, was on Facebook. He tries to balance his life between the office & family.

He drives a Ford Explorer and weather permit his Harley Davison Fatboy.

Does much of his research online but could use a hand to drive him to the right answer, with the day to day workload, he has not realized why he should look into new technologies that may facilitate his daily workload, he still think that they may be expensive and complex to manage.

IT John goals are:

To earn a living for him and his family and save enough to send his kids to school.
To keep his department running smoothly
To help his company thrive while ensuring it survives on these times.
To be viewed by his bosses and colleagues as a friend and an asset.

If you know your market these descriptions get easier and I bet you that your best sales people will find this exercises boring because they are obvious to them, which might be why some sales people outperform others.

So instead of asking others, why I haven’t receive a phone call? Think about it.

Do you have a clear vision of who your buyer persona is/are?
Are you crafting your message in a way that will entice the person(s) that make the decision to purchase your products and/or services?

Are you still using free email services for your company?

Ramon Trujillo — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 19:36:00 GMT

Besides the email subject, nothing makes me delete an email faster than emails offering services sent from a free domain, I'm talking about the AOL, hotmail, Gmail accounts and all the others, (yes, you know, that one too).

So, is your real estate firm, your dental, medical and/or law practice suffering from this simple to fix problem?

I don't have a problem with the use of any of these services for personal communications, I even have several accounts myself, but when it comes to professional and business communications I always use my company's e-mail address and domain.

It used to be that the only way for you to have an email with your domain name, was to setup an email server and maintain it yourself or have complicated an expensive hosting of your domain.

Nowadays there are services that not only do your email on the cloud for you, but also add applications like office suite, mobile access from your PDA which is crucial for a fast response to customers and collaboration websites, others also include web meetings with prices starting at $50 to $80 per user per year, between $4 to $6 a month.

If you think that is expensive, think of this for a moment, it is all part of your branding and how you want to project your company to your potential customers but also, what happens when that wile.e.coyote@aol.com leaves the company?, all the emails follows him/her with the customer information that you and your company helped and invested to discover.

Want to Learn more about email Cloud Solutions?

Blogging for Business

Ramon Trujillo — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 18:30:00 GMT

There is no question about the benefits of blogging in terms of not only traffic but also inbound links and SEO.

The problem is that if you don’t use it right, it can work against you, that is why you have to make it part of your Internet Marketing strategy.

You need to know your buyer personas and you need to identify the keywords that they will use if they were looking for your products and/or services and use them on your postings, this does not mean to talk about your products and/or services, but instead what they want to learn, like solving a problem that they may not even know they have.

Mix your postings not all of them have to be an academic dissertation, you can have postings where you discuss and give your opinion on other peoples post. Then you can include videos and your opinion of why your readers should watch that video.

Try to keep your postings to 1 idea per post and try also to always add a picture, it helps to break and soften the post.

Always, always, always spell check before publishing and try to stick to a schedule, people expect consistency.

Promote your entries throughout the Social Media sphere, use twitter, facebook, LinkedIn and any other social media outlet to spread the word.

Pay attention and respond promptly to comments, make certain that you respond back and that you find out who these people are, subscribe to their blogs and follow them, in other words do your due diligence, after all you want to be part of the conversation too. Be prepared differentiate when you need to defend yourself and when you have to accept criticism.

Measure and keep track of how many people subscribe to your blog either by mail and/or RSS.

Remember what you do and what you sell is not important, what is important is how you can help and solve problems for your target audience; this will generate a trusting relationship that eventually will help to become a business relationship.

How long does the Inbound Marketing methodology take to work?

Ramon Trujillo — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 18:10:00 GMT

It depends, there are a lot of factors and normally I'll tell my customers that I can't and will not offer them the first page of Google in 1 week. Inbound Marketing is a process that takes effort and time.

We just released a new site for a Ft Lauderdale Yacht Cleaning and Management Company, Freedom Yacht Management; we revamped their site from a flash based site. Immediate results (less than a week) including their marketing assessment grade (from 37 to 79 points) and their Alexa traffic rank went from 45.90% to the top 13.61%. (Lower is better).

Another client, a Delray Beach Real Estate Company, Century 21 Danon Realty, went form 73 to 95 in their marketing assessment grade and their Alexa traffic rank went from 19.54% to a 6.21%. (Lower is better) in less than 90 days.

