http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com Mon, 21 December 2015 09:54:00 Mon, 21 December 2015 09:54:00 3158 http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2015/12/21/how-i-used-linkedin-for-prospecting.aspx It seemed like finding clients on social media was the stuff you read about on, well, social media, so my initial reluctance to use LinkedIn as a prospecting tool was high.  While it sounded like the type of thing that only worked for other people, I hadn't heard anything convincing from my own circle of sales comrades that it couldn't be successful. We all shared the same bright-eyed skepticism when it came to being heavy social sellers. But with strong anecdotal evidence from my own research, I figured LinkedIn was harboring too much potential to not tap into it, so I set my "optimistic hesitance" aside and decided to join the "other side" to start mining social media for business deals.  Here's a rundown of how I started my prospecting on LinkedIn along with my results and outcomes:  Approach I went into this endeavor with a straightforward definition of what I wanted success to look like: for every 15 introductory notes I sent out, I wanted to get three conversations (I used this number based on similar and previous "cold" approach channel results and the number of LinkedIn InMails my account was able to send within one month.) My goal was to simply get in front of my target prospects and ask if talking about any marketing challenges they had would be worth their time. Simple enough.  First, I started with building a targeted client list and the appropriate filters to build the prospect list using the Sales Navigator tool. This took into account things like company size, titles of ideal decision-makers, company verticals and geography. I was able to see the degree of connection these folks were to me, if we had any connections in common, and based on my subscription, I was able to have this list refresh on a weekly basis with new profiles that fit my desired criteria. From there, I was able to use that information to research and join the right groups that served as watering holes for my ideal prospects. These groups were based on popular topics my potential clients were interested in and pain points they were eager to solve, like growing their business, streamlining marketing and sales operations and leveraging technology for better marketing insights.  Next, I started planting the seeds for participation – asking and answering questions that members of the group had posed to drive engagement and posting other pieces of original content my firm had developed to share. Based on response, I'd reach out to a member personally. While I had no idea if they had a marketing problem, let alone one my firm was equipped to solve, I'd send an InMail introducing myself, that my firm helps companies similar to theirs, and if a five-minute conversation was worth their time about the topic we discussed within the group.   Outcomes and Insights This approach got quite a few bites. Of the first three notes I sent, I got three conversations. My initial reaction was that this was too good to be true and that there was no way the 100% response rate was sustainable. Within the first month, I'd drummed up four calls and one networking/coffee meeting with a potential referral partner. Of the notes that I sent that didn't materialize, more often than not I'd receive a message back saying "Thanks for thinking of me, but no" which to a salesperson, is better than "I'll think about it" or "Try me again later, in three months." From our firm's perspective, one month is considered a short test, but I was able to draw a few solid conclusions that affirmed the benefits I'd read about prior to my prospecting efforts: -Social media, LinkedIn specifically, is a great channel for building awareness and a pipeline. If your goal is to simply open the floodgates and get your name is front of ideal companies, accounts, and prospects, this channel offers a low-cost barrier to entry to do so, and was very time-efficient. Once I had my list built, and my introductory email with my elevator pitch complete, reaching out to a handful of prospects each day barely took 20 minutes. -Social media offers a nice opportunity to position me and my company as subject matter experts. Since we already have a nice stream of content through our blog, along with a few years of archives to dip into, I felt armed to share our knowledge with prospects and group members. Using our own branded, original content gave our take on the marketing matters more authority and credibility versus the usual "Here's an article I read in Inc. about the subject..." There's definitely an advantage saying, "Here's how we think" instead of "Here's what I read too." -Social media is extremely efficient in getting sales outcomes. As a salesperson, there's nothing worse than getting "think it overs" and sales opportunities that stall from indecision. When that happens, you're forced into the dreaded follow-up sequence where all you get are crickets and tumbleweeds for responses. The InMail approach was especially useful in getting potential prospects to give me a definitive answer: yes, a five minute call is worth my time, or no, thanks for thinking of me but not interested. Even with the no's, I at least knew where I stood  and allowed me to keep moving through my list. What's your experience with LinkedIn Prospecting and social selling? Whether you had epic wins or utter failure, we'd love to hear your stories and invite you to share them in the comments below! http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2015/12/21/how-i-used-linkedin-for-prospecting.aspx http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2015/12/21/how-i-used-linkedin-for-prospecting.aspx Mon, 21 December 2015 09:54:00 2659 http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2015/11/30/lead-generation-quality-or-quantity.aspx Lead quality and lead quantity are sometimes thought of as competing ideas, requiring you to pick one and sacrifice the other. Either generate many leads of questionable quality, or a very small number of spot-on leads. There’s a problem with this logic. Marketing isn’t an exact science (much to our dismay). A lead generation campaign that is targeted in a way that may seem too broad still has a real potential to pull in highly qualified leads. And a highly targeted campaign might bring in great leads, but if it isn’t pulling in enough of them to hit your sales goals, it isn’t serving its purpose. Not every lead will be perfect (yes, even the ones who seem perfect on paper can disappoint), making it important to increase the opportunities your sales team has to close a sale. The clichéd saying that you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take couldn’t be more true when it comes to your leads: if you don’t give your sales team anyone to sell to, you won’t be selling to anyone. Don’t Be Afraid To Broaden Your Reach If you’re serious about increasing your sales, you need to start by increasing your lead quantity. For most, this requires increasing your reach. Increased reach can be accomplished in a number of ways, but let’s talk about one that almost all marketers can relate to: broader search keywords and targeting. If you’ve been focusing all of your lead generation efforts on lead quality, this advice may seem blasphemous. After all, won’t you risk diluting your lead quality if you broaden your keywords and targeting?  The answer is yes. But by being laser focused, you risk missing people who are potential qualified leads. A Broader Reach Doesn’t Mean An Untargeted Campaign Let’s be clear: we aren’t suggesting that you run a campaign with vague targeting or ad copy. Too broad of a campaign will result in you essentially throwing your money out the window. If you’re going to part with your money, let’s make sure you get something in return.  What we are suggesting is opening up your targeting and ad copy to allow for more people to be interested in your ad.  Let’s pretend you are a marketer for an online record store that only sells rare jazz records. Right now, your AdWords ads are very targeted: Rare Jazz Records Hard-To-Find Vinyl From Your Favorite Jazz Musicians. Shop Now! This ad might be gathering clicks from people who are in the market for a rare jazz record, but the number of clicks is smaller than you know it should be based on your knowledge of the market. How might you broaden this to get more leads? You could to create two ads that speak to broader – yet still targeted - audiences: one focusing on jazz and one focusing on rare albums.  Jazz Records Unique Selection Of Jazz Vinyl. Browse Our Catalog Now! Looking For A Rare Album? Unique Selection Of Hard-To-Find Records. Shop Now! This broadening will capture people who are simply searching for jazz albums, rare or common, as well as people who are looking for rare vinyl, with no stated genre preference. Will some of the leads these ads generate be duds? Yep. Are there more opportunities for qualified leads in these broad ads than in the ad that promotes a highly-targeted product? You bet. Broadening Your Whole Campaign While AdWords ads make for a simplistic example, the principles shown above can be used across your entire marketing strategy. In the example above, we’re still advertising to people who are in our target market – we’re just framing it in a way that we don’t scare anyone off who isn’t specifically looking for a rare jazz album. When you develop ad copy, create landing pages or choose your advertising channels, be open to trying tactics that have a broader reach than just the people who are in your most targeted group of ideal customers. While there is merit to the idea of focusing on the smallest, most qualified group, you risk missing out on other qualified leads – and a lot of potential sales. http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2015/11/30/lead-generation-quality-or-quantity.aspx http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2015/11/30/lead-generation-quality-or-quantity.aspx Mon, 30 November 2015 11:57:00 2659 http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2015/11/17/what-does-a-successful-marketing-agency-relationship-look-like.aspx You’ve just signed a contract with a new marketing agency. You’re buzzing with excitement about what the future holds for your company. Think of the campaigns! The leads! The sales! And it’s not just you who is excited - your marketing agency can’t wait to get started, either. Marketers love getting to dive into new projects where they get to immerse themselves in the world of their client and develop strategies to help them achieve their goals. Unfortunately, misunderstandings and misaligned priorities sometimes get in the way of making incredible marketing happen. Though there are several ways that a marketing agency can make or break this relationship, today we’re focusing on ways that clients can help ensure a great relationship. If you want to make sure that you get the most out of your time working with a marketing agency, remember that a successful marketing agency relationship rewards frequent communication and trust. How to have a successful relationship with your marketing agency I can’t emphasize enough that the success of the relationship depends as much on you (the client) as it does your marketing agency. Both parties must commit in order for the relationship to be successful. There are two main reasons that contribute to a client-agency relationship that’s less than satisfactory for either party: a false belief that the marketing agency can work completely independently and a lack of trust. Marketing agencies rely on client feedback to develop successful campaigns This one is often an issue for organizations that hire an agency because they lack the internal resources to spearhead marketing. While handing off marketing activities to an agency certainly frees up a significant amount of resources within your organization, it does not mean that you don’t have to work collaboratively with your agency. Now, we don’t mean that we expect you to write copy or come up with campaign ideas. That’s the job of the agency. What your agency does need from you includes:  Timely feedback on material they create so that they can revise until both parties are happy with the final product Open lines of communication with a reliable internal employee who can answer the agency’s questions Insight into the quality and quantity of leads and sales Insight into organizational changes that may impact marketing  What your agency needs is a person to shine a light on the right track for the agency to take. Your input and information ensures that the time you are paying for is spent in a productive manner, instead of spent developing copy and creative that is incomplete or incorrect, and thus, unusable.  We’ve found that some of our most successful relationships with clients occur when there is one point-person that we primarily work with at an organization. When one person acts as the spokesperson for their organization, we are able to streamline our processes and develop a relationship that allows us to learn over time what kinds of requests and feedback to anticipate. It also makes accountability crystal clear, as there is no question about who should be responsible on the client side for providing feedback and approval. You must trust your marketing agency to develop campaigns you like It might sound odd: why would an agency be hired if the client doesn’t trust them?  Maybe the person who hired the agency trusts their work, but their day-to-day point-of-contact doesn’t. Maybe it’s the first time they’ve worked with an agency and they’re nervous about giving up some control to an outside organization. Maybe they just have trust issues. Whatever the case may be, it’s crucial that trust be developed so that there is no slow down or dilution of the quality of work being created by the agency. A lack of trust most often shows itself through excessive revisions. Any reputable agency will plan for a number of revisions on every project based on client feedback; however, there may become a point when the revisions aren’t fixing or improving the marketing project, and instead, slow down the creative process.  This lack of trust needs to be confronted by both parties. For agencies, this means developing processes to get sign-off on projects, creative and procedures prior to beginning work. This may play out like this:  A client and agency decide they want to create a billboard, with a specific goal of having it increase brand awareness. If the client agrees that this channel and goal are worth exploring, they can submit a creative brief to their agency. A creative brief will include the client’s notes about what the project needs to achieve in order for them to deem it a success, the most important thing the billboard needs to do or say, and the priority of the project. This information will allow for the agency to move forward with the project in a manner that’s in line with client expectations. This will help the copywriting and creative team create the billboard quicker while reducing the number of revisions that a client will request (since they’ve already set the requirements for the billboard).  Click here to view a larger version of our Creative Brief For clients, this means letting your agency know your expectations and limitations upfront during the creative brief process. Think of the creative brief process as a way for you to dictate what you envision (or don’t want) for your campaign. By letting your agency know upfront that you don’t want to use a photo of a middle aged man or the word “revolutionary” in your creative, for example, you’ll be able to ensure that your agency steers away from the things that would make you consider the piece unusable. Remember that creative briefs are meant to be just that: brief. Keep your vision and restrictions limited to the most important items; otherwise, both parties will be so bogged down in minutiae the billboard deadline may be missed. We’re all working toward the same goal With timely and open communication and clear processes in place, you and your agency should be able to successfully develop crowd-pleasing creative and meet deadlines. At the end of the day, the most important thing to remember about your relationship with your marketing agency is that you’re both working toward the same goal: the success of your business. By sharing your input while still trusting the ultimate output of your agency, you’ll find you and your agency can accomplish great things. http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2015/11/17/what-does-a-successful-marketing-agency-relationship-look-like.aspx http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2015/11/17/what-does-a-successful-marketing-agency-relationship-look-like.aspx Tue, 17 November 2015 16:52:00 2661 http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2015/11/04/before-launching-an-inbound-campaign-a-marketing-checklist.aspx Let’s say you (or your marketing team) has already put in the time and hard work to hone in on a well-researched and strategic inbound marketing plan. You’ve got the perfect channels, tactics, messaging and offers in place to make it start raining highly qualified inbound leads – now all you have to do is press “go.” Right? If you don’t have an air-tight framework for what happens next, there’s still legwork to be done. Before you launch, be sure you’ve given due consideration to all of the following steps to ensure you’re getting the most out of your campaign. What to Consider Before Launching Your Inbound Campaign Revisit Your Goals Having proper goals in place before launching your campaign is essential; without them, there’s no accountability, no definition of success and no context to inform ongoing direction. To avoid intangible, subjective goals (i.e. “more engagement” or “better leads”), use the SMART goals framework. SMART stands for: Specific Measurable Attainable Realistic Timebound Use this framework to establish threshold, target and exceptional goals. Make sure you put these numbers down on paper, share them with your team and incorporate them into your marketing reports. Once your campaign has kicked off, keep these goals handy and compare your performance against them on a regular basis. Audit Your Intake Process One common misconception about marketing is that sales and intake are somehow separate from marketing. The truth is that every area of your company that affects how your market perceives you – from your sales tactics and the way your staff answers the phone down to your email signatures and the invoices you send to customers – is connected to marketing. When marketing efforts end with channel execution and fail to take into consideration these less obvious touch points with leads, customers and referral partners, businesses miss the opportunity to maximize their marketing investment, and they risk creating a negative impression of their brand among would-be leads. Before you launch, it’s important to take the time to thoroughly audit your company’s intake process. This is a crucial component to maximizing the performance of any campaign – and it’s often overlooked. For example: Who in your company is accountable for handling inbound leads? What is their documented intake process? Have they been properly trained so that all leads come away loving your company – even if they’re not ready to convert? How are leads handled after-hours and on the weekends? Are these expectations being clearly set with leads? For website, phone and email leads, is everyone clear on how to track leads in your CRM, coordinate with the rest of the team and follow up in an effective manner? The person in charge of intake needs to be accountable for answering these questions, and they need to make timelines for the following before the campaign kicks off: Ensure all the right intake/sales people in the right seat. In other words, does everyone get what they’re doing, want to do it and have the capacity to do it well? Training and expectations are known. When there’s ambiguity in training, expectations or accountability, the ball can easily get dropped. Reinforce training. After the training is complete, continue to revisit the process until the intake process is automatic. Testing. Have someone use a fake name and do test calls/emails/web contact submissions to ensure that the process is working. Ensure Proper Tracking and Analytics Are in Place If your inbound campaign is effective, you’ll likely see a dramatic increase in conversions and web traffic. To have a clear line of sight to your key performance indicators (KPIs) and to avoid getting bogged down trying to figure out which leads and traffic came from where, take the time to make sure you have the proper tracking in place. Depending on your KPIs, this can include but is not limited to: Website analytics Real-time website tracking Heatmap tracking Phone tracking/recording Channel-specific URL tags Unique landing pages Plan and Build Your Nurturing Flow The marketing doesn’t stop once your sales/intake team has communicated with the lead; you need a plan to follow up and nurture leads through your sales funnel once they have provided you with their email. Following the steps below will help you build a flow that works with your strategy: Identify who you want to nurture Determine what you want to nurture them towards Decide the frequency and number of emails needed to establish a trusting relationship with this target Write your nurturing emails so they’re ready to go If you expect a high volume of leads, an automated marketing platform like HubSpot will make this process more manageable.  To help simplify this process for preparation, we put together the checklist below.  Charlie Nadler http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2015/11/04/before-launching-an-inbound-campaign-a-marketing-checklist.aspx http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2015/11/04/before-launching-an-inbound-campaign-a-marketing-checklist.aspx Wed, 04 November 2015 10:50:00 2659 http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2015/10/19/are-you-marketing-the-wrong-attributes-of-your-business.aspx You know your business better than anyone. After all, you’ve put your blood, sweat and tears into building and marketing your vision. You have every reason to be completely confident that you are promoting the most enticing attributes of your business. Or do you? Focusing on the Wrong Attributes Can Lead to Big Disappointment It’s all too common for business owners to be so closely connected to their service or product that they misjudge what it is about their offering that their market will care about most. When the wrong attributes are marketed, your target audience will struggle to feel a connection to your brand, making it difficult for your organization to hit its sales goals. Two of the most common reasons business owners market the wrong features of their business are: A lack of consideration for the emotional effect varying attributes could have on potential customers An incorrect assumption that the attributes that show company credibility are of interest to customers Market What Your Customers Really Want – Not What You Want Them to Care About Forget about what you think is great about your business. Instead, think about your ideal customers. From their perspective, if they’re considering purchasing the product or service offered by your company, what do they really want? What would compel them to purchase? Hint: it might not be something you are currently marketing. It might not even be an attribute of your business that you’ve spent much time thinking about. There may be a mismatch between what you are currently marketing and what the people who purchase your product are looking for. The good news is that what your customers really want might already be part of your product or scope of services– you just haven’t figured out how to best highlight it yet. Ask “Where Would I Send My Mother?” Take, for example, one of our clients: a senior services network offering – among many other things – an assisted living home. The organization has earned various accreditations and offers a variety of payment options for residents – both of which are important for running their nonprofit as successfully as possible. But if you’re looking for a home to move your elderly mother into, are the number of accreditations really what will draw you to any particular assisted living home? Instead of looking at the facts about how the home is run, we wanted to look at what the organization does to make their residents feel at home. What we found out from first hand feedback was that residents raved about the chef-prepared meals made on-site daily and were always looking forward to the wine and cheese happy hours.   