It is hard to believe that in the year 2013 some companies are not yet using any social media and their website is a basic brochure style template. Some of these companies are struggling, and believe it or not, some are thriving below the radar.

I know that given my line of work, my speaking and workshops all promoting social media as the go-to solution for marketing that the opening statement might appear blasphemous. But the truth is the truth.

Why then, you may ask, are some companies not doing any social media and why it might not be necessary. I’m happy to share my thoughts, experience and views.

Should you be in the business of selling products to consumers – you belong on social media. If you are selling a service direct to customers – you belong on social media. When you are providing products or services in a localized area to a very specific and not socially active target base, you might not need social media.

An example of this might be a personal shopper or stylist who targets C-Suite Female Executives. This community is far less likely to be on social media platforms or doing searches for these types of services. They tend to want to keep any and all personal events very private so they aren’t going to Like you on Facebook or Tweet your virtues. This community relies heavily on personal and in person recommendations and so you should market accordingly. Try using email campaigns and direct mail. Ask for recommendations and make sure that your emails have a forward to a friend option and call to action.

Should you have a broader target market of let’s say for example young (25-35 years old) career women, then it is more likely that this community is very active on social media and if you aren’t involved then chances are you would be missing out on a lot of opportunities to get referrals and increase your brand’s exposure, and it would be considered a marketing mis-step. If you are very small, such as a solopreneur or an independent consultant, then find out from our existing clients where and how they use social media to help guide you where to spend your time and resources and connect with your existing client base to springboard leads and referrals.

When it comes to the Business – to – Business side of things, not much changes. If new business for your company relies on lead generation and search results, then social media is a must, regardless of who your target audience is. However, there are a few businesses, much like the consumer facing companies mentioned above, that remain local in their servicing area and rely on a rather elitist or specialized target who don’t use search or social media to find their resources or vendors. While this is rare, it does occur.  Even if that is the case in your business model, you may still want to help your company’s standing by becoming known as an industry thought leader or get some press for your company. You will need social media to make that happen, otherwise, stick to the more traditional sales and marketing and quietly grow your company.

So as you can see, sometimes Social Media doesn’t make sense and that is okay. However, like most things in the world, change is necessary and so should your business model change and your target audience change, playing catch up in social media will get more and more difficult as these properties and communities evolve.

What say you? If you haven’t already, will you get involved in Social Media?

My guess is that there isn’t a company on the planet that doesn’t want more customers. But what kind of customers?

Small companies, above all others, with limited time and resources, need to maximize their efforts to be sure that they are bringing in the right customers, not just any customer. The ‘not right’ customer can eat into a company’s resources diverting them from more profitable relationships. The same goes for sales people.

Struggling or evolving businesses might feel that any customer is a good customer, and while that might be fine in the short term, sustainability demands a focus on the best customers that you should be attracting.

Having a clear idea of who your ideal customer really is – or should be, will help you to formulate your sales and marketing efforts and help you grow. You might even save yourself a lot of time by not chasing prospects that won’t deliver long-term value.

One way to look at customer acquisition is like any investment – such as a piece of equipment you might be considering purchasing.

• How much is it going to cost?
• What is the lifetime expectancy for this piece of equipment?
• What are the ongoing maintenance costs?
• How easy or difficult is it for your staff to work with?
• What can it produce?

But many business owners don’t look at customer acquisition in this light and may be missing an opportunity to improve their sustainability.

So, what are some of the components to measuring a customer’s value?

• Purchase – average spend per purchase

• Frequency – how often they purchase

• Paying – how they pay

• Relationship – how they react, relate

• Influence – who can they influence

• Loyalty – price shop, share, rate, review, refer 

• Lifetime Value – how long will they stay

So who’s your best customer?

This is a guest post by Amanda Baird, a Marketing Strategist, Analyst and Researcher with a domestic and global financial services background. To learn more about Amanda, you can connect with her through her LinkedIn profile.

Having attended a SES Sponsor’s session this past February, it became clear that the nature of SEO has dramatically changed.

Google has been rolling out between 5-600 changes to its search algorithms every year, making it more difficult to game the system. A few of the more notorious changes were Panda and Penguin. Panda’s primary target is content, while Penguin’s focus is links.

Panda was originally introduced in February of 2011 and regularly goes through updates. By March of this year Google rolled out its 25^th iteration of Panda. Once Panda was introduced, many websites experienced a fall in rankings, penalties, or both.

This session, titled Link Building, Authors, Panda, Penguin, Tools & More, was presented by Jim Boykin, owner of Internet Marketing Ninjas.

Boykin recommended that you look at who is linking to you, who you are linking to – and ask ‘does it make sense’? Google is now looking for more natural interactions between websites. For example, a dentist’s blog linking to a flower shop triggers a robotic disconnect.

He further suggested that you dig deep into any reviews about your site, and question if they are genuine – Google certainly will. Your back links and anchor text links should be organic and natural – not broken, not over optimized for search, and definitely not bought.

Having real people like or comment on your site that Google can verify as authors also helps. The Panda algorithm verifies if the comment on a blog was made by an individual who shows up somewwhere else on the Internet. If the commenter has no other accounts on the Internet, Google decides it is a fake account created solely for the purpose of attempting to game the system. That person is considered as an unranked author and that can negatively impact your site’s overall rankings. Getting genuine reactions to your posts from people who show up elsewhere indicates organic engagement, and that should be your objective.