Normally there are several factors that determine how long it takes for your strategy to start being noticed and you can start getting results:

How long is your domain being registered? Older sites may see results faster than brand new sites, which may take up to 6 months to start getting some measurable results.

How well established is your competition? The longer they have been established, the hardest is going to be for you.

Content is King How much and what is the quality of the content on your website? Is it so good and are you giving your audience so much value that people will share it?

Are you willing to spend the time? As we mentioned before, Inbound Marketing is a process not a destination. You need to develop relationships with your potential customers and they need to trust that you are the company that can solve their problems.

I think the takeaway is that, the sooner you commit to follow an Inbound Marketing methodology, the sooner you will get the benefits. We continually work with new prospects trying to educate them on the benefits of developing an Inbound Marketing strategy for the benefit of their bottom line.

photo credit by Robbert van der Steeg

SMB on the Cloud

Ramon Trujillo — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 17:01:00 GMT

You may have heard people talking about cloud services, Software as a Services, SAAS and Services on the Cloud and still wonder, what are they talking about?

A little history is always good to try to understand were things are coming from, by the way, this is a relative short history or at least I’d like to think that it is because I have lived through it so far.

First there were the Servers, Corporations, Government and Educational Institutions that could afford them will gather programmers and users around it most of the time in the same location. Everything was centralized and running of dumb terminals that connected to the Server.

We are going to skip the mini-computers era because it was the same as the Big Servers but at a smaller scale which allowed Networked Servers and more access to Computer due to cost reduction.

The next big change came along with the introduction of the micro-computers (or personal computers) which introduced the concept of Client-Server, now some of the processes were executed in the local computers. We started to see shelved Applications to run in this Client-Server environment ERP, CRM and Office Suites that will have some local component to ease the load on the Servers. These Client-Server environments were still mostly local and if you needed to connect different sites it was accomplished with expensive dedicated lines.

Moving forward and with the advent of the Internet people started inter-connecting more and more disparate equipments and servers using a unique protocol to gap many communication problems, bandwidth was the limiting factor but once again with the increase in adoption and technology development, bandwidth not only got higher but cheaper. This created the seeds for a new business model were Services are offered to be accessed from anywhere through a web browser. From mail services to CRM you no longer need to create an IT infrastructure to have access to the tools you need.

The promises of SAAS are very tempting indeed, you will have access from any device to a secure site that has the applications that you need, were programmers are developing the next version of software, to which you will have to do nothing to get access to, at a price that you can afford.

There are plenty of applications that are already offered under this model, like Google Apps for office suite, file sharing and email, Lotus Live for email, integrated social networking and online collaboration services, SalesForce the largest provider of CRM services on the Cloud, Hubspot an Inbound Marketing Content Management Software, Constant Contact for e-mail Marketing campaigns, Network4Leaders Key Performance Indicator’s application, Freshbooks for time tracking and invoicing customers.

The applications are endless, ones more successful than others but they are all based on the premises that your business application needs is no much different than the next one and you should have easy access in a secure environment along with access to the latest version of the software.

There are several hurdles with Services on the Cloud that need to be addressed before Cloud Services are adopted.

The Culture. Is your organization ready to let the data go to an undisclosed location? While what you bring and offer to your customers is what differentiate you from your competition, must likely your Organization DOES NOT have different requirements than the one next door.
Security. People’s perception of risk of putting your data on the Cloud because while you don’t need to know where your data is which is one of the marketing premises of the cloud; you really want to know where your customer’s records are.
Exit strategy. If the Cloud does not deliver how can I get back my Service and more important my data back in a non-proprietary format that I can easily re-deploy to a new location.
Openness. How difficult will it be for us to customize if needed.
Inertia. You already have your services in place and you don’t feel that moving to the cloud will benefit your organization. Is that an informed statement or the Job Security of some don’t bother me with that group, opinion?

I will not go into details of mixed or hybrids Clouds here, the idea being that you could have some of those services in premises for your team and/or customers to access.

One last thing I’d like to talk about is the cost of going to the Cloud, the good news, must of the time is fix price, the bad news it can add up pretty quickly but compared with not having a Local IT Infrastructure and Licensing cost to support it, it is something to consider specially if you are an SMB owner.

What do you think? Are you ready to take the leap into the Cloud?

Google places for your Small Business

Ramon Trujillo — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 11:19:00 GMT

I already blog about Google reader, a tool that if you are not using yet, you should be considering to use it to save time when reading and following your favorite places on the Internet.