To test the ability of this small yet emotional attribute to move people, let’s walk through a simple exercise: When you think about your mother living in an accredited assisted living home, what images come to mind? If you’re drawing a blank (like I am), it’s because the accreditation of the home doesn’t tell you anything about the experience she would have living there. In other words, it’s not something you can picture.   Why? Accreditations are boring. Important? Absolutely. Compelling? Not if we don’t know what it means for day-to-day experiences. Accreditations can impact almost every aspect of a business, from leadership to meal choices. While the quantity and names of accreditations themselves won’t spark interest in most audiences, the outcomes of these accreditations might. Now, when you think about your mother living at an assisted living home with delicious chef-prepared meals, what images come to mind? You may have thought about fresh, brightly colored food. Maybe you imagined the scent of a home cooked meal. Or maybe, like me, you pictured your mother, feeling happy and healthy, laughing over dinner with her friends. Fresh cooked meals may sound like a small detail – and they may, in fact, be – but when you consider how miserable your mom would likely be if she were eating bad food every day, this small detail suddenly has a much bigger emotional impact. When you think about the two options, which one would you choose to send your mother to? Finding the Right Attributes to Market If you have a feeling that you may be marketing the wrong attributes of your business, you’ll need to figure out what your business offers that helps ease pain, solve problems or makes life more enjoyable for your customers. To do this, you’ll want to embark on a small market research project. Talk to your current customers: what do they like about your product or service? What do they wish they knew prior to purchase? What surprised them about your product? You’re likely to be surprised by your customers’ experience and emotional ties to your product or service. Not sure how to get started with a market research project targeting your own customers? Gather a sample of current customers that you can email a survey to. The survey should be short and sweet (the shorter the survey, the more likely your customers will complete it) and participation should be incentivized, if possible. Have you struggled to find what parts of your business capture the attention of your target market? Let us know in the comments! http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2015/10/19/are-you-marketing-the-wrong-attributes-of-your-business.aspx http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2015/10/19/are-you-marketing-the-wrong-attributes-of-your-business.aspx Mon, 19 October 2015 16:07:00 2661 http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2015/10/02/should-you-download-google-primer.aspx In October of last year, Google rolled out Primer – the app designed to help startups, small business owners and would-be marketers learn the basics of marketing strategy development through short, digestible self-paced lessons. Until recently, I had only seen a few screenshots of the app, which indicated a very basic introduction to search engine marketing. (“Online searches give a lot of insight into who is doing the search and why they’re doing it.” Yes, thank you for that, Google.)  Okay – so clearly the app isn’t designed for someone who’s been doing this type of work for years, but I decided to give it a test drive to see if it’d be potentially helpful to new business owners and/or aspiring marketers. Clear approach to big picture strategy For those new to marketing, figuring out where to start is a daunting task. The ever-changing landscape of tools, tactics, technology updates and algorithm overhauls is a lot to keep up with – and the seemingly endless number of “experts” and self-proclaimed “thought leaders” tripping over themselves to churn out tips and how-to’s can make getting a handle on things feel even more confusing. Primer does a nice job of focusing in on what’s important as you develop your marketing strategy. The lessons guide you toward beginning with a clear understanding of your market, and they provide processes for determining how to make sense of data. Users also receive guidance on starting with the right resources before diving into tactical recommendations. Yes, there are recommended tools and platforms, but not an overwhelming number of them – and they all serve to support the development of a thought-out plan. Good starting point for setting realistic expectations In going through Primer’s lessons, the basic innerworkings of SEO, SEM, content and measurement come into focus. Without a handle on these fundamentals, SEO can seem like a dark art – which makes it difficult to know what to expect from it as a marketing channel. Especially with the countless emails bombarding us all with promises of getting our websites to “Rank #1 on Google!” it’s easy to think there are some easy levers that just need to be pulled to start capturing more search traffic.  Primer walks through the high level work involved in these channels and even requires that you have marketing resources with the capacity to manage them before you can advance in the lesson. Whether you’re considering this work yourself or delegating it to a marketing team, having this insight from the start is crucial.  Smart interface Primer is easy to follow – but not too easy, which is a plus. Were every screen to require the same upward swipe to proceed, it’d be tempting to get into a mindless rhythm of swiping through entire lessons without paying close attention. With Primer, different screens prompt different actions – which helps keep your focus. And, the app’s design and tone manage to have some character without feeling too cute. So, should you download it? If you’re new to marketing – absolutely. It’s easy to use, requires minimal time and the lessons are useful and focused on developing a foundation that will be helpful to both business owner and beginning marketer. If you already have a handle on the fundamentals of marketing, you may pick up a couple new tips but most of the lessons will feel skippable (which should go without saying; the app is called Primer). If you’ve used Primer, did you find it helpful? Are there other resources you like better? Let us know your thoughts in the comments. http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2015/10/02/should-you-download-google-primer.aspx http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2015/10/02/should-you-download-google-primer.aspx Fri, 02 October 2015 09:53:00 2659 http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2015/09/17/the-four-sins-of-reporting-and-how-to-create-reports-that-are-actually-useful.aspx Any marketer worth their weight in AdWords knows that reporting is one of the most important cornerstones of a successful campaign. Reporting allows marketers and the business owners working with them to see what is or isn’t working and allows decisions to made regarding best next steps. Without reporting, marketing is just a series of uninformed guesses. The Four Sins of Reporting   With such emphasis (rightly) being put on the importance of reporting, we’ve noticed that sometimes reporting is taken too far. Whether you are a marketer tasked with creating reports or a business owner who is responsible for monitoring the success of their marketing agency, you should ask yourself if your reports are committing any of the following reporting sins: 1. Too Detailed To Understand With a bevy of analytic tools available to marketers, it’s easy to get excited about all of the data available to include in reports. While having many different ways to quantify success (and, occasionally, failure) seems like a sure-fire way to impress clients, business owners know that too many details is not just overwhelming – it makes it difficult to figure out which metrics matter the most. 2. Too Time-Consuming To Create Reporting does not happen without a time commitment. After all, marketers need to be providing accurate data and making it easily understandable. That doesn’t mean it’s not possible to spend too much time on reporting, though. Marketing Land’s Matt Umbro said it best when he suggested that reporting should require no more than 25% of a client’s monthly billable hours. After all, if a marketer spends more than a quarter of your time reporting, how will they have enough time to produce campaigns to report on? 3. Lacking Context For Individual Data Points “30% increase in conversions!” “2,500 clicks!” “10% increase in time spent on page!” If you’ve ever created or been presented with a marketing report, you’re familiar with the data points like those above. Unfortunately, these data points are often presented without the context necessary to actually make this data mean anything. A 30% increase in conversions sounds great … until you remember that the previous month had seen a 70% dip in them. 4. Lacking Accountability For Success or Failure The success or failure of a campaign is dependent on many things: channels, copy, budget and targeting – to name just a few. However, that doesn’t mean that marketers shouldn’t hold themselves accountable for the results of a campaign. If your reporting doesn’t provide any goals or benchmarks to determine what success is, how can a marketer or a client determine they are receiving the results they expect? If any of those sins are reflected in the reports you create or receive, it’s time for a reporting overhaul. The good news is that a restructured report can save time and give you a clearer sense of what moves need to be made to help your campaigns be successful. Creating Useful Reports with Scorecards We’ve found that the most effective reports are concise, provide relevant context and hold our team accountable for its results. It also requires less time to create than reports we’ve made in the past. We call this report our scorecard, and it’s quite simple to emulate. An example of one of our scorecards can be seen below:   Benefits of Reporting with a Scorecard The benefits of the scorecard are quite apparent upon first glance:  You can clearly see what goals have been set You can clearly see if those goals have been met, which means business owners are able to see if the marketers have held up their end of the bargain You can quickly compare the results of varying months to each other You can learn all of this information with only a small amount of time spent looking at the report Because our scorecard shows monthly data, there is enough context to give more meaning to each month’s information – for example, you see that even though August 2015 had significantly more conversions than July, it still felt short of our monthly goal. Because this scorecard design inherently provides context, it allows for reduced or completely eliminated written analysis. With less written analysis and overall simpler structure for reporting, you’ll be able to spend more time earning conversions and less time reporting on them. http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2015/09/17/the-four-sins-of-reporting-and-how-to-create-reports-that-are-actually-useful.aspx http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2015/09/17/the-four-sins-of-reporting-and-how-to-create-reports-that-are-actually-useful.aspx Thu, 17 September 2015 13:01:00 2661 http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2015/08/11/how-are-you-calculating-your-conversion-rate.aspx Quick: what’s your company’s conversion rate?  Remember that percentage; we’ll come back to it in a minute.  Having a handle on your business’s conversion rate is a critical step toward being able to predict marketing ROI. (For more on this, see our post on how to use your conversion rate to develop ROI metrics for marketing channels.) While the question of how to calculate your conversion rate might seem obvious at first, I think it’s worth a closer look. Here’s why. Your Conversion Rate Isn’t 95% We hear this all the time when we start with working with a new client. As part of the kickoff, when we ask about conversion rate, the typical answer is at least 90%. More often it’s 95% -- and sometimes it’s even 100%. If your answer above was in the 90-100% range, you’re not alone – but you should probably reconsider that number. Why? When small businesses make the transition from relying on referrals to investing in growth through marketing, this will have a significant impact on the types of leads that come in. Most referrals are by nature ‘hot’ leads – these are people who have come to you because someone they trust sent them your way and they may not even be considering anyone else. Closing these leads is easy; your conversion rate should be close to 100%. Once you begin opening new marketing channels, you’re casting a wider net than you were with word of mouth – which means you’re going to start seeing leads that may be much higher up in the sales funnel. For example, let’s say you begin investing in a paid search campaign; assuming this is a good fit for your business, you’ll likely start seeing a mixed bag of leads – some ready to convert into customers right away, some who contacted you along with seven of your competitors and some who clicked accidentally/are looking for a job/are doing competitive research/“can guarantee to get you #1 on Google good sir!” etc. That second batch is comprised of quality leads – and it’s important gain visibility with them if you’re intending to grow your business – but these cannot be treated the same as the referral who’s ready to convert before the first contact is even made.   Expecting to maintain a 95% conversion rate during this phase is not realistic, and it will skew your planning if you allocate your budget and resources based on these projections. If you don’t know what conversion rate to expect, that’s okay; start with an estimate that’s 10% more conservative than what you think it might be for non-referral leads and carefully track and measure your leads and conversion data so that you can hone in on a more accurate estimate as you move forward.  If you’ve calculated your conversion rate based on data from a variety of sales and marketing channels and you’re still at 95% -- congratulations and please send me the name of your sales coach. Charlie Nadler http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2015/08/11/how-are-you-calculating-your-conversion-rate.aspx http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2015/08/11/how-are-you-calculating-your-conversion-rate.aspx Tue, 11 August 2015 13:34:00 2659 http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2015/07/27/communicating-major-organizational-changes-your-checklist-for-doing-it-right.aspx Changes in your organization are all but inevitable – stick around long enough and you’ll need to (or be forced to) deal with changes that are so significant that you need to announce them to the world. Sometimes these changes are relatively benign, like a new company name. Often times, it’s great news, like an exciting acquisition or new product offering. Of course, not all changes are good: departing key staff members, layoffs or changes in business structure are all tougher to announce. Regardless of whether the changes taking place in your business are positive or negative, it’s important that the proper steps be taken to communicate the changes. A poorly executed announcement could rub employees, customers and investors the wrong way, even if the changes you’re sharing are positive. A well-planned strategy can help ensure your organizational changes are announced in a manner that best manages the emotions and reactions of those impacted.  Our suggestions below are what we’ve found works best for small businesses announcing organizational changes. Enterprise-level businesses should work with a consultant and/or legal counsel when developing their announcement plan. Announcement Timeline Before getting into the nitty-gritty of messaging and execution tasks, you need to step back and consider how you will roll out your announcement. It isn’t a “one-and-done” deal. You’ll need to communicate to different groups with messaging tailored to their relationship to your business; for many businesses, that means employees, clients, investors and the general media. What’s more, you’ll want to let different groups know about your announcement at different times. Although the timeline of some announcements (like a merger) may be legally regulated for publicly traded companies, we recommend following the below timeline as closely as possible:  Employees Investors Clients Media General public Internal Communications In most situations, employees should know about changes impacting the company before anyone else – especially if those changes may impact their employment status. If they find out through any means other than direct communication, they are likely to feel betrayed. Giving employees first access to the new information will help build internal morale, give them time to ask questions and allow them to be prepared for when the announcement becomes public. Investors and clients should be alerted to the organizational change very shortly after you announce the news to your employees – possibly even the same day. In many circumstances, the announcements to these two groups may be made at the same time. External Communications Once you’ve shared the news with your employees, investors and clients, you can reach out to the media and general public (but don’t be surprised if they have already caught wind of your announcement – never forget that employees, investors and clients are all potential sources of information for the media). At minimum, plan to share your news via the following methods: Press release Website copy Social media posts Be sure to keep a close eye on media mentions (Google Alerts is a great, free tool for watching this), social replies and posts and any other Internet chatter relating to your announcement. You may need to insert yourself into the conversation to provide clarification, answer questions or (in tougher cases) halt the spread of false information. Tactical Items          Before you begin rolling out your announcement with the timeline described above, make sure you have prepared or are prepared to check off the boxes below. There are many tactical elements of an organizational announcement to consider; missing or messing up any of these items could hinder your ability to share your message the way you’d like. Every organizational announcement has a different set of communication needs. The list below captures many items that should be considered, but it should be noted that it is possible some items may not apply to your unique situation. Craft your messaging for each segment you must reach (employee, investor, client, media/general public) ensuring that each group understands the following: What the change is Why it is happening (what circumstances, decisions or opportunities led to this?) What it means for them (even if it means business as usual for them) Who they can contact if they have questions Determine what channels you will use to reach each group. Channels may include: Email Phone calls In-person meetings Letters Press releases Social media Advertising (web/print/radio/TV) Update all web presences, printed collateral pieces and advertising to reflect changes, if necessary: Website copy (a thorough audit of every page of your website will be needed) Social media information Email signatures Boiler plates Contact information Directory listings (be sure to update all listings, even if some directories you do not actively manage or pay for) PPC and display advertising Review planned print, television and radio advertising initiatives to ensure they still make sense and ensure that all previously developed creative is still accurate Revisit marketing and SEO strategies and make alterations if your current strategy no longer makes sense Update internal processes that are impacted by your change. Some processes that could need updating include: Intake Sales Guidelines for responding to media requests Employee rules and guidelines A lot to consider, right? While you may be tempted to pick and choose the tasks that seem most interesting, it’s important that you are thorough in your announcement planning. You could spoil big news by having some parties miss or misunderstand your announcement. http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2015/07/27/communicating-major-organizational-changes-your-checklist-for-doing-it-right.aspx http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2015/07/27/communicating-major-organizational-changes-your-checklist-for-doing-it-right.aspx Mon, 27 July 2015 13:15:00 2661 http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2015/06/29/the-problem-with-purple-cow-syndrome.aspx Recently, I was talking with members of my team about some of the more common and problematic misconceptions people have about marketing. There are plenty out there – and we’ll examine more of them in future blog posts  – but there was one that stuck out to us as especially noteworthy: the myth of the big idea. What is Purple Cow Syndrome? If you haven’t read marketing guru Seth Godin’s 2003 book Purple Cow, you’ve probably at least had someone describe the premise to you in some form or another. If not, here’s the quick summary: According to Godin, the days in which businesses could advertise their way to success are over. There is now too much competition for consumer attention, which has led to the end of the TV-industrial complex. In today’s world, the only way for brands to be successful is by creating a product or service that is inherently remarkable. If your business is boring and unremarkable, you’re doomed. (If you're still wondering about the title: after you drive past a few normal cows, they all start to look the same and you stop noticing them… until you see a purple cow. Or, I'd guess, until you see one with long blonde hair wearing a lab coat and a Richard Nixon mask – but I suppose that makes for a less catchy book title.) It’s an insightful book and a compelling idea with plenty of merit. The problem is that 12 years after its publication, we’re still seeing lessons from the book being misapplied. This is what I mean by Purple Cow Syndrome. Disrupt or Die? Godin’s argument is substantiated to a degree when you look at the ultra-successful global brands in the last couple decades. Google, Netflix, Facebook, Apple, Uber and Airbnb are all prime examples of remarkable products and services that have disrupted their respective industries and built massive success primarily through enthusiastic word of mouth rather than traditional advertising. These are all purple cows. So, does this mean that all businesses need to follow this same path? The short answer: no. For some industries, having a unique and remarkable product or service is absolutely critical and the Purple Cow wisdom is highly applicable. Consumer technology is a clear example. Release a “me-too” app into the marketplace and, unless it’s a significant improvement, no amount of well-placed advertising is going to help you topple the innovator that came out first. On the other hand, let’s say you’re the owner of a small auto body shop. If your shop doesn’t revolutionize the way we think about having our dents removed, are you doomed to inevitable failure? Obviously, we’ve all seen auto body shops that do just fine by providing the same predictable, boring old services that mechanics were providing for our grandparents. Brown cows, all. And guess what? The successful shops often advertise. The danger of Purple Cow Syndrome comes when businesses pass on sound strategies for sustainable growth and assume that the only ideas worth considering are the ones that disrupt, go viral, revolutionize and so on.The auto shop is just one example, but the truth is that for the majority of small businesses, marketing success doesn’t look like lightning in a bottle and doesn’t often come from one Big Idea that changes everything overnight. Businesses that we work with typically see success coming as a result of a sound strategy, smart tactical execution, careful measurement, iteration… and patience. Given your market, the competitive landscape and the position you’re competing for, traditional advertising may or may not make sense for your business – but to decide that the tactic is obsolete for all businesses is a mistake. Depending on your service or product, the reality is that there might not be a Purple Cow, nor a need for one. But, while you’re out chasing it, your competitors might just be eating into your market share – one small, tactical bite at a time. http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2015/06/29/the-problem-with-purple-cow-syndrome.aspx http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2015/06/29/the-problem-with-purple-cow-syndrome.aspx Mon, 29 June 2015 15:38:00 2659 http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2015/06/10/are-your-sales-and-marketing-teams-working-in-harmony.aspx Sales and Marketing: they can be the best of friends or the worst of enemies. Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon to find these two teams suffering when their work is siloed. Both teams are working toward the same goal: earning new customers. So why do so many organizations suffer from a lack of insight and communication between two of their most important departments? How Sales and Marketing Feed Off of Each Other For many businesses, Marketing and Sales both involve many distinct processes, but their goals can be boiled down thusly: Marketing: drive leads Sales: close leads Back in the days before everyone used the Internet to research businesses, services and products, the timeline of how Marketing and Sales played into each lead was relatively straightforward: Marketing created demand and drove leads; once the leads contacted Sales, the Sales team closed the deal. With the abundance of information available online, the purchasing process isn’t as linear as it once was. People may skip or repeat parts of the traditional sales process – some may be ready to immediately convert and some may need to be nurtured before they choose to commit. Because the sales process is now less predictable than it once was, Sales and Marketing must rely on each other more than ever. Unfortunately, many of these teams are still operating as in the old days of Sales and Marketing, where each does the best job they can without coordinating with each other. This organizational structure is no longer viable for organizations. So how can you get Sales and Marketing to work together for the greater good? How to Get Sales and Marketing to Work Harmoniously Sales and Marketing should understand that the outcomes of their respective efforts will be more successful if they work collaboratively. Having the support of the other department is akin to phoning a friend on Who Wants to be a Millionaire: you might be able to get the job done without them, but you know the odds of success are a lot better when they share their expertise with you. For example, if Sales clues Marketing in on why the leads they are getting aren’t qualified, Marketing can then recalibrate their efforts to target better leads. More qualified leads will result in more closed sales (and hopefully bonuses all around!). Not sure how to get your Sales and Marketing to phone (or, more realistically, email) each other to provide support? Here’s how the two can get started: Sales: Share Customer Insights with Marketing One of the most important ways that Sales can support Marketing is by providing feedback about the leads they are seeing. Because Marketing generally doesn’t work directly with leads or customers, they may be unaware of commonalities in the leads that are being sent their way. Information about the quality and types of leads that Sales sees must be shared with Marketing so that they can modify their marketing efforts, need be, to ensure that the best leads are being generated. Information Sales should share with Marketing: Are the leads they are seeing high quality? If not, what makes them a poor lead? Are customers voicing opinions on things they want or object to, in relation to either the sales process or the product? Psychographic commonalities in strong leads: what is motivating them to buy? Why now? What benefit will it serve them? If possible, Sales should share conversions directly with Marketing – whether in the form of inquiry emails, contact form submissions or recorded phone calls. Doing so not only helps Marketing adjust its tactics to focus on the best leads and develop stronger lead nurturing strategies, it also helps Sales gain a truer line of sight to the ROI of its marketing channels through lead validation. Marketing: Create Marketing Materials to Help Nurture Leads AND Customers It’s no longer the case that once someone becomes a lead, the work of the marketer ends. While they’ve succeeded in driving demands, it’s often not a one-and-done process for leads at the top of the funnel. While there are many ways to nurture leads – and the best way to nurture will differ at every organization – email marketing is a great place for Marketing to jump in to help Sales. Marketing can assist in enticing a lead to convert by developing strategically crafted and timed emails. Nurturing emails will look different depending on the organization and the lead: practical information, entertaining articles or special offers are all commonly used in nurturing campaigns. By arming Sales with nurturing materials, Sales can then send the appropriate content to each lead. These materials can be used for current customers, as well. It’s important to retain customers through similar nurturing efforts; if you don’t aim to keep clients, you risk them being poached by a competitor. The nurturing process can be made simple by using a joint marketing automation and CRM service, like Pardot Marketing Automation or Hatchbuck. These programs allow Sales to share a CRM with Marketing, who can then nurture or retain leads and clients via email follow up. By using the same software, Sales and Marketing will always be on the same page of the status and progress of leads. What to Do if Your Teams Don’t Want to Play Nice? Sometimes the lack of coordination between two teams is the result of egos, company culture or other personnel issues that cause Sales and Marketing to butt heads (or just ignore each other completely). While these situations are complex and differ for every organization, one solution that may help is charging an outside marketing firm with the task of managing the coordination between your two teams. An outside marketing firm will determine what information your Sales and Marketing teams are currently lacking. With an understanding of what the two departments need from each other, they will then act as an independent ringleader that coordinates the flow of information between departments and helps assist both departments in generating more quality leads and nurturing leads and clients – all while the your internal Marketing and Sales teams are able to continue on with their routine tasks. Whether you are able to make changes to how your internal Sales and Marketing departments communicate and work together or you need to bring in outside help, having coordinated efforts between the two will lead to more success for Sales, Marketing and your organization as a whole. http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2015/06/10/are-your-sales-and-marketing-teams-working-in-harmony.aspx http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2015/06/10/are-your-sales-and-marketing-teams-working-in-harmony.aspx Wed, 10 June 2015 11:56:00 2661 http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2015/05/26/how-should-you-set-your-marketing-budget.aspx Over the years, I’ve noticed that a couple common things can happen when small businesses set and reassess their marketing budgets. For some businesses, there’s a yearly ritual when putting the annual plan together. The business owner reviews the total marketing expenses for last year and decides whether the budget should go up or down based on a factor of their revenue, and decisions to add or cut are made from there. For other businesses – including a significant portion of both new and established businesses – the reality is that there is no defined marketing budget; the “budget” is just the money left over when the other expenses have already been covered. If you’re in either of these camps, you’re not alone. The problem with both of these approaches is that your marketing budget isn’t being assessed based on the goals, targets or objectives it’s designed to achieve. When this budget is seen as an expense rather than an investment, it’s almost always the first thing that gets cut. And that can be a big mistake. Developing your budget is a math question Let’s get the obvious stuff out of the way: every industry is different, budgets can be affected by a variety of factors, there’s no one right answer – and so on. All true, none of it particularly helpful to you. The good news is that developing your budget is really just a math question. The part that many businesses struggle with is defining the variables that let you set up your equation. So how do you define your variables? Start with your business’s biggest objectives and work your way down. Ideally, your marketing resources will be involved in the strategic planning process; this helps ensure that you have a clear vision, goals and targets that keep your business on the right track, and that the marketing strategy is designed to help you achieve these targets. It’s important to make sure your goals are both realistic and meaningful to you and your team; otherwise, you can count on them being missed or forgotten completely. Using goals to set your budget Your goals are the variables that let you set up your marketing budget math equation. Some goals are more tangible and easier to measure than others, but it’s critical to make these as concrete as possible. (“More business”, bad; “$2 million in annual revenue in 2015”, good.) Before finalizing your budget from here, you want to know what a reasonably expected return will be for the channels you’re considering. The steps for projecting and assessing returns are outlined in more detail in our post on calculating marketing ROI, but the highlights are as follows: 1.       Track leads by channel Always tag leads by channel and use a CRM (or at least a spreadsheet) to keep track of everything 2.       Determine channel cost Track your expenses by channel – including any hourly costs to manage 3.       Determine average client value Define how much a single client produces in yearly revenue, on average 4.       Determine sales conversion rate At what rate does your sales team convert leads into business? 5.       Determine your magic number Average Client Value x Sales Conversion Rate = Magic Number (how much you can pay for a lead to break even) Now, you can look at what you’re paying for leads with your current channels (or use industry averages if you haven’t tested them before): Channel Cost / Total Channel Leads = Cost Per Lead (CPL) Taking the time to define these numbers will prove extremely beneficial. With this framework, you can determine what budget is needed to hit your goals and what your marketing should be accountable for. When reassessing your budget each year, you can use this same framework to determine which channels are the most cost-efficient, which should be scrapped and where you should reallocate based on your evolving targets. http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2015/05/26/how-should-you-set-your-marketing-budget.aspx http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2015/05/26/how-should-you-set-your-marketing-budget.aspx Tue, 26 May 2015 09:57:00 2659 http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2015/04/20/google-s-new-algorithm-puts-small-businesses-at-risk-what-you-need-to-do-to-stay-visible.aspx April 21 marks the beginning of a new, more mobile-focused era for the Google algorithm. With more and more web searches being done on mobile devices (in the final quarter of 2014, 29% of all U.S. search queries were made on mobile devices), it’s only logical that Google made a move to help mobile users find websites that offer a good user experience. The change, which was heralded as being “bigger than Panda or Penguin” by Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Zineb Ait Bahajji, will only impact results from Google searches that take place on smartphones.   Unfortunately, small businesses are at greater risk to take a hit from the updated algorithm, as they are less likely than larger corporations to have already had a mobile-friendly website infrastructure in place. Most major companies have had mobile-optimized websites for some time. Many small businesses, on the other hand, have never even considered optimizing their site. Google first announced the impending update in February, so hopefully you’ve already optimized your website. If you’ve been putting off updating your site or are just learning about the new algorithm, here’s a crash course of what you need to do to make sure you aren’t losing traffic because of a poor mobile experience. Check To See If Your Website Is Mobile-Friendly Google’s free "Mobile-Friendly Test" will analyze your website and report back if it has a mobile-friendly design. Hopefully, you’ll see a message like this and you can stop reading this post (it’s ok, we won’t be mad).   If you’re still with us, we’ll venture to guess your website didn’t perform so well on the mobile-friendly test. Don’t panic. With the feedback Google provided you in their report about why you aren’t mobile-friendly in mind, you can begin to fix your site. Here are the things you should focus on to help get your site in tip-top shape: Determine Your Mobile Configuration (Hint: It Should Be Responsive) There are three different ways to create a mobile website: responsive web design, dynamic serving and separate URLS. Responsive web design is the best design pattern (and the one Google recommends) for mobile websites.   Unlike dynamic serving, which requires different HTML from your desktop site along with separate URLs which require an entirely new URL on top of new HTML, responsive design allows your desktop website to render properly on different mobile devices without using a different URL or code. If you are responsible for updating your website and are new to responsive design, Google has a nice primer here to get you started. Get Rid Of The Things That Make Visitng Websites On Mobile Awful Video not playable on mobile? Come on. Links on your mobile website direct users to the desktop version? Who designed this thing? Pages loading slowly? You know what, I didn’t want to look at your website that badly, anyway. If you’ve ever been in the position of trying to use a website on mobile and ran into one of the above situations, you can sympathize with the reasons why mobile visitors will leave a website. If your website isn’t easy to use, your visitors will look elsewhere for the information they were searching for. Sort of defeats the purpose of investing in a website, right? Fixing the above issues will not only boost your mobile conversion rates, but it will help your mobile site rank higher. You must also make your website easily viewable as-is: that means no zooming in, no struggling to click on the right link, and no unnecessary scrolling. Per Google: A page is eligible for the “mobile-friendly” label if it meets the following criteria as detected by Googlebot: Avoids software that is not common on mobile devices, like Flash Uses text that is readable without zooming Sizes content to the screen so users don't have to scroll horizontally or zoom Places links far enough apart so that the correct one can be easily tapped Allow Google To Read Your CSS And JavaScript Files In order for Google to read your website the same way one of your visitors would, it needs access to your CSS, Javascript and image files. Googlebots don’t have eyes (yet), so even if your website appears to be mobile-friendly when you view it on your phone, Google won’t be able to confirm its friendliness unless it can read those files. Make sure your robots.txt file doesn’t block the crawling of these files. You can check to see if it is allowing crawling here. If the file is blocking crawling, you can change that by using the “Fetch as Google” feature in Google Webmaster Tools. The importance of updating your website to be mobile-friendly can’t be overstated. You could lose a notable portion of business simply because mobile users didn’t see your website listed in Google. Even if you can’t make all of your changes right away, update as much as you can as soon as possible. Did your website pass the mobile-friendly test? What do you need to do in order to ensure your website isn’t penalized by the new algorithm? Let us know in the comments! http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2015/04/20/google-s-new-algorithm-puts-small-businesses-at-risk-what-you-need-to-do-to-stay-visible.aspx http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2015/04/20/google-s-new-algorithm-puts-small-businesses-at-risk-what-you-need-to-do-to-stay-visible.aspx Mon, 20 April 2015 12:14:00 2659 http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2015/04/02/adwords-bing-or-facebook-who-should-you-choose-for-your-ppc-campaign.aspx PPC campaigns are a staple of many digital marketing campaigns. While most people think of Google AdWords first when considering where to run their ads, Bing and Facebook also provide ample – and sometimes even better – opportunity to increase website traffic or increase conversions. So, where should you run your campaign? Before you start comparing the ad platforms, you must consider who you want the ads to reach, how you want them to reach it, and the ultimate goal of the campaign. Take the following examples: You are an online retailer that sells clothing to women in the 18-35 age bracket. Because your business is similar to others in the market, you hope to reach these women through a digital “word-of-mouth” type approach that suggests they might like the company – even if they aren’t searching for clothing retailers. Your goal is to drive sales on your site. You own a moving company for people living in Chicago. You want to target those searching for a moving company, with the ultimate goal that they call or email to request a quote. Those two examples present different needs, and therefore, opportunity for more success on differing ad platforms. Here’s what should be considered for each option: Google AdWords AdWords is the most commonly used PPC tool, and with good reason: in 2014, Google claimed 68.75% of global search engine share. It makes sense to go where the people are. AdWords is a logical choice when you’d like to target someone who is actively searching for a product or service your business offers (like moving companies in Chicago). However, be aware that getting your ad to a high position may be difficult and come at a relatively high cost, due to the number of other ads you’ll be competing against. You should use AdWords if: you are looking to reach the largest share of search engine users who are actively looking for information, and are prepared for competition that may increase your costs and/or earning a high average ad position more difficult. Bing In many ways, the Bing ad network is similar to AdWords, in terms of the ad creation & management interface, ad targeting, and how the ads look. Like AdWords, Bing is a good choice for advertisers who want to reach people who are already actively seeking information that is related to their product or business. Bing ad copy is one line long and has a slightly longer character limit than AdWords, but the live ad looks so similar to AdWords ads that you might not have even realized there was a difference. Bing ads actually run on two search engines: Bing and Yahoo. Yahoo holds 6.73% of global search engine share, and Bing holds 5.5%. Don’t let their relatively small share scare you away, as there are a number of reasons to use the Bing ad network for your PPC campaign: Because they receive less traffic, there is less ad competition. This means it is usually easier to score a higher average ad position – and often at a lower CPC than on AdWords. Bing is the default search engine in Internet Explorer; Yahoo is the default search engine in Firefox. These two default search engines represent a small (relative to Google) but mighty group of people who will always use Bing for the queries. Internet Explorer users are more likely to be females over the age of 45 – if you extrapolate this data to assume it is true for Bing searchers, it may be helpful in terms of targeting. You should use Bing if: you are looking to reach people who are actively searching for information and either don’t want to compete as much as you would need to with AdWords or want to increase your reach by using Bing as an add-on to your AdWords campaign. Facebook The most important thing to consider about Facebook PPC ads is that your target audience isn’t actively searching for information. Facebook ads are presented alongside content from friends, family and liked pages – meaning that your audience isn’t as receptive to advertising as they are while using a search engine. However, what Facebook does present is a way to frame your ads in terms of how it relates to the interests of your friends and the ability to make ads more interesting. It also makes targeting easier, as you are able to get very specific – one of the most useful targeting options is the ability to serve your ads to people who have stated interests already on the website. Facebook is a great option for the online clothing retailer looking for a more word-of-mouth approach of introducing their store to women who may not be actively seeking clothing relaters. What do Facebook ads offer that AdWords and Bing don’t? Ability to be incredibly specific with your demographic targeting: everything from location and age to hobbies and profession to estimated net worth and income are available as targeting criteria. Option to advertise to people based on interests they’ve listed on the website. Ability to include rich media (photos and video) in your ads to make them more appealing. You should use Facebook if: you won’t be able to easily drive traffic from search engine users, have very specific targeting needs, or will have increased success with the ability to include rich media in your ads. Remember that these three PPC networks don’t require you to choose one over the other: if your budget allows it, AdWords, Bing and Facebook and be complimentary components of your ad campaign that can help reach different segments of your market. These also are only a handful of many websites that offer PPC options – in fact, many social platforms are increasingly gaining relevance as marketing channels. If you are looking to test out another ad platform, Pew offers helpful demographic information about the most popular social networks that should help aid in your decision making process. By taking into consideration those demographics, while also comparing the capabilities similar to how we outlined the abilities of AdWords, Bing and Facebook, you’ll be able to pick the perfect advertising platform for your campaign. http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2015/04/02/adwords-bing-or-facebook-who-should-you-choose-for-your-ppc-campaign.aspx http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2015/04/02/adwords-bing-or-facebook-who-should-you-choose-for-your-ppc-campaign.aspx Thu, 02 April 2015 14:40:00 2661 http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2015/03/06/the-challenges-of-marketing-your-sustainable-business.aspx If your small business has aspects of its products and/or services with benefits that could be considered sustainable, green, responsible, eco-friendly, environmentally-friendly – or whatever other descriptor you prefer – your outlook in this area has likely evolved over time. First, you may have thought, “Hey, this will be great for our marketing because everyone wants to be sustainable!” Shortly thereafter, you may have come to the conclusion that, in fact, none of your potential clients really care about being sustainable and that you’ll have to focus your branding on something else. If this has been your experience, you’re not alone. On Sustainability Fatigue So do your potential customers really not care about sustainability? The likely answer is that it does matter to them, but you haven’t been speaking their language. Companies in virtually all verticals, at all levels of the B2C and B2B playing field, have been clamoring to capitalize on the sustainability movement for years – though the preferred names and areas of focus have evolved to varying extents. The prevalence of this movement is reflective of the strong desire of consumers and needs of businesses to reduce their negative footprint on the planet and its natural resources. The upshot: your prospects have heard