Today’s SEO practices and the best signals are from someone who finds your website as a result of a Google search and then goes to a social platform website such as LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter to explore deeper. This kind of behavior tells Google that your content is worth sharing. The worst signal is that someone finds your site via Google and then returns to the search – indicating the information sought was either not found or not relevant to the search. This search behavior is referred to as pogo sticking. You should be monitoring your activity through your analytics account and paying attention to the bounce rate.

With Panda, Google may be trying to dictate what natural content looks like. While Google does offer a lot of web master support to aid in the development of optimized sites, be advised that if you optimize too much, you risk being penalized. The understanding is that Google wants people to write organically without a SEO agenda in mind, an agenda that SEO/SEM managers have suggested in the past due to Google’s previous search algorithms. Boykin went on to suggest to the SEO and SEM managers in the room, “Google is not your friend. As a practice, your jobs mess with the algorithm.”

A few other key takeaways from Boykin’s presentation:

• Write great content to get links and mentions
• Build your own brand and community
• Create great resources so you don’t have to ask for links
• Stop chasing the short tail
• Start making connections with influencers

No longer is there magic code to play the search game, Boykin declared that the payoff requires you to put in the work and put these practices in action now, to avoid getting a notification letter from Google. Google notifications are not, “We notice something about your site…”, it’s (in so many words) instead, they notify you with a ratings penalty and notification that “You’ve messed up; here’s how, let us know when you’ve fixed it…”.

Get your website optimized – organically. This requires a delicate balance of content, social citations, and web citations, which when intersected will result in authorship and trust. Don’t pay for links, fix your broken links, and update your backlinks and anchor text with organic search phrases. Why? Google sees links as votes that your website is genuine and a valued source for information and resources.

It’s Springtime –finally. Springtime triggers thoughts of cleaning – freshening up the house, yard and even digging into closets to rid yourself of heavy winter wear and cobwebs.

Your business needs a springtime clean as well. Purge old files and records now that your taxes are filed; put things into storage, donate them or toss them out to make room to grow your business – maybe even create space to bring on some summer Interns.

If your business experiences a slow down during the summer, then spring would be a good time to ramp up sales and marketing efforts to keep your leads and project pipelines filled and cash registers humming during these upcoming months.

And if you’ve been reading my latest posts, then you are tuned into how things are changing quickly on the Internet. The following are 11 things to get on your ‘must get marketing done’ list for this spring:

1. Replace Google Alerts. First you may have noticed that it hasn’t been working all that well lately, and you probably have heard that it is going to be discontinued. I’m testing a replacement free alert service now and so far so good.
2. Your blog’s subscription is being serviced by Google’s Feedburner. This service is being discontinued shortly as well. You can consider migrating now to Feedblitz, which has a free RSS subscription service but the email service is for a fee – low and manageable but a fee nonetheless.
3. Google+, Twitter and Facebook all changed their banner and image sizes on your profiles. It is probably a good time to get some new artwork and reignite your profiles.
4. Install rel=auth tag. Content is a critical piece to the search optimization puzzle. Google takes this seriously and offers authorship coding for your blog that links to your Google+ profile. This also helps you claim authorship in case anyone is scraping content for their own use. Another benefit is if you come up in a search, your headshot just might pop up in the search results with it. If you aren’t comfortable coding then get some help to install rel=auth tagging on your blog.
5. Software updates. Just like your computer operating system and programs that you use daily, your website and your blog programs have continual updates to improve speed, performance and security. It is probably time to have your website programs updated.
6. Fix the Links. Have you tested lately for broken links on your website? These are bad not just for visitors but for search engines too. It is a good idea to run some diagnostics to find broken links on your site and get them fixed or removed. I would also suggest running site speed tests and find ways to improve your site load times.
7. Get Links. Like Spring Shopping, now is a good time to instill a plan to start building up high-value back links to your site. Do some research to find the directories and web sites that you would want to get links from and create a strategy and a plan to get them.
8. Keywords, maybe they are still the same, maybe they should change – it is really a matter of what is trending and what people are looking for so think about revisiting your keywords. It might be time to rediscover what is working and what is not. This is a good time to begin drilling down to time spent and bounce rate on individual pages on your website and find ways to increase time spent and reduce bounce rates.
9. Grow, prune, arrange, and sort your email lists. The more relevant your emails the more likely your conversions. Create campaigns that not only help you to grow your email marketing lists but also help you to identify who is interested in what kind of messages, preserve your contacts by avoiding getting nicked as a ‘do not mail’ address.
10. Repurpose your marketing copy. Revisit all your past marketing material and create new ways of reusing or refashioning your material to meet the high demand for content across multiple channels on the web. Can you make an infographic? How about a video or tutorial?
11. Spring into action – find ways to revisit lost leads, grow awareness, engage existing customers, and nurture fans.

Since you took the time to read through this post, I’m going to share a secret: ask your web designer or developer about schemas. If you haven’t set them up on your website you might want to get that going to get over on your competition.