Today we are going to talk about another Google tool that you should be using if you have a Small to Medium Business and you want to be found when someone search for your Products and Services locally, it used to be called Google Locals but they switched the name to Google Places, by registering with Google Places, your listing will also be available through Web Search, Google Maps, Mobile search, 1800-GOOG-411 and Google Earth.

On "The Power of Local Mobile Search" an Info graph they show us some interesting numbers:

80% of searchers, research online before purchasing in a 10-20 mile radius.
More than 4,000,000 Map Listings Claimed. (14% of businesses in the US have claimed theirs)
Local Search includes Mapped results and those were almost 1.28 billion searches in March 2010.
While 89% of consumers shop for info online 98% of retail sales happen offline.

The message is, if you are not using Google locals you are missing opportunities to get found.

But I don't have a website, it doesn't matter, all what you need is a Google account to claim your business.
But that should be expensive, it is a free service.
A company promised me that for $200 a month I will show on the first listing on Google locals, from Google official site, "Google Maps business listings are generated and ranked entirely by mathematical algorithms. Our algorithms and index sometimes experience changes, so businesses may not always appear for a particular category or keyword search. We also can't guarantee that your listing will appear in search results for a particular category or keyword."

So go ahead and claim your business on Google locals it is easy to setup and you will gain immediately benefits by appearing in local searches.

Compelling offer 101

Ramon Trujillo — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 12:18:00 GMT

A Compelling offer is something that should be perceived as having "high value" or "interest for the targeted prospect". Let's start by making one thing clear: the fact that you have a "contact us" or "request a Call" button, DOES NOT represent neither a compelling offer nor a Call to Action.

On the other hand if you have the solution for the mosquito biting problem in the backyard but I live in an apartment where there are no mosquitoes, I won’t care much about your offer. The idea is that your offer should be compelling to the eyes of right prospect.

The average Executive receives 41 campaigns a week, this includes but is not limited to counting the consumer marketing they receive when they get home. Do you want to become the 42nd interruption? Or the only one they pay attention and respond to?

The correct way to convey a compelling offer is to create perceived value which will generate high responses that should help qualify your prospects.

So let’s go over what makes a good compelling offer:

A free-assessment or free-consultation: Your prospect gets the chance to receive advise on your products and/or services for free. This can help start your sales cycle, however, unless you offer a very specific consultation it could be perceived as too generic. Plan ahead and figure out in advance the time and resources that you will need to dedicate if someone takes your sales offer.

A webinar: You can educate your audience on your services and/or solutions. It can be a technical challenge to setup, but with proper planning it can drive a lot of responses. Webinars are always attractive because they not only lower your overhead costs, they also save a bundle of time!

White papers and e-books: Help position your business as the authority on your subject matter. It is not only cost effective but you can also benefit from long tail results. Write it once and and your white papers and e-books are published forever. There are plenty of examples of this, but the one that always comes to mind is the one from the SMB dental Practice in Boston with over 100,000 downloads and counting.

Discounts and giveaways: Best for B2C (Business to Consumers) businesses but you run the risk of being perceived as if you are offering a "cheap" solution or as someone said before “if you only compete based on price, you can only go down”. Giveaways and discounts are great if the marketer finds a way to still profit. You are in business to make dollars, not donations.

In Summary

Choose the offer you know your company can best fulfill.
Listen to the market and identify which offers your prospects will find more compelling.
When creating a compelling offer, be prepared to accept that one does not fit all. Do not be afraid to try new approaches until you find the right one!.
Measure responses and follow up, it is the only way you are going to understand what your prospects are looking for.

Do you have something to share? Leave a comment and be part of the conversation.

Professional practices needs SEO, not yellow pages

Ramon Trujillo — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 16:52:00 GMT

Professional practices, Lawyers, MD and Dental Practices, have the opportunity to increase revenues through Search Engine Optimization SEO. More and more searches are happening every day of people looking for attorneys, doctors, insurance, real estate and dental services.

Today Professional Practices still spending outrageous amount of money on Yellow Pages at around $4000 for a half page ad a month right there you are spending $48000 a year on a static information resource, that people hardly uses anymore.

People are using Search Engines like Google, Yahoo and even AOL to search for services and information. If you look at a joint eye tracking studies show that the vast majority of eye tracking activity during a search happens in a triangle at the top of the search results page indicating that the areas of maximum interest create a "golden triangle."