the boilerplate sustainability pitch a million times – and by now, they’re no longer moved by it. They’re probably sick of it. Market Benefits, not Buzzwords In 2015, the marketing around your business’ sustainability must go beyond giving lip service to the concept at a high level. While your product or service may be the most sustainable, green, responsible or environmentally-friendly product or service on the market, consider never using any of those buzzwords when marketing yourself to your target market. Instead, get specific about the benefits you offer and deliver that message to the segment of your market that will be most receptive to it. Whether you’re able to deliver a reduction in water consumption, carbon emissions, waste, hazardous material, energy or something else, don't just mention it: quantify it. Visualize it. What does that reduction look like over the course of a year? How much more does that save than your competitors? How does it tie in to the tangible forces that directly affect your market on a personal level? B2B Sustainability Marketing Strategy In the B2B world, you face an inherent challenge in that the person in charge of procurement at your prospect’s company is, in most cases, not the person most concerned with any objectives falling under sustainability or corporate responsibility in their company. If your marketing and sales messaging geared to this audience is speaking to sustainability in vague terms, you may be doing more harm than good. However, by targeting the right companies and tweaking the messaging that’s going to this group, there’s an opportunity to overcome this challenge. If the market is targeted, the companies you’re marketing to will have public sustainability goals – often published on their website with clear targets and objectives. Instead of pushing product and service features (or sustainability in general), your marketing and sales messaging can cite publicly validated goals that the company has shared, and speak to specific benefits that can help your client achieve these goals. In doing so, the procurement contact will be presented with a compelling message – and a chance to be the hero to his or her boss. (It should be noted that, in order for this strategy to work, the product or service should also be at least as effective and affordable as that currently used by the prospect.) By avoid generalities and speaking to the specifics that resonate with your audience, you can avoid having your sustainable benefits fall on deaf ears. Charlie NadlerSimple Machines Marketing http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2015/03/06/the-challenges-of-marketing-your-sustainable-business.aspx http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2015/03/06/the-challenges-of-marketing-your-sustainable-business.aspx Fri, 06 March 2015 14:04:00 2659 http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2015/02/26/how-to-differentiate-your-brand-in-an-over-saturated-market.aspx Some companies bring something new to the table, such as an innovative product or a personal touch that no one has experienced before. Most companies, though, don’t stand out. A great product? Sure, they have that. But so do their competitors - who also have the same great product. It can be difficult to cut through the competitive noise to convince potential customers that they should pick you. To figure out how to take your brand from pedestrian to persuasive, you’ll need to take a close look at what your competitors are doing. Competitive Analysis: Find the Gaps in Your Market Let’s say you own a nail salon. Nail salons are a dime a dozen - most offer generally the same services at a similar price point. If your nail salon is in a large city, there is likely an incredible amount of competition from other salons that are just like yours. How can you stand out when your salon is just like all the others? You’ll need to partake in an exercise called competitive analysis. After figuring out who your biggest competitors are, you’ll need to spend some time learning how your marketing compares to that of your competitors. (If you need help figuring out where to find your competitors, start by looking at other nail salons in your neighborhood.) The following five-step exercise will help you get a better sense of what you can do to put a unique twist on your brand. All five steps are vital if you want to strategically brand your company. 1. What Contributes to Success? Start by thinking about what you and your competitors must do to be successful. For a nail salon, that might mean offering services that are up-to-date with what’s trendy, having prices that are considered reasonable, or offering incentives for new or recurring patrons. Write down the five most important things that any business in your industry must do to stay competitive. 2. Rate How Well You and Your Competitors are Achieving These Factors for Success After figuring out what the most important keys to success are, rate how well you think your company is achieving these items. Then do the same for your competitors. Depending on what factors you listed in step 1, you could do this on a 1-10 scale (1 = doing a poor job, 10= knocking it out of the park) or simply checking off a box when a factor to success is being met or marketed. When you’ve completed this exercise, you’ll have a good overview of what you and your competitors are doing well, not doing well, or not doing at all. 3. Analyze your competitors’ marketing strategies Now it’s time to dive deeper into the marketing tactics of your competitors. Take note of as much as you can about their marketing tactics.   The results of your analysis could have included confirmation that many competing nail salons offer trendy services and frequent buyer deals and market a relaxing or “girls night out” atmosphere. Surprisingly, all require that you call ahead to make an appointment. Many are also using Groupon to get people into their salons. Few are using social media to promote their brand. 4. Find the gaps Armed with a well-rounded knowledge of how your competitors are marketing themselves, you can start to figure out where you fit in. To figure out what opportunities you have to brand yourself in a way that sets you apart, use your newly collected data to answer the following questions: Are there any needs or desires of my target market that aren’t currently being marketed by any of my competitors that I could market? Are there any subgroups within this target market that could be focused on? What marketing or branding opportunities are none of my competitors taking advantage of? What marketing tactics or branding efforts are overdone? Are there any promotional, branding, or experiential tactics used in other industries that aren’t being used in mine? 5. Fill in the gaps Using everything you’ve learned in the competitive analysis process so far, you can finally start to figure out how to brand your company as different from your competitors. For some, that will involve taking advantage of opportunities your competitors have missed. What might this look like? Based on what you learned about nail salon competitors, you might decide to market your salon to an ignored segment of our target market: businesswomen who want a professional-looking manicure prior to a client meeting. You decide to host and market “nails and networking” events to reach these types of women. By adding an online appointment booking option to your website, potential clients can quickly and easily set an appointment without ever needing to pick up the phone – a great tool for busy professionals. And you can choose to eschew Groupon in favor of advertising on Yelp. You may also take to Facebook to frequently update your fans with information and photos that your newly defined target (business women who enjoy getting manicures) will enjoy.  At the end of the day, the service you offer (manicures) hasn’t changed. Instead, you’ve simply rebranded to define and reach a market that none of your competitors were. By marketing to a specific subgroup of your greater target audience, you can focus on building clientele that identify with your branding.  What if you found no opportunities to take advantage of to stand out? Other companies performing this competitive analysis may find that there isn’t an opportunity to differentiate themselves in a meaningful way from their competition. If you can’t find a way to stand out through means of differentiation, consider what your company’s biggest selling point is to potential customers. Are you able to offer the best price, the most reliable customer service, or do you have overwhelmingly positive customer reviews? Determine what your company is excelling at, and make it the focus of your branding. Your marketing tactics and channels can then be chosen based on how they support these claims. If you are going to emphasize low prices, it makes sense to advertise your discounts (be they in the form of coupons or other special promotions) heavily, and use loyalty rewards programs to retain those customers that choose your business based on your advertised promotions. If you wish to leverage your glowing customer reviews, paid promotion on Yelp can help more people learn about the positive experiences others have had with your business. You’ll want to make it easy for customers to leave reviews, so providing an easy way for customers to provide a testimonial (such as providing an option to leave a review after a transaction) will help you maintain your position as a highly regarded company. Whether you choose to take advantage of an untapped opportunity or just play up your strengths, the opportunities to help your business stand out in a saturated market are there. All it takes to find them is competitive research, a thorough understanding of your market and honest consideration about where your business excels. http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2015/02/26/how-to-differentiate-your-brand-in-an-over-saturated-market.aspx http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2015/02/26/how-to-differentiate-your-brand-in-an-over-saturated-market.aspx Thu, 26 February 2015 09:52:00 2661 http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2015/02/12/marketing-and-the-role-of-strategic-planning.aspx For small and growing businesses, the development of a marketing plan should not take place in isolation. To ensure that a marketing operation is truly positioned to achieve broader business goals – and that the business is prepared for the change driven by the marketing – it’s critical for the marketing team actively engage the leadership team from the beginning on the vision, goals, strategy and direction of the company before making any recommendations. When a small business is prepared to invest in its growth through marketing, it is faced with a number of key decisions: if and where to advertise, what benefits to market, how much to budget etc. This critical stage is fraught with potential risk, and any one of these factors can threaten the future of the business if the wrong decision is made. It is often for this very reason that many businesses seek the help of marketing consultants. This usually proves to be a wise move for the business if the partnership is a good fit, but the success of the partnership depends not just on the plan itself and the expertise of those developing it, but also on how the plan moves the business toward its vision for growth. When the marketing and the leadership team work together to ensure that the marketing and the strategic plan are cohesive, the risk of making the wrong decision is minimized, and the path for agile execution is clear. When There is No Clear Vision or Direction  As we’ve seen in our own experience, the need for marketing can occur before a business has had the chance to document their vision, direction and goals. For example, perhaps you've got a great service, you've built your initial growth on a strong referral base and you recognize that you need more visibility, but you're not sure what the next few years should look like or what infrastructural investments you should plan for. Maybe you've set aside a marketing budget based on last year’s revenue, but you don’t have a goal for what revenue should look like five, three or even one year from now. In the cases where marketing moves ahead while there are still significant gaps in the company’s strategic plan, efforts can stumble in a few different ways. In some instances, the plan will be putting the company on a path for growth that’s not aggressive enough and the business runs out of capital. In other instances, the plan will require the company to grow in a direction or pace that it’s not comfortable with, or the plan will force the company to compromise on an ideal or vision that’s important to the leadership team but hasn’t been articulated. These are just a few examples.   In our experience, we’ve found it to be profoundly effective to start the marketing discovery process by discussing the strategic vision of the company. If the vision already exists, great – we’re able to talk through it and this insight equips us with the context to develop a fully informed marketing strategy. If it doesn’t exist, then we start by giving the client a questionnaire and walking through the answers so that together we're able to fill in the gaps and document the goals, vision and direction. The importance of this step can't be overstated. Marketing can feel like a complicated and difficult challenge, but when marketing and strategic planning work hand in hand, those seemingly mysterious decisions become much simpler.   Charlie Nadler Simple Machines Marketing http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2015/02/12/marketing-and-the-role-of-strategic-planning.aspx http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2015/02/12/marketing-and-the-role-of-strategic-planning.aspx Thu, 12 February 2015 13:14:00 2659 http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2015/01/02/google-rank-the-harsh-truth-about-getting-to-page-one.aspx We often hear from business owners who are anxious to be ranked at the top of the first page of Google for the keywords they are targeting. We can’t blame them – being one of the first search results that a person sees can be huge for a business (especially when you consider the fact that only 8.5% of online search traffic makes it to the second page of results in their Google search). But is it realistic to expect that your website can get to page one of Google? While achieving a high-ranking spot on Google is a worthwhile aspiration, the sobering fact is that it is often a difficult and long process to get there – if you can make it there at all. Google uses 200 different factors to determine your website’s rank: from the obvious factors (like keyword density) to the more surprising factors (like linking domain age), it can be overwhelming, tedious and sometimes unrealistic to try to get your page to the top of the search results. Does your Google rank really matter? It’s important to not get too hung up on what your website’s search position. Why? While your average rank may provide a guideline of your website’s success in search, it is not the definitive measure of your website’s value. The concept of “rank” isn’t as cut-and-dry as it used to be. Search results used to be fairly similar for all Google users. Nowadays, how your page ranks for each person will vary greatly based on a multitude of factors, including: The geographic location of the person searching The type of device they are searching from If they are signed into their Google account or not when they search Their search history Their social media activity as well as social activity in their networks With Google customizing search results based on individual user data, your website could rank first in one person’s search and not even make the first page for another person’s search of the exact same phrase. That’s why there is no fixed ranking for each keyword that your website is targeting. While there are tools that enable you to calculate your average position each month, it’s important to remember that this rank is not your fixed position for every search user.  If you are a local or regional business competing against a national brand, it may not even be realistic to achieve the top spot on Google consistently. However, if you put in the effort to build a quality website, you’ll see your efforts pay off at the local level. This isn’t to say you shouldn’t strive to optimize your website to rank high in search results; rather, being aware of how Google lists their results will help you have a more realistic approach towards search engine optimization. How to rank in Google: rock solid SEO strategy + time + a bit of luck There are many misconceptions out there about how to get your website to the first page of search results; the most heinous delusion is that there can be any kind of guarantee that your page will rank on page one. If you’ve ever been emailed with such a promise by a self-proclaimed “SEO Expert”, run away – fast. As with most things in life, you should never trust anyone or anything that makes such a guarantee. Though you might be emailed with a compelling pitch, it’s important to realize that no one – not the person emailing you, not a marketing agency, not your internal SEO expert – can guarantee how well your website will rank. In addition to the 200 factors Google uses to rank your site – to which you have a fair amount of control over – your rank is also determined by the number of competitors, how they rank and the ever-changing algorithm that Google uses to determine rank – all things that are out of your hands. And that is to make no mention of the fact that maintaining your Google rank is a never-ending process, as all of those factors are constantly changing, thus leaving you with a fluctuating rank. Improving your SEO isn’t an overnight process: it takes time, effort and often money. Anyone who tries to lead you to believe it’s quick and easy does not have your best interest in mind. Furthermore, the people who make such misleading guarantees tend to also be the people who deploy tactics that result in penalizations from Google – thus achieving the exact opposite of what they’re promising. While we don’t want to discourage you from trying to improve your website’s rankings, we do want you to be armed with realistic expectations so you can develop a practical action plan to help you make worthwhile strides to achieve your goal. Three things you must do if you are dedicated to working towards a high Google ranking 1. Plan to dedicate serious time to working toward your rank goal If you’re in an industry with a high level of organic search competition, time is the single most important factor to consider when developing your SEO strategy for ranking well in Google. You must plan to consistently dedicate time to working on your strategy – whether it’s in the form of content marketing, onsite optimization or a combination of tactics. If working on SEO every day is not realistic, we recommend carving out a couple of hours at least two to three times a week to work. If this is still not realistic, you should consider hiring an internal resource or outsourcing the work to ensure it’s done. It’s important to note that when we talk about spending time on your SEO strategy every week, we don’t mean every week for a set period of time. SEO is a never-ending endeavor; even if you land the coveted number one position for a large percentage of your target search visitors, you won’t be at number one for long if you don’t continue working to stay there. 2. Get people to engage with you, whether it’s on your website or social media pages Engagement encompasses two different aspects of your SEO strategy: Social Media–  While it might tempting to write off social media as too time consuming or not fruitful enough to spend time on, did you know that the number of social shares, likes, tweets, pins Google +1’s, and overall authority of social channels tends to correlate with a higher search ranking? While Google has not said there’s a direct cause-and-effect relationship between social and search, we have seen firsthand with several clients that social traction rarely comes without some increases in organic traffic and visibility. Website Engagement– When people visit your website, are they clicking on your links? How many pages do they visit? Do they stay long enough to read your content, or do they leave your website quickly? What search terms brought them to your website, anyway? If you don’t know the answers to these questions, you should begin tracking your website engagement. Using tools like Google Analytics, you’ll learn how people use your website. Do people frequently leave your page after viewing your About Us page? Do people who visit one of your landing pages frequently go on to make a purchase? Knowing how people behave will allow you to continually optimize your website so that you’re providing a quality user experience – which will ultimately help your ranking in search.  3. Create quality content that helps answer your customers’ questions While it’s been stated so often that, at this point, it’s cliché, the adage that “content is king” is popular for a reason: developing content for your website plays a critical role in how you rank. This content should answer questions your customer may have -- whether directly or indirectly related to your product, service or industry. How does content help you? More quality content provides more opportunity for your website to show up in search results. Content that answers questions your potential customers have translates into opportunities for search users to land on your website – and stay there – when they are looking for information regarding their search query. Great content has the opportunity to be shared by others; if shared by other websites, you’ll build quality links that help your page rank. In the earlier days of SEO, marketers took a leap of faith when they shifted from tactics like meta keywords to linkbuilding to help improve their search ranking. Today, they must trust evidence indicating that investing in websites with a great user experience and quality content – useful information that potential customers are looking for when they run a search – is key to optimizing for search visibility. Results can’t be expected overnight, and winning that number one ranking in Google may feel more elusive than ever, but by investing in a website that delights your customers, you’re investing in an SEO strategy that will be immune to the countless algorithmic changes we can expect from Google in the years to come. http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2015/01/02/google-rank-the-harsh-truth-about-getting-to-page-one.aspx http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2015/01/02/google-rank-the-harsh-truth-about-getting-to-page-one.aspx Fri, 02 January 2015 00:00:00 2659,2660 http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2014/10/24/how-to-use-emotion-to-tell-your-small-businesss-story.aspx If you’re a small business owner, you have probably wondered how to pique interest from your target audience—without spending a great deal of money. One of the best ways to get people to care about your company is to tell a compelling story. What makes a story compelling? Emotion. We all love stories – we’re born for them At its conception, the phenomenon that would come to be known as “social media” seemed to be the answer businesses big and small had been waiting for: large, detailed sets of customers actively engaged in an accessible platform. As we now know, social media plays a huge role in marketing for brands. With most brands recognizing and utilizing social media, it can feel overwhelming trying to make your brand’s voice heard. Regardless of whether you choose to use paid advertising or simply share content on your social profiles for free, breaking through the noise of social marketing can be challenging. Of course, ads have become an increasingly prominent presence across social media, but the majority of businesses seeing real engagement are the ones that find their real voice to tell relevant stories. If your business is going to have a social profile, it can’t be a faceless machine! Have a depth of character. Care about certain topics. If appropriate, make fun of yourself. In short: be real. Because social media is a place where consumers share their lives, a brand should share their own.  