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the process of optimizing your website content to rank better in Google, Bing, Yahoo and AOL and any other Search engine. This mean that your site will show as close as possible to that "golden triangle", if done right it can be accomplish at portion of the cost of any other traditional media with the additional benefit of long-tail results 24 by 7.
But driving the traffic is just part of the equation, if traffic was all you needed, the problem could be solved by throwing money at a Pay per Click campaign. You need to be able to convert that traffic into leads and those leads into paid customers, which is when an Inbound Marketing Strategy pays off.

This is the time to start increasing the visibility of your professional practice and start ranking better on the Search Engine Market the cost of a lead generated by your website using inbound marketing is 60% cheaper than traditional marketing media cost.

What do you think? Isn't it time you start moving your marketing budget to a more productive and less expensive media?

In retrospective..Social Culture

Ramon Trujillo — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 12:30:00 GMT

This is a guest post written by Pedro Hermida, a Florida-based Technology strategist. He is also the owner of Innovate-it.us.

Those who know me, know that I do not do crowds, I do not do lines, I do not do shopping and I am not to be seen in any of the crazy “Mondays” dedicated to “sales” in the US. They also know that I do not jump on a new product ever, specially the launch day and also know that I am a PC, with the only exception of my phone.

Well, today I decided for the first time in my almost 52 years in the planet, to break those rules and did crowds and did lines, although I must confess that I kept my face down in case I came across someone I knew, or worst, some one that knows my wife from work.(*)

Today, I went to get my Iphone 4.

During the 7 hours and 20 minutes waiting in the garage, hallways and corridors of the selected mall, I had the opportunity to do a lot of “people watching” (and criticizing) and confirm that

(a) there is a ZOO out there,

(b) that I am correct when I blame the teenagers, punks and similar as to the cause of the (AT&T) network clog and the end of unlimited internet,

(c) that is never late to embrace technology: way too many 65+ including my “mate” who was side-by-side with me on his 65th birthday, as well as some grandmas and grandpas getting “cool”.

Tired, hungry, thirsty, I spent 7 hours and 5 minutes to get inside of the Apple Store … and let me tell you, the 15 minutes I spent inside almost made me forget the other 425 I waited. I was treated like gold, in a relaxed and extremely cordial and professional manner … They know how to do this!, I mean service customers (have a darn problem with queue theory and some operational principles, though).

At the end, I did it for the first time …. To behave like a typical, frenetic shopper .. got my Iphone 4 and I am now looking for “mates” to “facetime” !

(Will never do it again, though)

PS: Special note for BlackBerry Users ….. come on guys, drop the “ball” !!

(*) She works for another SOFTware company. ;)

Doing it right! Doing it Remarkable!

Ramon Trujillo — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 00:10:00 GMT

I had the chance to meet some interesting people during my son's wedding celebration over the last two weeks.

Among other people and family I had the chance to meet Mike Beschen, his son Shane Beschen is married to my daughter Sofia for the past 6 years but we never had the chance to meet.

One night he was wearing a t-shirt that caught my attention, it read “Old Guys Rule”. When I asked him about the t-shirt he told me that the company was owned by a friend and that he would contact him to send a couple of hats, of course I checked out the company’s website but that was the end of that.

Last Saturday the day before Father’s Day, I returned home and found a box addressed to me from Don Craig with 2 hats, some stickers and a hand written note that read:

“Ramon,

Mike Beschen requested that I send you a couple of Old Guy Rule hats. He said you were worthy recipient and would wear them proudly.

These are meant to be worn as a “Badge of Honor”. Thanks for your support.

Regards

Don – The Old Guy”

Ok here is what happened, Don Craig just won a customer for life and someone who will spread his message because I think his products and his projects are remarkable especially, the work he is doing with the “John Wayne Cancer Foundation”

Mike Beschen, runs a mailing list where every Friday he sends you an awesome picture and the Subject of his e-mails and his project is "Aloha Friday", if you want to join his no-spam mailing list just 1 remarkable picture a week, shoot him an e-mail “mbeschen at hawaii.rr.com”

The takeaway is:

“Bridge the tribes”.

Like Mike, take the time and introduce people with common interest to each other.

“Reach out and be remarkable”

Like Don, not only take the time market your product but to have the delicacy to personalize your message.

Social Media, It’s a new world…

Jay Soshnick — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 12:01:00 GMT

The Internet continues to change the way businesses operate. New applications are being utilized to prospect, manage relationships and deliver results.