According to filmmaker Andrew Stanton, “Storytelling is joke telling. It’s knowing your punchline, your ending…knowing everything you’re saying from the first sentence to the last is leading to a singular goal.” A business’ singular goal might be to acquire and keep customers, but a brand’s singular goal is to make the customer care. Make customers care by making them feel Making the customer care is easier said than done (if it was easy, marketing would be a breeze!). That being said, one of the most effective ways to make storytelling a worthwhile way to build customer interest is by using emotional triggers. As Susan Gunelius of Entrepreneur explained, your copywriting should accomplish two goals: “It should make consumers feel something, and it should make them act on those feelings.” As consumers and users of mass media, we’re constantly on the receiving end of emotion-based content. Whether you’re watching an UpWorthy video or reading a Buzzfeed listicle, content is most successful when we not only choose to view it, but let it affect us, too. By being presented with a story that we can ultimately relate to our lives – whether the relation is direct or not – we slowly build our perception of a brand in our memories. It doesn’t matter whether you are sharing your story on social media, TV or print – emotional triggers can be used effectively to communicate the need for your product in a memorable way. Emotional triggers to use in your storytelling While there are as many possible triggers as there are emotions, consider the following commonly used emotional triggers. Would any of these emotional triggers compliment the story that your brand is already telling? Trust: Allow customers to view your brand as one they can trust, whether the trust is in the form of a product guarantee, timeliness, or another positive differentiator of your brand. Example: Nationwide - “Nationwide is on your side.” Belonging: No one wants to feel alone. Tap into this feeling by showcasing how your product will bring people together, make the consumer be "cool" or become part of a group of people they aspire to be associate with. Example:  Skype - “The Born Friends Family Portrait” Value: At the end of the day, consumers want to feel like they are getting a good deal on their purchases. Market the value of your product persuade customers that they’ll feel like they made a great financial decision by purchasing your product. Example: Dollar Shave Club - “Our Blades Are F***ing Great” Fear: Sometimes the value of your product is most evident in what could be lost by not having it. Causing consumers to feel fearful at what might happen if they don’t purchase your product can help trigger action. Example: Capital One Venture - “Seats” Time: The appeal of having more time is universally understood. A product that does something faster, or requires maintenance less frequently, appeals to this desire to have more control over how you spend your time. Example: Verizion FiOS - “Half-Fast Internet” With a story that tugs at the right emotions, you can spark interest in your brand from the right people. A great story can help a small brand make a big impact, no matter the marketing budget. Regardless of whether you choose to share your story on social media, print, or even TV, never lose sight of your goal to make the viewers feel. http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2014/10/24/how-to-use-emotion-to-tell-your-small-businesss-story.aspx http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2014/10/24/how-to-use-emotion-to-tell-your-small-businesss-story.aspx Fri, 24 October 2014 00:00:00 2659 http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2014/09/11/5-tips-to-improve-your-mobile-website-conversion-rates.aspx Mobile optimization, the creation or editing of mobile websites to ensure that they look great and function properly on all mobile devices, can make or break your chances of converting mobile users. With the majority of American adults now owning smartphones (58% as of January 2014, according to the Pew Research Center), it’s crucial that your website is not only search engine optimized, but that it is also conversion optimized, as well. Conversion optimization is the method of creating an experience for a website visitor with the end goal of increasing the percentage of visitors that convert into customers. Websites that have been properly conversion optimized will experience conversion rates worth getting excited about. Have you optimized your website for mobile, but struggled to see any payoff in terms of your conversion rate? Check out our recommendations for increasing your mobile conversions using conversion optimization techniques below. What steps can you take make sure your mobile website is conversion optimized? 1. Make it as easy as humanly possible for a visitor to get to the information they are looking for.The quicker they find information, the higher the chances are that they will convert. Entrepreneur hit the nail on the head with this advice: “it should take no more than two clicks to reach anywhere on the site.” In other words: fewer clicks = a higher mobile conversion rate. 2. With one in three mobile searches having local intent,you should strive for local applicability. A study from Google/Nielsen found that location proximity was crucial for mobile conversions, with 71% of mobile users using a store locator to find a store location. So how do you focus your conversion optimization efforts to appeal to the local consumer? Adding location-based search capabilities – like store locators – will help site visitors find your brick and mortar locations quickly. Developing content based on location can prove useful; a visitor to a clothing store website in Florida will have different interests and needs than a visitor checking the site from Chicago).  3. Make contacting your company a breeze. One in three smartphone users are searching specifically for contact information, such as phone numbers, maps, and driving directions. Aside from making this information easy to find, how can you use this information to boost conversions? Use a click-to-call function to allow visitors to immediately call you (they are on a phone, after all). Allow for your visitors to be able to connect to a map application, like Google Maps, to be able to pull up directions to your company from their current location, without needing to manually input the address themselves.  4. Don’t expect visitors to type. If you’ve ever needed to manually fill out forms or search fields on a mobile website, you know how frustrating it can be. Whenever possible, use pre-populated options in drop down menus to help speed up the process of filling out forms or search fields. If you have a search function for finding store locations, add the ability to automatically determine the closest location for visitors based on the current location according to their phone’s GPS.  5. Make mobile payments simple. Much like the issue of typing on mobile websites, entering payment information on a mobile device can be a slow and frustrating experience. Make your customer happy by keeping purchasing forms as short as possible; don’t ask for any superfluous information that isn’t required for a purchase to be fulfilled.  Allowing a variety of payment forms can also be incredibly beneficial to your mobile conversion rates. While many people will happily pay with their credit cards, some people may not have a credit card handy when they are ready to purchase or don’t feel comfortable putting in their credit card number if they’re out in public. Allowing payment through a payment site such as PayPal eliminates both of those barriers to purchasing, increasing your website conversions.  Brittney Lane  Simple Machines Marketing http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2014/09/11/5-tips-to-improve-your-mobile-website-conversion-rates.aspx http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2014/09/11/5-tips-to-improve-your-mobile-website-conversion-rates.aspx Thu, 11 September 2014 00:00:00 2660 http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2014/08/15/how-website-encryption-will-affect-seo.aspx Google to begin factoring HTTPS encryption in search rankings  In a move to promote better online security practices, Google has announced that it will start using website encryption as a ranking signal. While encryption will be a lightweight signal at first – affecting less than 1% of global queries initially – the move by the search giant likely forecasts lower search rankings for sites that fail to make the security update. Website encryption is normally depicted with a padlock in the URL bar and https://at the beginning of a URL. This step by Google is designed to motivate developers to employ HTTPS – or TLS (Transport Layer Security) which uses digital certificates to encrypt traffic and secure information shared over the domain. Google hopes to have everyone   on the web using HTTPS on their website. How does Google rank? Google scans web pages with its spiders. These spiders take into account certain aspects of each website – such as user engagement, quality of content and density of ads per page -- to determine where it will appear in its search rankings. Encryption characteristics have been added to its list, but for now it is a soft implementation, according to Zineb Ait Bahajji and Gary Illyes, both Webmaster Trends Analysts at Google. The soft implementation is designed to give webmasters time to switch their sites over to HTTPS. All reputable websites that deal in sensitive, personal data use encryption already. However, some of these same websites downgrade to an unencrypted connection after the initial access, creating a hole for a middle man to attack. Adding this attribute to rank scores should help patch those holes up. What do I need to do? For small businesses, rolling out encrypted connections will be a fairly easy task for your web developer and Google’s Webmaster Tools provides the  steps for a site move. For larger businesses whose websites run on multiple servers, the task will be more involved. LinkedIn and Instagram have both discovered middle man issues and are still working to upgrade their entire network. Webmasters can test their HTTPS websites using the Qualys Lab tool. You can also stay up-to-date with Google web trends here.  Sara Seibt Simple Machines Marketing http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2014/08/15/how-website-encryption-will-affect-seo.aspx http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2014/08/15/how-website-encryption-will-affect-seo.aspx Fri, 15 August 2014 00:00:00 2659 http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2014/07/31/how-to-eliminate-copy-that-is-scaring-off-your-customers.aspx Have you ever landed on a website, interested in purchasing a service from a company, only to be overwhelmed by the volume and organization of information? How quickly did you exit out of the tab? One of the more damaging mistakes a small business owner or marketer can make is being too verbose. You surely have incredible amounts of knowledge and passion to share about your business, but your potential customer is probably not interested in hearing it. Don’t take it personally. Much like you, they’ve got busy lives and would prefer to just get straight to the point. Consider this: a visitor lands on your website, after doing a quick search for a local floral shop. Ready to purchase flowers for their mother, they are inundated with a novella’s worth of copy. The visitor doesn’t want to spend much time searching through the website to see if the shop can quickly deliver the type of flower they’re interested in, so they hit the back button in their browser and try another website. It can be challenging to write the right copy for your website, brochure or other marketing materials. To keep your copy on-track, consider following these three guidelines: 1. What does your customer need? What brought a visitor to your website in the first place? If you’re unsure about what your visitors are looking for, you must begin using analytics data to track what search terms or links bring people to your corner of the web. You may think visitors are choosing you because they want a floral shop that sources from local, family-owned farmers, when most visitors are actually interested in your same-day delivery option. Once you know why your customer chose your website to help solve their problem, you’ll need to perform an audit of your copy to figure out if what you’re saying is matching up – quickly and clearly – to your customers’ needs. 2. What information is irrelevant to your customer’s needs? After completing the audit of your copy, you will likely have come across copy that isn’t addressing the needs of your client. Move or remove this text. For example, the two paragraphs outlining your company history may be better suited to live on a separate “About” page, instead of your homepage. 3. How can you rewrite your copy to make the same point, in fewer words? The easiest way to be more concise in your writing is to understand what language is slowing down your reader. A common mistake is overusing adjectives that don’t actually mean anything. Words like “amazing” and “incredible” are usually nothing more than empty words: we see the words so often that they’ve lost their true meaning and impact potential. (If you don’t believe me, I highly suggest taking a listen to Louis CK’s thoughts on the subject). Try removing the unnecessary descriptors from a sentence. Does it still tell the same story? If so, you’ve just saved your potential customer time, helping them move forward to make their purchasing decisions just a bit quicker. At the end of the day, your web (and other marketing material) copy is about your customer, not you. Your copy should meet their needs in a quick and clear manner. Save the time of your potential customer by getting straight to the point, and you’ll be rewarded with more sales. Brittney Lane Simple Machines Marketing http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2014/07/31/how-to-eliminate-copy-that-is-scaring-off-your-customers.aspx http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2014/07/31/how-to-eliminate-copy-that-is-scaring-off-your-customers.aspx Thu, 31 July 2014 00:00:00 2661 http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2014/05/21/why-you-need-must-have-marketing-milestones.aspx We’ve touched on the process for assessing marketing channels a number of times on this blog – looking at how to calculate marketing ROI and how to assess social media success. These posts look at how to assess marketing on a channel-by-channel basis, but what about assessing the success of a longer term marketing plan with several moving parts? In my experience with clients, I’ve found that the key here is to define what “success” looks like upfront – and part of this is differentiating the things that you want from your marketing from the things that you need. About that project plan… Assume you’ve recently signed on with a marketing agency. After the initial discovery phase, the agency comes back to you with pages and pages of research, recommendations and – finally – a project plan. Let’s say our hypothetical plan spans 12 months with a review scheduled for the final month. The plan includes several phases of collateral development, website updates, channel testing and ongoing execution. Based on your business’ conversion rates and revenue estimates, this plan is going to give you everything you want! And if the marketing team can’t deliver what you want, you’ll just go with someone else next time, right? There’s just one problem: even if your agency does everything right, things don’t always go according to plan – and to quote one of history’s great British philosophers – you can’t always get what you want. Consider all of the potential things that could occur over the course of the project plan timeline that might significantly disrupt the planned course of action: personnel turnover in your company, technology and/or infrastructure changes, increased/decreased cash flow, an unforeseen sea change in your market and/or industry – and so on. If you’re looking at a plan as long as 12 months – or even half that – you can go ahead and assume that certain elements of the plan are going to change during that time. In most cases, they should change. If it’s a good plan, it will be designed with a healthy level of flexibility in mind. So, when you get to that month 12 review, how will you know if the plan was a success if it’s probably going to change anyway? Start by deciding what you need While the plan may have everything you want, you also need to decide what it is that you’ll need in order for the marketing engagement to be considered a success – regardless of what happens between now and the end of the plan. In other words, you and your marketing team should decide on a list of your must-have marketing milestones before day one of execution. (A savvy marketing team will be more likely to initiate this discussion without your prompting it.) Think of your must-have milestones as those things that need to be researched, planned, built, executed, measured and/or iterated in order for you to have a clear sense of how to move forward at the end of the project timeline. Details of the plan will likely get shifted, modified, reallocated and possibly scrapped, but the must-have milestones are the things you need to see. For example, what collateral needs to be updated for your sales team to do its job effectively? What work needs to be done for your website to function as it should? What are the most important channels that at the very least need to be set up and tested for viability? What tracking capabilities need to be in place for you to know whether your marketing is working or not? By defining these milestones before your campaigns kick off, you’ll avoid a situation in which you’re at the end of your project plan timeline with no clear sense of whether the plan worked and little direction in terms of next steps. You’ll feel better moving forward with the plan having done this, and your marketing team will be appreciate knowing they understand what your priorities are. Over to you Have you ever put together a list of must-have marketing milestones? Was it helpful for you and your marketing team? Charlie Nadler Simple Machines Marketing http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2014/05/21/why-you-need-must-have-marketing-milestones.aspx http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2014/05/21/why-you-need-must-have-marketing-milestones.aspx Wed, 21 May 2014 00:00:00 2661 http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2014/03/20/guest-blogging-simplified-avoiding-google-penalization.aspx This week, Google started taking action against guest blogging websites found to be in violation of their SEO guidelines, following through on the warnings issued starting in January. This situation has left SEOs questioning whether or not this spells the end of guest blogging. Search Rankings Gone Bad: The MyBlogGuest.com Effect Google’s Matt Cutts announced on Monday morning the search engine’s penalization of a “large guest blog network” via Twitter. It was later confirmed that MyBlogGuest.com, the penalized site, took a big hit in search rankings. Even when searched by name, the domain is no longer visible in search – with the exception of paid advertising.  Not only has MyBlogGuest taken a hit, so have the publishers of their content. Search Engine Land alone received 215 comments regarding publishers who have seen drops in ranking and manual action notifications. Google Webmaster Tools has been sending the following notice to those affected: “Google has detected a pattern of artificial or unnatural links to your site. Buying links or participating in link schemes in order to manipulate PageRank are violation of Google’s Webmaster guidelines. As a result, Google has applied a manual spam account to [domain name]. There may be other action on your site or parts of your site.”  With Google starting to penalize sites like MyBlogGuest, does this mean that guest blogging has officially gone the way of keyword stuffing and invisible text?  Stop Guest Blogging for Links It's worth taking a moment to remember that anyone contributing to a blog owned by someone else is technically "guest blogging" and that much of it has nothing to do with links. No one is expecting Google to banish all involved parties to internet oblivion. That said, guest blogging just for the sake of link building is not going to add any value to your content marketing strategy or your search rankings – and Google has made it clear that this can get you penalized.  So, what does your business hope to gain by guest blogging? Exposure? Branding? Partnerships? Once you figure out if and how guest blogging aligns with your business objectives, you can craft a smart strategy that will allow you to benefit from this tactic without having to worry about repercussions of Google.  Be Selective You don’t want just anyone guest posting on your company blog – they need to be providing useful, relevant content for your readers. Protect the reputation you’ve built by doing your research. If you receive a guest post solicitation, do a quick search to see if they are legitimate experts. If you see that they have written on the proposed topic multiple times and are simply spinning content, reject it immediately. They are just looking to build links and you don’t want to be part of that. Buzzsumo is a great way to get a sense of the social authority of potential guest bloggers – especially if your business is looking to gain exposure. It’s also a great tool if you are looking for websites to pitch a guest post topic to. You want to post to and receive posts from influencer sites who will share content that will then be shared again by their followers. If you are looking to be a guest blogger, look for a website that shares a similar specialty to yours and pay attention to the content they post. You don’t want to pitch to a site that over-links and is heavy on anchor text. If any part of the site makes you question its reputability, move on to the next opportunity.  Chances are it will be a better fit for your brand. Remember that quality, legitimate link generation doesn’t happen overnight. By creating and publishing valuable content and by patiently staying the course with a sound strategy, you should eventually be able to develop links that will withstand the test of time.   Stacy Jeziorowski Simple Machines Marketing http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2014/03/20/guest-blogging-simplified-avoiding-google-penalization.aspx http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2014/03/20/guest-blogging-simplified-avoiding-google-penalization.aspx Thu, 20 March 2014 00:00:00 2662 http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2014/03/12/how-to-create-a-quality-twitter-following.aspx With 78% of small businesses gaining new customers via social media, there’s no surprise that Twitter is at the top of just about every small business owner’s mind. One of the most common things we hear from our clients is that they know they should be on Twitter but don’t think they have the time or resources to make it worth the effort. In fact, as a small business owner, you should already have one of the most important resources you need for Twitter: your mission statement. Twitter is a vehicle to help share and advance the mission of your organization, to grow awareness surrounding it and to engage others who may find it relevant. By sticking to your mission and leveraging resources available to you, you can develop a quality following that won’t monopolize your time or break your budget.  Quality Followers Start with Quality Follows Finding and following relevant users is one important way to begin growing your presence on Twitter, but that doesn’t mean you want to go out and follow all 241 million active users. Adhering to these best practices while maintaining your Twitter account will steer this tactic in the most effective direction: Find and follow influencers: Chances are you already know many of the influencers in your industry. If you are looking for more, there’s a new tool – Buzzsumo – that ranks social influencers by keyword. Follow these influencers and look for tactful – but not obnoxious – ways to engage them. Follow users carefully: A user might have a relevant bio, but their tweets might not align. Our general rule of thumb: if you wouldn’t read or share their content, then you shouldn’t follow them. Avoid spam users and followback accounts: While Twitter regularly cleans out spambots, many accounts exist to increase followers. Fluff followers aren’t going to convert into business and won’t do anything to help your Twitter brand. Never pay for followers: There are many companies that offer to increase your Twitter followers for a fee. Yes, these services will increase your numbers. No, they will not be quality followers. Craft Quality Posts for Shareability  Now that you are following quality users, you need to establish a way to engage them and to attract new followers. The key to building a strong following on Twitter is to post often and to post interesting and relevant content. It sounds a lot easier said than done, right?   Start by developing an editorial calendar. Sit down with your team and plug in any important items that you should be tweeting about – company milestones, events or new product releases. Then think about the topics you’d like to cover in general. It’s more than likely that you’ll cover many of the same topics monthly, but if your business is seasonal or is affected by the holidays, you’ll want to adapt your messaging accordingly. Once your calendar is established, use a social dashboard like Hootsuite to help you schedule your content. To keep up with shareable content, look to publications surrounding your industry and to those you follow for ideas. Buzzsumo can help here too, as it functions as a search engine and ranks content on its shareability across social platforms. It’s a great way to ensure the content you share is relevant to your audience. When tweeting, it is good practice to include hashtags and calls to actions when relevant – read more, retweet and share – to increase the chances of your content being found and shared. When you receive mentions and retweets, remember to acknowledge those who share your content, engage with those who share similar ideas and always respond to customer service concerns – good or bad. This type of engagement will improve not only your visibility, but your reputation as well.  Evaluating Your Success Running analytics on your Twitter account will give you an in-depth look at what is working and what’s not. Many analytics programs provide you with more statistical breakdown options than you may need; hone in on the key metrics that correlate with your broader business goals. (See also: How to Assess Social Media Campaigns.) Through Hootsuite Analytics, you can not only look at follower statistics, but also at what content is being clicked on and shared. Eliminate the content topics that aren’t working to ensure that more of your posts are of interest to your audience. Followerwonk is another great tool to analyze your account. The free version will allow you to look at the gender, language and location breakdown of your followers, which is useful if your business targets a certain demographic. The biggest piece of advice we give our clients is to be patient. Your Twitter page isn’t going to garner 10,000 followers, 50 retweets and 100s of mentions overnight. Start with a strategic plan, tweak it according to the analytics and with time, you’ll develop a quality following on Twitter.  Stacy Jeziorowski Simple Machines Marketing http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2014/03/12/how-to-create-a-quality-twitter-following.aspx http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2014/03/12/how-to-create-a-quality-twitter-following.aspx Wed, 12 March 2014 00:00:00 2661 http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2014/01/22/how-to-assess-social-media-campaigns.aspx If you’re not measuring your social media marketing returns, you’re not alone. According to a recent survey by Tata Consultancy Services, 44% of companies surveyed reported that they do not have mechanisms in place to measure the impact of their social media efforts. By comparison, about 18% reported negative returns on their social media investments, while 38% saw positive returns. Unlike some more traditional marketing channels that lend themselves to relatively concrete cost-benefit analyses, social media comes with a host of unknowns and gray areas, making a direct assessment of this sort virtually impossible. While you may not be able to calculate an exact ROI, this doesn’t mean you can’t quantify the results and measure the impact of your social media campaigns. Yes, you’ll have to accept a certain level of murkiness; you’ll depend on estimates and imperfect comparisons, and some benefits will probably be intangible and/or overlap with other benefits. Despite this level of uncertainty, you can still create a framework to develop an informed picture of your social media marketing returns. Using Objectives to Define Metrics The first step in measuring your social media results is to pinpoint which metrics are most important. As with any marketing channel, the metrics should ultimately be determined by your broader business objectives. If this foundational work hasn’t already been done, take the time to go through the process. Here’s a quick guide to get you started: After doing this groundwork, you might develop a framework like this:     Now, with the best corresponding metrics assigned to your top Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s), you’ll have a much clearer path to determining the tactical benefits of your social media marketing. Assigning Value to Social Media Benefits Determining the right metrics to gauge is one thing; computing the value of these metrics is another. How you do this will largely be contingent upon your business model and your broader social media goals. Here’s an example. You own a taco truck, and you rely exclusively on Twitter to broadcast your location to customers. In this case, your goal with social media is primarily to sell more tacos. With a fairly direct relationship between your Twitter activity and your sales numbers, you have a clear framework to judge whether this channel is working to hit your goals or whether it’s coming up short. On the other end of the spectrum are businesses using social media purely as a branding and visibility channel. If your business falls into this category, you may not have any direct response call to action or a direct connection to sales; instead, you’re looking for targeted reach, frequency, impressions and engagement. In this case, while there is no taco sales goal to use as a benchmark for success, you still want a frame of reference to make sure you’re not wasting money. To assign a ballpark value to social media visibility, consider what you’d have to pay in advertising costs to achieve the same result. Your social media analytics will tell you the reach, frequency and (if applicable) clicks you’re achieving within your market. Let’s say your social media activity for the month is generating 100,000 impressions. If you take an average CPM rate for display ads in your industry – let’s say that’s $7 CPM – you can calculate that: 100,000 social impressions / $7CPM  = $700 display ad spend (roughly) Given your social media expenses, are you over or underperforming when judged against a comparable ad spend? (This is not to say that social media visibility is equivalent to visibility gained through advertising, but this provides a good basis for comparison.) For many businesses, social media is used both for visibilityandlead/sales generation – in which case there is a mix of metrics that need to be weighed according to the priority of the goals. If it sounds like a lot of work, it can be – especially if you have a diverse set of goals and several active channels. But, by doing the upfront work and starting with clear goals, identifying the most important metrics for success and tracking results, you won’t be in the dark about the impact of your social media marketing. Charlie Nadler Simple Machines Marketing http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2014/01/22/how-to-assess-social-media-campaigns.aspx http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2014/01/22/how-to-assess-social-media-campaigns.aspx Wed, 22 January 2014 00:00:00 2955 http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2013/11/14/how-small-businesses-can-harness-the-potential-of-tumblr.aspx (Today's guest post comes from Bernadette Coleman, who shares some of the benefits of using Tumblr along with tactics for getting the most from this platform.) With so many social media and blogging platforms available, it can be overwhelming for businesses to decide which should be used to showcase their brands. While Facebook and Twitter are often the first places brands turn to, Tumblr is also an effective channel for many small businesses. This 77 million-strong blogging platform attracts an average of nearly 4.5 billion impressions on a weekly basis. Tumblr is a free micro-blogging platform that can serve as a powerful tool in promoting brand awareness. Tumblr’s primary users are young people around the age of 25. If your brand focus is on this market segment, you can’t afford to miss out on this channel. Because the content is indexed by major search engines, Tumblr can help increase your search visibility. It integrates well with Facebook, and it’s also a very mobile-friendly interface.  Getting Started on Tumblr Your first blog on Tumblr becomes your default blog; deleting this is a complicated process, so take care while creating it. Tumblr has references to help out new users, and there are plenty of guides available online. It’s a good idea to install the Tumblr ‘bookmarklet’ on your web browser; this will let you quickly add new posts without having to log in separately. Add the app to your smartphone or tablet to make sharing even easier. Engaging with Other Blogs Search and select blogs related to your business and brand – blogs relevant to your customers. Follow people in your niche who post important and engaging posts on a regular basis. Reply to posts from other bloggers and share their posts on your Tumblr blog with attribution. Like other social media platforms, your primary goal should be to post a variety of content that will be interesting and/or useful to your market. To be really effective, create new original posts at least three times per day. These can be noteworthy images, videos or links; you don’t necessarily need to write long blog posts. Working on Your Theme Unlike Facebook, Tumblr is very customizable. Design your page to be consistent with your brand. There are thousands of free and paid themes available, and you can create one of your own with a little knowledge of CSS. Even the existing themes allow for plenty of customization. Tagging for Visibility It’s important to understand how tagging works. Look for tags in popular posts from bloggers you follow. Track those tags so that you know of new relevant updates. When preparing new posts, use tags that you want the post to be marketed under. Now, people searching these tags are more likely to find your blog. This is an easy way to increase readership. Advanced Features There are a number of advanced features and tools that let you get the most out of your Tumblr use: Tumblr integrates with Goggle Analytics, letting you monitor traffic to your blog. You can also add a custom domain name to your Tumblr blog, which can help with search visibility if you’re using targeted keywords. Users can integrate Tumblr with Disqus to enable commenting.  If you’re promoting events or milestones, you can create “event” blogs within your Tumblr account to showcase different events; these can then be deleted at any time. Tumblr allows you to post based on a pre-determined schedule; if you don’t have the time to post regularly throughout the day, you can schedule posts ahead of time. Regardless of which tools and features you use, keep in mind that when using Tumblr as a marketing channel, it’s always a good idea to stay within your niche to gain a meaningful audience. While posting on every other topic or happening will dilute your identity, a clearly defined brand image and content mission will help you to stand out and gain a loyal following. About the Author Bernadette Coleman is the CEO of Advice Interactive Group. http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2013/11/14/how-small-businesses-can-harness-the-potential-of-tumblr.aspx http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2013/11/14/how-small-businesses-can-harness-the-potential-of-tumblr.aspx Thu, 14 November 2013 00:00:00 undefined,2661 http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2013/10/28/create-a-plan-to-get-the-most-from-your-analytics.aspx If you’re in any way involved in the management of your business’ website, it’s a given that you’re familiar with website analytics. Odds are that you’re using Google Analytics (or a plugin for it), and depending on your role in the business, you’re either being given reports from analytics or you’re pulling the data yourself. It’s always good to know how much traffic your site is getting and how that changes month to month, but this is really just the tip of the data iceberg, and learning how to create a plan to better harness the power of website analytics is a crucial way to make the most of your digital marketing efforts. Start with Objectives You have a website and you want to increase traffic – that much we’ll assume is true. But beyond that, what interactions and relationships do you want to foster with your site?  Are you trying to create awareness and grow sales of your amazing hair removal product? Build trust and grow leads as a legal support provider? Define these objectives as clearly as possible. This is a critical step not just for your analytic planning, but for the marketing and growth of your business in general.  Define Your Strategy and Tactics If you’ve already developed a marketing plan, this piece should be in place. What strategy will help you achieve your business goals, and what tactics best support that strategy? Your tactics can include things like a blog, social media execution, direct mail, PPC advertising, email marketing and so on. Identify the Most Important Performance Metrics For each tactic being used, identify which desired actions you want visitors to take and which behaviors you wish to improve. For example, if one of your tactics is a newsletter, a completed newsletter signup form on the website will be one desired action you’ll definitely want to track. Platforms like Google Anlaytics allow you to set up macro and micro conversions so you can track both the most important actions (macro) and the indicators that users are moving toward a macro conversion (micro). Create Relevant Segments Depending on the type of business you have and visitors you’re attracting, it will be valuable to segment visitors by certain dimensions and track their behavior in isolation and compared to each other. If you have two locations of physical stores and an e-commerce, you might want to segment visitors be geography – visitors near store A, visitors near store B and visitors not close to either. Determine Targets To give your performance data context, look to external data and any historical data to determine targets for your website. What overall traffic volumes and conversion rates are leaders in your industry seeing? What conversion rate do you need to hit for your marketing channels to be profitable? These types of indicators should be used to set realistic goals, and from there your analytics will help drive tactical decisions. Over to you – how have analytics influenced your business’ strategy? Let us know in the comments! Charlie Nadler Simple Machines Marketing http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2013/10/28/create-a-plan-to-get-the-most-from-your-analytics.aspx http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2013/10/28/create-a-plan-to-get-the-most-from-your-analytics.aspx Mon, 28 October 2013 00:00:00 2661 http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2013/10/17/the-end-of-search-traffic-data-from-google.aspx Recently, we made a significant change to how we report on SEO work. Before the change, we included a metric in SEO reports called “HVK traffic” – traffic from visitors searching for high value keywords – as a way to gauge how many visits a website was attracting due to SEO efforts. HVK is another way to think about non-branded organic traffic; someone who searches for your services/products but doesn’t search for your business by name is an HVK visitor. These are the keywords the site is optimized for, and the primary goal of SEO is to increase these visits. Unfortunately for marketers and businesses who rely on this data to help optimize their websites for search, Google has been steadily encrypting more and more organic searches – meaning instead of seeing what keywords search visitors used to find your website, you’ll only see “(Not Provided)” in your analytics. As the ClickConsult graph at the right shows, encrypted accounts for around 80% of searches now, and experts are resigned to the reality that soon enough, 100% of organic Google searches will be encrypted. (Note: while keywords from organic searches are increasingly encrypted, Google continues to provide keyword data for AdWords clicks. Whether or not we can conclude that Google is forcing marketers to essentially pay for keyword data is a debate I’ll leave for another time.) What Now? Does the end of organic search data from Google spell the end for SEO? Not likely. For a vast number of businesses and organizations, a strong organic search ranking will continue to be an invaluable visibility boost and an extremely powerful inbound lead generator. While the lack of organic search keyword data makes assessing ROI from SEO more challenging, Webmasters can still see how their sites are ranking for targeted keywords – and tying this progress to increases in organic search traffic will be a primary component to gauging results. Is SEO changing? Absolutely. SEO has changed drastically in the past decade, and it will continue to change as search behavior – and search algorithms – evolve. The loss of search keywords may be a hurdle, but it’s a hurdle that can be cleared by continuing to look forward and by finding new ways to make the best use of available data.  Charlie Nadler Simple Machines Marketing http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2013/10/17/the-end-of-search-traffic-data-from-google.aspx http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2013/10/17/the-end-of-search-traffic-data-from-google.aspx Thu, 17 October 2013 00:00:00 2661 http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2013/10/10/how-marketing-surveys-could-inform-your-strategy.aspx It goes without saying that businesses need to have a finger on the pulse of their target market in order to succeed. If you don’t know your customers’ psychographics and how they make buying decisions, you’ll have a tough time getting off the ground – not to mention adapting to changes. Big businesses pay big money to generate market research and hire specialists to analyze and synthesize the data. Ideally, this research gives the business not only a more concrete look at threats and opportunities at any given time, but also a good idea of what those threats and opportunities might look like tomorrow. If you’re at a smaller and medium-sized business, market research is no less crucial to your success – though you’re probably not sitting on big budgets set aside for formal market research. Fortunately, as many businesses have discovered, using surveys can be a very cost-efficient way to gain broader insight into your market. Insights to be Gained from Marketing Surveys To help spark some ideas, here are five different ways surveys might inform your marketing strategy: Determine brand equity. What percentage of people in your market are aware of your brand? What qualities do they associate with it and how loyal are they to it? Having survey data that sheds light on these questions will help determine where your marketing should be focused – whether it’s increasing brand visibility, overcoming negative brand connotations, clarifying scope of services etc. Clarify your market. You might have a general sense of who makes up your market and how they make decisions, but a survey can identify customers and non-customers in further detail. Why are/aren’t they giving you their business? What attitudes and expectations do they have in regards to your products or services? This level of market clarification can provide invaluable direction for your messaging and channel choices. Assess customer service. For a high percentage of small B2C businesses, customer service is a defining strength for their brand. Including a voluntary customer service survey after a transaction is a common way to gauge how strong the service actually is in the eye of the customer. Focus questions on the actual service received, the process involved and all relevant participants. The results could generate some important discoveries – especially if customer service is a cornerstone of your brand. Assess demand for a new product or service. Before rolling out a new product or introducing a new service line, consider using a survey to get a sense of how it will be received and what changes might be in order before it’s ready for primetime. Is there strong enough demand? Are there things about your product or service concept that people especially like or dislike? Not every business decision should live or die by survey results, but these opinions can provide important guidance and shouldn’t be ignored. Assess marketing effectiveness. Marketing channels come with their own measures of success – impressions, clicks, phone calls, CPL and so on. Many of these metrics are more useful for assessing lead generation campaigns and less so for brand awareness campaigns. For businesses engaged in these broader, long term mass media campaigns, surveys are often relied on to get a sense of penetration achieved and the effectiveness of the campaign in moving the audience toward the desired goal. Did your market see the ad? What affect did the ad have? These are just a handful of the ways marketing surveys can help inform and guide a business’ strategy for growth. Small businesses have a number of free-to-inexpensive and easy-to-use survey platforms like SurveyMonkey that help users to generate questions, collect survey data and organize results. Have you used surveys to improve your marketing? What insights did you gain? Let us know in the comments. Charlie Nadler Simple Machines Marketing http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2013/10/10/how-marketing-surveys-could-inform-your-strategy.aspx http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2013/10/10/how-marketing-surveys-could-inform-your-strategy.aspx Thu, 10 October 2013 00:00:00 2945 http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2013/09/19/5-ways-a-small-business-can-compete-with-large-companies-at-a-trade-show.aspx (As a follow up to our post about seven types of trade show displays, business and tech writer Elizabeth Alton outlines a few important ways small businesses can compete in this space.) Trade shows are a highly effective venue for reconnecting with existing clients and meeting new customers. But sometimes, when you’re a small business owner, industry events can be intimidating – especially when several large businesses are scheduled to be in attendance. Large businesses tend to have large budgets to create fancy displays that are designed to draw in potential customers. So how can you compete as a small business owner? Luckily, there are a number of ways you can create an attractive trade show booth on a smaller budget. Here are five ways a small business can compete with a large company at industry events. Pay attention to your booth design One of the quickest and easiest ways to grab the attention of others at a trade show is with a creative booth design. Now, you may be thinking that a custom booth design is simply out of your price range. Luckily, there are a number of options available for businesses of every size. Trade show display companies can work with you to create an attractive display to meet your budget. For some great examples of creative booth designs and accessories, check out the seven types of displays for industry events.  