After the Internet boom, media stories were written about what would be the next "big thing."

The "big thing" is Social Media, and how it will increasingly change the way we do business.

Businesses are in the midst of great transformation. Everything centers around information:

How to find it, manage it and use it effectively.

Before the Internet, businesses were establishing target lists through cold-calling and attending trade shows.

Email and dynamic websites have changed that by allowing us to "touch greater numbers in less time."

The Internet is a two-way communication media that is changing the game dramatically.

It's not about who you know anymore... It's about "who can find you."

With the ease and low cost of information access today prospects want to feel very comfortable with you before they conduct business. They want to trust you!!!

We all know the best way to obtain new business is still through a referral. However, for new prospects that may not know who you are they seek a professional who is credible and who can deliver.

Prospects will want to check you out before doing business. What does your "digital footprint" say about you? Have you Googled your business name lately?

We never get a second chance to make a first impression. Therefore, you must make a name for yourself before you talk to prospects.

Today, businesses must do this with effective use of marketing, PR and social media:

Marketing is a multi-step process to build your name in the minds of prospects. It typically takes 6 to 8 "touches" before a client remembers you.
PR is about gaining visibility in the media; by being quoted in traditional (newspapers, magazines, TV) or new (electronic, blogs) media.
Social media involves two-way communication with LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. Key objectives are to build your business profile and expand your network.

Social media requires you to be proactive and continually plant seeds which will enable branding and greater name recognition.

Social media enables branding, broadcasting, and engagement.

When done right, the potential pay-off could be huge.

Information Overload and Social Communication

Ramon Trujillo — Thu, 20 May 2010 12:38:00 GMT

Nowadays everybody seems to be preoccupied with the amount of Information that we get every second of the day, specially with the advent of social media, 13 hours of videos are uploaded to YouTube every minute, it will take you 412.3 years to view every video, the are over 13 million articles available on Wikipedia and over 4 billion photos archived on Flickr.com and this doesn't take into consideration the countless number of blog entries everyday.

Ever since the library of Alexandria we have had information overload, but information is power rather than a distraction, we just need to learn to filter it, based in our interest and needs.

One tool that you should be familiar with is RSS, and if you are not, it is time you learn about it.

RSS stands for real simple syndication, if you are collecting and reading information from 20 to 30 different sites and you go to some of them in a regular basis, wouldn't it be great if instead of you going to those sites, they could come to you when there is new information? Can you imagine the time you will save by not visiting all those sites to scan information? And all that information delivered to you on a standard view.

All what you need is an RSS reader application either web or desktop based and a list of feeds that you want to subscribe, add them to your reader and you are done.

There are several RSS reader applications out there, but if you are just starting and want to try it, I'll recommend that you use Google Reader once you do that you can check the sites that you normally visit for an orange icon like this one , it indicates that the site provides an RSS you can simply click on the icon and follow the instructions to add it to your RSS reader.

Another beauty of the RSS readers is the fact that you can create folders to organize your feeds by areas of interest.

Go ahead; take it for a spin, once you try it you'll find that it is a tool that certainly will help you save some time that you can dedicate to more productive things.

Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/25031050@N06/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

You can teach a new trick to Hubspot CMS, including shopping cart integration

Ramon Trujillo — Tue, 18 May 2010 12:30:00 GMT

One of the issues for some of our customers to go into hubspot CMS is the fact that it does not have an e-commerce module.

We are talking about customers which main strategy is not to run an e-commerce site, but that will like to have the opportunity to offer a limited amount of their products and/or services for purchasing on their website.

So, after doing a research on the options that I had, I found 2 solutions, if you need a full bloom e-commerce store I suggest that you transfer control to an e-commerce software like those from Network Solutions, they are complex and can be customized to fit your requirements.

Now if you only need to offer a limited amount of products and/or services I recommend you take a look at ecwid, they have a free version and a paid version ($17 a month), it integrates seamlesly with hubspot CMS, it is a extremely simple to setup and use shopping cart application, but it contains all the elements that you are looking for on a shopping cart, multiple integrated shiping carrier, multiple payment options including Google chekout and Paypal that you can setup in minutes.

I've setup this solution for one of our customers and it is really flexible when it comes to shipping methods and taxes also.

What type of shopping cart integration are you using with your hubspot solution? Please share your thoughts in the comments