Be outgoing So what if your business booth doesn’t necessarily have all the bells and whistles of larger competitors? That doesn’t mean you can’t make a great impression on potential customers stopping by. Plan your communications strategy ahead of time, and make sure you put any shyness aside for the trade show. Being friendly, outgoing, and accessible goes a long way towards making meaningful connections with your target audience. Get creative Have you ever been to a trade show where businesses seem to be giving the same old sales pitch at every booth you visit? Why not change things up a little bit to help ensure that your business stands out from the crowd! Consider purchasing a unique branded giveaway item for customers, developing a short ice breaking game, or crafting a pitch that’s attention grabbing and totally unique. Standing out from the crowd isn’t about how much money you’re spending, it’s about being memorable! Work the room One rule of thumb for trade shows is that you should never go alone – it makes it much easier to work the floor. Always bring a colleague with you so that one of you can stay at your booth while the other networks their way around the room. This two-pronged communication approach is especially important for small business owners because it gives you the opportunity to cover more ground in less time. This also allows you to provide potential customers with multiple reminders of your business. After all, they will have the pleasure of meeting you as you explore the trade show floor, as well as your colleague who is manning your businesses’ booth. Stay connected Do you have a LinkedIn profile? If not, it’s time to get started with building one! The popular social network provides a great outlet for making connections with contacts you’ve made at industry events. After you attend the upcoming trade show, make some time to go through that stack of business cards you gather and start networking on LinkedIn. Sometimes a simple follow up message is enough to trigger a deeper conversation and develop a relationship with a potential customer. If you are a small business owner who is feeling excited but somewhat intimidated by attending a trade show, not to worry! There are several strategies that can help you stand out from the competition, even if the competition is a larger company. Author Bio Elizabeth Alton is a business and technology writer. She covers trends related to small business, entrepreneurs, and the evolving digital landscape. Her work has been published by The Huffington Post, USA Today, The Daily Muse, Better Homes and Gardens, and PolicyMic. Connect with Elizabeth on Google+. http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2013/09/19/5-ways-a-small-business-can-compete-with-large-companies-at-a-trade-show.aspx http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2013/09/19/5-ways-a-small-business-can-compete-with-large-companies-at-a-trade-show.aspx Thu, 19 September 2013 00:00:00 2661 http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2013/08/22/simple-machines-posts-from-around-the-web.aspx Along with the posts we write for the Simple Machines blog, we contribute to a number of different websites that cover similar territory. Below are a few of our recent favorites. 1. Content Marketing Strategy: Lessons from Good (and Bad) Comedy  The worlds of content marketing and comedy don’t exactly overlap, but we’re here to tell you that there are lessons to be learned from comedy writing that can apply to content. Seriously, find out how you can use these lessons from good (and bad) comedy writing to improve your content marketing strategy. No joke. Read the full post at Content Marketing Institute 2. Providing Metrics in a (Not Provided) World Instead of valuable search keywords showing up in our analytics, we have “not provided” accounting for upwards of 50% of search traffic in some cases. For those who rely on organic traffic data for search engine optimization, this trend is serious cause for concern. I know it’s tempting to get angry and theorize about Google’s  PPC-minded motivations, but I think that a better use of our efforts would be on preserving and maximizing the search data we still have. Read the full post at Advanced Web Ranking 3. 4 Ways Social Meda can Help New Businesses Establish Credibility I’m not here to claim that every business should invest heavily in social media. However, I will offer a few ways that social media can help new businesses establish credibility—benefits that aren’t always discussed in the typical social media success stories. Creating visibility is a primary challenge for any new company, but for many segments of clients and consumers, establishing credibility will be crucial as well. Read the full post at  Grow Socially   4.  Less Obvious Landing Page Conversion Killers As a marketing strategist with a digital focus, I’ve spent a lot of time analyzing, tweaking, testing, and generally thinking about landing pages. The topic of  conversion optimization is one that’s been widely written about and discussed. And yet, I continue to see landing pages from businesses that are falling short in critical—and familiar—ways. Read the full post at Keep Up with the Web    5. 4 Signs You Need a New Website            If the very prospect of investing in a new website is making you stressed out, there’s a good reason for that. It’s a big undertaking, and as the old adage goes, “Change sucks.” Why invest so much time and resources when the site you have now is fine, right? Read the full post at Zemanta 6. Troubleshooting Your Underperforming PPC Campaign If you've ever managed a PPC campaign, you know there's always more tweaking required before you have a well-oiled conversion machine. Here's a guide to troubleshooting that underperforming campaign. Read the full post at Search Engine People Charlie Nadler Simple Machines Marketing http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2013/08/22/simple-machines-posts-from-around-the-web.aspx http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2013/08/22/simple-machines-posts-from-around-the-web.aspx Thu, 22 August 2013 00:00:00 2661 http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2013/07/30/3-ways-to-get-more-from-your-existing-content.aspx Several of the posts on the Simple Machines blog have dealt with the task of generating effective, optimized content – whether it’s website copy, blogs and articles, social media content or press releases.  If content generation is a significant piece of your marketing strategy, there’s a good chance you have some old content floating around out there that could benefit from a touch up as well. Rather than letting it collect dust, why not optimize where you can and make the most of the work that’s already been done? 1.      Optimize Highly Visible Content for Conversion Use analytics to take a snapshot of your proprietary content (web pages, old blog posts, white papers, slideshows etc.): which of these pieces of content are getting the most views? How do the conversion rates for these compare to your strongest, conversion-friendly pieces of content? Because there are a strong number of impressions for this content, you have much to gain by ensuring that it has been adequately optimized for conversion. Now, if you have a well-crafted, archived blog post or white paper on your site that is still getting shared regularly, the last thing you want to do is ruin it with an inordinate amount of hard-sell marketing-speak. That said, you’re not likely to ruin anything by including pertinent forms of contact info and a relevant call-to-action. 2.      Increase Visibility for High Quality Content Are there any pieces of content that you feel are especially strong but perhaps haven’t received much visibility? There are a number of ways to give these a second shot at receiving the impressions they deserve: Search optimization: Use one of the many keyword research tools to determine if there are relevant key phrases worth optimizing for. If there is a strong opportunity, make sure to use the best key phrase in the title, H1 tag, and at least three or four times in the body text. If there are other pages or new posts that you can link back to, do that as well. Share through social media: Unless you’ve recently done so, share the content through all social media channels. As long as the content is still relevant and you’re not oversharing it, there’s no reason not to use these channels for distribution. Advertise. If the content has a high potential to engage your target market, you may consider using PPC advertising to drive impressions. Be sure to carefully monitor and analyze visitor behavior, making adjustments as needed. 3.      Sharpen Dull Content Not that I would ever imply YOUR business would possibly create any dull content – you can feel free to skip this section – but some OTHER businesses might find this pertinent. Browse through your content and consider whether any of the following tactics might help to sharpen it up or improve click through rates: Add interesting and/or helpful visuals Update the bio to include Google Authorship Make the content concise and easily scannable Maintain a consistent, genuine and authoritative tone in your writing Include real-world examples to illustrate ideas where possible Use a compelling meta description to improve CTR where applicable If you have a lot of old content out there, it’s a good idea to prioritize this task by starting with the highly visible and strongest quality content rather than wading in and waiting for shortcomings to jump out at you. By making the most of your existing content, you’re essentially creating a low-overhead new facet to your content marketing strategy – and who can say no to that? What ways have you gotten extra mileage from your existing content? Share with us in the comments! Charlie Nadler Simple Machines Marketing http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2013/07/30/3-ways-to-get-more-from-your-existing-content.aspx http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2013/07/30/3-ways-to-get-more-from-your-existing-content.aspx Tue, 30 July 2013 00:00:00 undefined,2936 http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2013/07/15/seven-types-of-trade-show-displays-for-indoor-or-outdoor-use.aspx (Occasionally we like to invite guest writers to weigh in on topics that we don't regularly write about but that some of our readers may find useful. Today's post comes from Mike Weimar, who provides some good insight regarding different display options for businesses marketing at trade shows.) Depending upon your company’s trade show display needs, you will get more bang for your buck by choosing some components that will offer versatility if you use both indoor and outdoor setups throughout the year. With the warmer weather upon us, you may be taking part in trade shows or other events that take place outside. Today every dollar counts, so you want to maximize your trade show budget.   Many display elements are already geared toward outdoor use, while some can be used in outdoor situations with proper precaution. Outdoor displays are designed and built to hold up to wind, rain, heat or whatever else Mother Nature may throw at them. High-quality inks and special printing processes are used to ensure that your graphic displays will resist fading, even after repeated outdoor use. Impress Your Potential Customers It’s been said that the first impression can make or break a customer relationship. Whether indoors or outside, you want to put your best foot forward and present your company in a polished manner. Consider the following six display types that can be useful in both indoor and outdoor situations with proper care and setup, helping your company maintain a polished look: Canopy Tents. These tents are available in a variety of sizes and styles. A canopy is versatile in that it provides shade from the sun and a reprieve for potential customers from the blazing heat. This leaves you more opportunity to share the benefits and features of your products or services. Made of weather-resistant material that can be customized with your logo and graphics, these canopies will stand up to repeated outdoor use. For indoor use, they provide an inviting area that stands out from the crowd. Outdoor Banner Stands. These stands come in a variety of styles that will work both indoors and out. Retractable display stands make it easy to transport, set-up, and store your displays until the next show. Stands that are weighted down with a water-filled base will help secure your displays and help prevent damage or injury caused by wind-blown or fallen displays. Literature Stands. Regardless of whether you are inside or out, you need to have something to organize your brochures and printed materials. Using rocks to keep flyers from blowing off your table isn’t the professional appearance you’re striving for. There are a variety of literature stands to choose from to provide an attractive and secure display for your marketing collateral. Expand MediaFabric Displays. For a quick setup with minimal effort, consider an Expand MediaFabric Display. In less than two minutes, you can easily set up this attractive printed backwall and start getting the message across to your future customers. The fabric backwall remains attached to the display frame making for teardown and storage in its convenient carrying bag. Modular Displays. If you really want to attract attention, then a modular display may be just what you are looking for a stylish and sophisticated display. These displays can be adapted to different space constraints and are great for companies that frequently travel and exhibit at trade shows. They are very easy to transport and set up and will certainly draw an audience to your exhibit. Tabletop Displays. For tight spaces, tabletop displays are another option. These are also ideal for smaller companies with limited budgets. You can choose from pop up, fabric, or folding tabletop displays that put your message front and center. Combined with other options, such as a canopy tent, tabletop displays can be adequately sheltered from many outdoor elements. Truss Displays. For a sturdy and versatile display that show attendees will be sure to notice, consider a truss display. These units can be easily modified and can be incorporated into your existing display elements or used as a standalone display unit. Truss displays are easy to set up and offer a variety of layouts for 10’ and 20’ spaces. With the right combination of elements and accessories, you can easily transform your company’s display into one that can be used both indoors or at out. As your display needs grow, you will find that it is easy to expand most of these systems to meet those needs. About the Author Mike Weimar is President of Iconic Displays, makers of a range of custom trade show displays. http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2013/07/15/seven-types-of-trade-show-displays-for-indoor-or-outdoor-use.aspx http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2013/07/15/seven-types-of-trade-show-displays-for-indoor-or-outdoor-use.aspx Mon, 15 July 2013 00:00:00 2661 http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2013/07/01/what-you-lose-by-not-tracking-your-leads.aspx You’ve been working hard to create visibility for your business. You get calls and emails from your website. Changing your number and contact email is only going to confuse visitors and potentially result in prospects calling the wrong number in the future, right? This is a hesitation we occasionally encounter when it’s time to set up tracking systems for a marketing operation. While I can understand and appreciate the concerns business owners have about using new, dedicated means of contact to track leads for various channels, the pros vastly outweigh the cons. Here’s what I mean. Assessing the Concerns The biggest worry I hear from businesses is along these lines: customers or prospects will write down or save a tracking number from the website, the business will discontinue the tracking number and revert the site back to the primary number and these people will call the old tracking number and won’t be able to reach the business. While possible, this is a small risk for the following reasons: If the marketing efforts are working, you will want to keep the tracking numbers and emails, not discontinue them. If the marketing efforts are not successful, there will not be a high volume of new visitors on the site recording the contact info anyway. The majority of people who reach a discontinued or incorrect number or email will quickly look up the correct contact info online. Considering what will be Lost The cons of NOT using a tracking number, however, present much more difficult obstacles for a marketing operation. Namely, without a tracking number you will have incomplete results when assessing various marketing channels. This means an unclear line of sight to channel effectiveness – which limits your ability to make informed decisions regarding ongoing strategy – and an inability to accurately determine ROI for your marketing investments. While there are a few other methods of tracking phone calls without using a new number, they tend to involve setting up awkward hoops for the caller to jump through such as reading codes from the website. Extra steps like these are exactly the types of things you want to avoid when optimizing your site for conversions. The bottom line is that unless it will cause serious logistical problems, it is in your best interests to use tracking phone numbers and dedicated emails to track your leads. If you decide against these tools, it’s important to recognize what you’re losing. What are your favorite lead-tracking tools, and which ones did you dislike? Let us know in the comments! Charlie Nadler Simple Machines Marketing http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2013/07/01/what-you-lose-by-not-tracking-your-leads.aspx http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2013/07/01/what-you-lose-by-not-tracking-your-leads.aspx Mon, 01 July 2013 00:00:00 undefined,2661 http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2013/05/28/what-the-google-penguin-updates-mean-for-your-business.aspx Last week, Google unrolled its most recent webspam algorithm: Penguin 2.0.  As SEOs dissect, analyze and speculate about every word in the announcement from Google’s head of webspam, Matt Cutts, let’s take a step back and consider what these updates mean on a broader scale and what implications there are for small businesses. What is Penguin? Penguin is simply Google’s name for its webspam algorithm updates. These updates aim to improve the search experience – primarily by a) decreasing the search ranking of spam sites and those using “black-hat” SEO techniques, and b) by rewarding websites that feature a compelling experience for users. The first Penguin update was announced on April 24, 2012; Penguin 2.0 signifies the fourth Penguin-related launch. Before Penguin, Google released updates called Panda, which penalized websites that provided a poor user experience. What Are the Effects of Penguin on Search Results? In the early days of SEO, websites could achieve high search rankings by stuffing their site with keywords and meta data. Google adjusted its algorithm and, as a result, meta data was devalued and keyword-stuffed sites were penalized.  More recently, websites could improve search ranking by racking up a big volume of inbound links. Inbound links are still important to SEO – if the links are coming from natural, legitimate, high authority sources. However, sites with a huge number of links from low-quality and unnatural sources are now being penalized with the introduction of Penguin. Sites that are penalized will suffer drastic drops in search ranking – even for branded searching (searches for the company by name). Businesses as big as JC Penney have suffered such penalties for questionable link building practices. What Does Penguin Mean for Your Business? These updates do not mean the end of SEO, but they do signal that it will continue to evolve. If SEO is or will be a piece of your marketing plan, here are a few things to keep in mind about your website: Onsite optimization is still important. Using research, your site should be optimized for your most relevant keywords -- including appropriate titles, adequate keyword density, internal links, and completed sitemap, among other things. Linkbuilding alone is no longer a winning strategy. A healthy link profile is still important part of optimization, but it’s a losing battle if this is the sole tactic. Black-hat linkbuilding will hurt your ranking.Paying for links and trying to pass link juice from paid guest posts or advertorials will lead to penalties from Google. Good content is critical. With every update, Google is doing more to reward strong, shareable content and authoritative websites. If your site is designed to be compelling for your market, than your goals are aligned with Google’s and these updates are nothing to panic about.  Furthermore, if you are using blogs, whitepapers, infographics, webinars, and other forms of valuable content, you can use these to attract natural, organic links back to your site. Final Thoughts With so much written about SEO and so many contradictions out there, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. There are countless articles claiming things like “SEO is dead” and content marketing is the new winning strategy. The fact is that content marketing is part of SEO, and other white hat SEO tactics – a diversified inbound and outbound link profile, natural anchor text, and appropriate redirects, to name a few – are still important, too. By working with a search marketing specialist who has demonstrated success in SEO, you can ensure that your business’ strategy is sound and that you’re not missing any pieces of the SEO puzzle. Charlie Nadler Simple Machines Marketing http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2013/05/28/what-the-google-penguin-updates-mean-for-your-business.aspx http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2013/05/28/what-the-google-penguin-updates-mean-for-your-business.aspx Tue, 28 May 2013 00:00:00 2661 http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2013/05/08/telemarketing-simplified.aspx I know, telemarketing is an easy channel to hate – I’ve been on the receiving end of plenty of those calls, too. Hate it all you want, but the fact remains that when it comes to B2B lead generation, telemarketing continues to be an extremely powerful tool for a lot of companies. If you’re considering using telemarketing for your business, there are about two million and three resources for your callers with tips about how to avoid rejection, maneuver past gatekeepers, use “interest-creating opening statements” to hook your decision-makers and so on. I won’t add to that pile here. Instead, I’d rather take a step back and consider how to plan for a telemarketing campaign that’s built on a foundation of sound strategy and ROI-based objectives right from the beginning. It’s a demanding, resource-intensive channel; by entering with the right framework, you can make sure those resources aren’t going to waste. Set the Right Goals A client recently told me about a frustrating telemarketing experience, and I’m going to guess that some of you will be able to relate. After enlisting the help of an outsourced telesales firm to target a pool of businesses, he started getting meetings. Lots of meetings. Most of them a big waste of his time. What happened? As it turned out, the outsourced firm was incentivizing its telemarketers to simply set as many meetings as possible; that was their ultimate goal. Meetings are great – if you get them with the right people. Using the raw quantity of meetings as the final measure of success for a telemarketing campaign? Not a good strategy. I'm not arguing that you shouldn't have a goal for leads; you should. That said, everyone involved needs to have a clear definition of a qualified lead and the understanding that setting appointments with these quality prospects is more important than generating a raw number of leads.  As with any channel, telemarketing should be approached and assessed in terms of ROI. As you plan, you should determine how much a qualified lead is worth in order to calculate an acceptable cost per lead. Your goals for leads may evolve as the campaign progresses and you have a more concrete close rate, but starting with a measurable benchmark that the telemarketers can work with is a critical step to avoiding the frustration this client encountered. Use a Calendar Here are some questions you don’t want to find yourself asking about your telemarketing campaign:  “Where are we with this?” “Weren’t we supposed to have something like X number of leads by this point?” “Shouldn’t we go over results one of these days?” Along with setting up goals and expectations, the planning stage of telemarketing should include setting up a concrete timeline. Ideally, you will have a shared calendar with the telemarketing manager. This calendar should include the following items by month: Launch date Top priorities Milestones Scheduled meetings and reports Any other elements you’d like to be aware of By scheduling these items before launch, you can refer to the calendar at any time to stay appraised of how things should be progressing and use this to hold the team accountable. Be Flexible Right after talking about the importance of sticking to an ROI-based framework and following a detailed calendar, it might seem contradictory to turn around and talk about flexibility – but the two are not mutually exclusive. Yes, you should be rigid about setting goals and expectations, assessing results and following a schedule. At the same time, it’s important to recognize that a telemarketing campaign is hard to predict and that, if executed properly, it’s going to evolve and build momentum as it goes.  What you have in your mind as the perfect pitch might need to be tweaked based on the responses of the prospect. What you happen to think is a reasonable call-to-lead ratio might not be reasonable in the first few months once hard data starts coming in. You shouldn’t budge on measuring results based on ROI, but you should have enough flexibility to adapt to realities of the campaign. Do you have any telemarketing success (or horror) stories? What decisions in the planning stages helped or hurt? Let us know about them in the comments! Charlie Nadler Simple Machines Marketing http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2013/05/08/telemarketing-simplified.aspx http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2013/05/08/telemarketing-simplified.aspx Wed, 08 May 2013 00:00:00 2871 http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2013/04/17/shedding-bad-recession-habits-the-return-to-tracking-profitability.aspx I started my marketing career in 2008, just as the latest recession was rearing its ugly head. As you undoubtedly already know, priorities in the worlds of lead generation and sales were very different then. Thousands of companies were coming to the harrowing realization that referrals and business development leads were drying up as media-driven panic caused the entire business world to table all planned investments indefinitely. Faced with a sudden revenue crisis, businesses everywhere were accepting jobs from nearly everyone that was willing to pay. Profitability took a back seat to gross revenue as business owners desperately tried to keep the doors open with as few layoffs as possible. Strategic goals shifted from growth to “weathering the storm.” The list of long-term effects of this period is lengthy, and businesses picked up new habits both good and bad. One of the bad habits that must be shed is the focus on revenue over profitability. Businesses that survived the recession did so by becoming leaner. Under the circumstances, that was mostly through cutting unnecessary overhead cost. But wasted money is wasted money; it counts exactly the same whether it’s wasted on an unneeded resource or an unprofitable project. This has major implications for marketers because it calls for a change in both messaging and channels to sacrifice quantity for increased quality. This is something that will absolutely (1) pay off in the long run and (2) be a pain in the short term. If you’re a marketer and your boss hasn’t already put pressure on you to do this, get ahead of the game. Here’s how to start: Determine if there is a problem in the first place. If your company isn’t measuring profitability on a client-by-client basis, it should be! Be the one to get it started. Get the finance department to help you figure out the best way to track project overages and tie them to revenue generated. Tie success and failures to the marketing channel that produced the leads. Now, you have baselines, and it is from baselines that progress can be measured. Talk to your manager about your findings. You may have discovered a serious issue, or you may have discovered that things are going swimmingly. Either way, you’ll want to talk about benchmarking future investments based on your current profitability, and it makes sense to let your supervisor decide on how to handle the information and potential change of focus. Rethink your messaging. This does not mean you need to rethink your brand. In many cases, this is simply shifting your target to a narrower part of the sales funnel. How many of those whitepaper downloads actually turn into work? When they do, are they profitable projects? Changing your call to action to require more commitment will likely lose a lot of leads, but it may be the perfect next step for the prospects you want the most. Getting better qualified leads to sales faster means more efficient use of everyone’s time. Rethink your channels. One of my clients was in love with SEO because its leads turned into sales appointments at a much higher rate than its telemarketing leads. However, a closer look revealed that those appointments from SEO turned into sales at a much lower rate than those from telemarketing. A little investigation revealed that the telemarketing appointments were, on average, more qualified than the SEO appointments. This client didn’t throw out SEO, but they did test new copy to try to be clearer about the types of jobs they were willing to perform. No one blames you for prioritizing revenue when the recession hit, but now it’s time to get back to profitability. Just make sure you set the expectations correctly within your organization, or a movement to make more money may just look like fewer new leads to your boss. Michael Holley  Simple Machines Marketing http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2013/04/17/shedding-bad-recession-habits-the-return-to-tracking-profitability.aspx http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2013/04/17/shedding-bad-recession-habits-the-return-to-tracking-profitability.aspx Wed, 17 April 2013 00:00:00 2871 http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2013/03/28/the-single-most-important-conversion-tactic.aspx It doesn’t matter what type of a website you run – ecommerce, blog, news aggregator, etc. – the key to your success is ease of use for your visitors. Don’t roll your eyes! I know it sounds obvious, but you and I may have different definitions of the term “ease of use.” I’ve found that the clients we work with are becoming increasingly aware of common tactical “best practices” for homepage and landing page components – things like contact forms, newsletters sign-up fields, download buttons, videos, and social media buttons. As such, they are more frequently requesting that lots extra things are added to their websites. There’s a common belief that a site is easy to use if most of its content is clearly accessible from the entry point. If you believe in these tools and their ability to demand attention, it’s very easy to overuse them and end up with something cluttered and confusing. The problem isn’t the tools, but the motivation behind including them. When a person visits a website, he or she is looking for something. What users are seeking can be very specific or something as vague as “a bit more information,” but absolutely every visitor has a purpose. Because these people have come to the site in order to find something, the site is “easy” to use if it is able to make that “something” easy to find and access. This is in stark contrast to the type of ease of use I mentioned in the paragraph above. If you needed to find a plumber, would you rather see a list of all the plumbers in the area, or a single ad showing the best possible choice along with all the information you need to reach out? So, the best possible thing you can do to maximize conversion is to make sure your site is built around the thing your ideal customer wants to find. The path of least resistance should be the most useful and intuitive course of interaction. Here’s how you do it: Find out who is browsing your website Let’s pretend you’re a B2B services company that’s using its website to generate sales leads. When a lead arrives, does the user need to be sold on your product line, or will he or she just be comparing you with your competitors? In the former instance, you might want to display the benefits of your service and give the user a chance to download something to learn more. In the latter instance, you’ll probably want to display testimonials and differentiators and give the user a chance to contact you about pricing. Your marketing department will be able to answer this question based on the types of channels being used to drive traffic. If you aren’t sure, use Google Analytics to find out what people are searching to get to your site. Are they searching for your brand name or for your industry? Bury the stuff that doesn’t matter to your user Let’s pretend you’re an ecommerce company selling goods directly to consumers. You’ve run some search ads and have users hitting a landing page where they can buy exactly what they’ve searched. You’ll probably want them to see the product’s price, availability, user reviews to help them pull the trigger, and a very easy way to begin the purchase. What you probably don’t want them to see is anything that might distract them for purchasing – links to your Twitter, a way to sign up for your newsletter, employee profiles, or anything else. There is a place for these things, but maybe that place is on the homepage – where users are more likely to land if they’ve searched for information on your company rather than a product. Use data to tweak your layouts Let’s pretend you’re a blogger that’s been growing your readership through guest blogging. You know you want to maximize the new traffic you get from other networks by making it easy to subscribe to your RSS feed from every entry. You want to make the link visible but not distracting – but did you go too far? Did you go far enough? You can use Google Analytics to see if more people have been clicking your link, but if you really want to see how users are reacting to your layout, you can use one of a plethora of available website heatmap tools. There have been studies that concluded that website users tend to move their mouse cursors along with their eyes, to the tune of an 80% correlation. These heatmap tools record mouse cursor paths for you so you can see where your users are hunting for your content and adjust your layout accordingly. Don’t get caught up in putting tons of neat things on your site. Your website should be special made for your users, so all you need are the features that make sense for them. Michael Holley  Simple Machines Marketing http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2013/03/28/the-single-most-important-conversion-tactic.aspx http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2013/03/28/the-single-most-important-conversion-tactic.aspx Thu, 28 March 2013 00:00:00 undefined,2871 http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2013/03/20/how-to-waste-your-marketing-budget.aspx Is your marketing budget too big? Are your marketing efforts drawing too much interest from qualified prospects? Do you need a way to flush that money down the toilet? I’ve got your answer – don’t invest any resources into your lead intake process. If you sell to businesses, the overwhelming majority of your target audience will be made up of very busy people. It is, in fact, one of the great challenges of B2B marketing: how do you successfully demand the attention of someone who has so little to give? Well, after you’ve managed to acquire that precious attention, there’s no better way to lose it forever than to botch the phone call or email you receive. There are lots of ways to do it: you can route your calls through a confusing auto-attendant, or simply to a receptionist who you haven’t bothered to incentivize or even train on how to handle leads. If you don’t have a receptionist or a fancy phone system, you can simply have calls forward to the cell phone of a salesperson or executive who spends 80% of his or her day in meetings. In this day and age, with all of your competitors just a Google search away, you can be certain that these potential clients will just move on to the next company if they encounter any barriers to getting what they need from you. Alright, that’s enough sarcasm – I think you get the point. If the above paragraph sounds ridiculous, then you’ve probably got it under control and you can stop reading. However, I’m willing to bet that some of this stuff sounds familiar to many of you. I’m not surprised that a lot of companies forget to think about how important their intake process is, but I am continually shocked at how often I run into companies that simply refuse to prioritize fixing it. B2B companies must treat their lead intake process as a crucial piece of their infrastructures. Please believe me when I say that a good intake process is truly a sales and marketing asset. Without it, you are (a) throwing away business opportunities that you are paying to receive and (b) making it impossible to evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns, thus making it impossible to calculate ROI. How you set this up depends on what internal resources you have available to you and how your customers tend to reach out, so there’s no precise blueprint to follow. However, if you make sure your process meets the following five requirements, you’ll be in good shape: Anyone that responds to inquiries must be trained on how to handle them appropriately (collecting information, setting expectations, setting next steps for sales, etc.) Someone must be available to receive phone calls at all times during your business hours. This means you’ll probably need more than one person in order to account for lunch breaks, bathroom breaks, vacations, etc. Someone must be able to respond to online inquiries or emails within 30 minutes, but ideally within 10. While they are often surprised, no prospect is ever upset about you responding too quickly. The prospect may need to set a different time to speak with you, but that’s fine – you’ve already set an appointment. There must be no barrier between a prospect and a trained responder. It may be completely necessary for your company to have an auto-attendant for phone calls or a general receptionist, but there’s no reason that you cannot put a phone number on your marketing materials that goes straight to your designated recipient of leads. You must be able to record every inquiry you receive, and you must be able to tie each one to the channel that produced it. This can often be achieved simply by requiring the trained responder to ask the prospect how he or she found you, but it may also be useful to utilize special tracking phone numbers (we use  these guys) and landing pages so you can maintain a database of how often each of your channels is producing conversions. You’ll also want to be able to get feedback from sales as to how qualified each of these leads are – it’s not uncommon for certain channels to produce higher quality results than others, even if they’re all producing traffic of some sort. Want to crowdsource some opinions on whether or not your intake process is effective? Start a conversation in the comments or on Facebook. I’ll make sure our marketing strategists chime in. Michael Holley Simple Machines Marketing http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2013/03/20/how-to-waste-your-marketing-budget.aspx http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2013/03/20/how-to-waste-your-marketing-budget.aspx Wed, 20 March 2013 00:00:00 2661 http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2013/03/15/beware-the-overpromising-marketer.aspx If you’ve been at the helm of a business as it launched its online presence in the past decade, you probably remember a period soon after launching where you started to feel pretty popular. Out of nowhere, you were getting all sorts of calls, contact form submissions and emails from people who ensured that they would optimize your site for search, have you listed in every directory under the sun, increase your website’s traffic by 1000% and flood your pipeline with leads. Welcome to the overcrowded and overpromising space of digital marketing services! The Commoditization of SEO and SEM Because there are a whole lot of digital agencies, business directories, media partners, SEO freelancers and other variations thereof competing for overlapping business, there has been some level of perceived commoditization of the SEO/SEM industry. In this ultra-competitive atmosphere, what we’re seeing is some serious overpromising—and inevitable under-delivering—on behalf of the hopeful digital marketers. Rather than trying to differentiate themselves in an email or cold-call, many competitors in the digital space think that their best bet to getting a foot in the door is to a) promise you exactly what they think you want to hear, and b) convince you that whatever you’re doing now is NOT WORKING because you’re not showing up in any directories or anywhere in search and without their help no one will ever find you ever! Finding the Right Fit for your Business It’s easy enough to ignore unsolicited emails and calls from alarmist marketers when you take your business online, but if you’re actively seeking marketing help, you may very well encounter this same approach; you outline your goals and the agency overpromises in order to get that contract signed. As with choosing any service, this is all about doing due diligence. Ideally, you want demonstrated competency, experience, and specialization to match your business. Whether you’re talking to an agency, a media rep, or a Yellow Book salesperson, take a close look at what they’re offering and take advantage of a free consultation to ask questions: What clients have they worked with in your industry, and how were they able to help them generate leads? Can they provide applicable case studies and client testimonials? What research can they provide about your market, your business, and your competitors to back up their recommended strategy? How do they track leads, report progress and demonstrate ROI? Marketing services shouldn’t be about guaranteeing results or making dubious claims. You’re not buying a prescription drug; you’re investing in a sound strategy to grow your business and the resources to execute that strategy. This process takes time, and your expectations may not always be realistic. Work with someone who’s not afraid to tell you that. Charlie Nadler Simple Machines Marketing http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2013/03/15/beware-the-overpromising-marketer.aspx http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2013/03/15/beware-the-overpromising-marketer.aspx Fri, 15 March 2013 00:00:00 2661 http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2013/02/27/why-your-blog-didn-t-make-the-cut.aspx I was recently wondering how much bad advice is floating around the internet pertaining to best blogging techniques. To get an idea, I did a quick search for “bad blogging advice.” On the first page of search results, eight out of the ten results had blog titles that were spot-on relevant to my search. Out of these eight blogs, five stood out as examples of strong, relevant content. Here’s what differentiated the memorable from the forgettable: Audience and the Purpose of Mission Among the blogs that didn’t make the cut, it appeared that the content was written for writing’s sake. There was no clear path to why. It was as if they were saying, “I’ll just stand in my corner of the internet and make some noise, hoping someone will hear me one day.” In other words, these blogs did not appear to be built on the foundation of a good mission statement. A mission statement guides the content and serves as a reminder why and for whom the content should exist. If a business creates a blog, then the blog should reflect the mission statement of the business. If you have created a blog as a separate entity from your business – or perhaps an extension of your own experience or expertise – a mission statement is still very much necessary. You must be able to answer these questions: Why does my blog exist?  What do I stand for?  How am benefitting my readers and why? Of the five blogs that pulled off a successful post about “bad blogging advice” – all five appeared to have clear mission statements. There was no question why they were writing this material or for whom they were writing it. Original Thought The blogs that didn’t make the final cut featured reused ideas. On the first page of search results alone, there were four or five posts that were essentially paraphrasing identical thoughts. Moving to another search results page uncovered longer lists of recycled ideas. The successful blogs had something unique to say. Maybe, they were inspired by other ideas, but they went to the trouble of owning their content and putting forth the effort to expound upon an idea in a direction that was useful, creative, and original all the while adhering to the real reason for writing: the answer to the question why. Given the breadth of content on the internet, it can be a challenge creating new ideas—or even creative twists on existing ideas. Anyone who is a blogger/writer has experienced this. Writing consistently original content is not easy, and it requires a significant time commitment. Hiring a strong writer with a proven record will obviously give you a big advantage here. My Final Thoughts It isn’t enough anymore to create a blog that shares useful information. There are countless blogs that do this and do it well. Readers expect it. If you don’t have a measurable value proposition, then there will be no direction to your writing. If your blog lacks direction, you will create lax content. If you create lax content, your blog will head in only one direction.   Benjamin Bullock Simple Machines Marketing http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2013/02/27/why-your-blog-didn-t-make-the-cut.aspx http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2013/02/27/why-your-blog-didn-t-make-the-cut.aspx Wed, 27 February 2013 00:00:00 2871 http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2013/02/20/simple-way-to-calculate-b2b-marketing-roi.aspx For B2C marketers (at least those selling products), tracking ROI is often as simple as making sure you know where your traffic comes from – it’s pretty easy to translate it to dollars from there. For B2B marketers, however, the sales process complicates the situation greatly. Not every lead is a sale, and not every sale is equal – so how much is a lead really worth? First, let’s think about what we want to use this information for. Channel ROI is a gauge for the overall effectiveness of the channel measured. Channels with positive ROI are making us money, whereas channels with negative ROI are losing money and each must be dealt with accordingly. So what channel ROI helps us to do is to make decisions about how to change our executions – whether to maintain a channel, to improve a channel or to discard a channel. Here’s a simple (five step) method to get a marketing channel ROI metric that will help you make decisions about your marketing investment: 1. Track leads by channel This part sounds obvious, but you may be surprised how many businesses don’t do a good job of this. You can probably use your CRM (or Excel if you don’t have one), but what you ultimately need is to tag every single lead with the channel that brought it to you. There can be no ambiguities here – if someone heard about you from an ad and then remembered you two months later when your website popped up on search, you must choose the channel that you credit and stick with it. Make sure you can export these into a list somehow because you’ll need to identify and count them. 2. Determine channel cost How much have you spent on each channel? The key here is to include the hourly cost of managing or executing each channel in with the hard media costs. I recommend using a yearly cycle – so you end up with total dollars spent on each channel as a function of media cost and labor. 3. Determine average client value Sales and finance will have to help with this one. Find out how much revenue the average client produces over the course of twelve months (or however much time you’ve decided to use for you marketing cost cycle). This can be complicated if you sell a product and then support it, but all of the revenue that is produced over the budgetary period needs to be factored in. Ultimately, you need to end up with a single dollar amount describing average yearly revenue produced by a single client. 4. Determine sales conversion rate A lead, of course, is an opportunity, and opportunities must be measured by the range and likeliness of their potential outcomes. The average client value gives us a good input for the range of outcomes if the lead hits, but we also need to factor the chance that it will hit, which is the rate at which your sales team converts its leads. If your sales team is currently trying to increase its conversion rate, you may want to use its goal conversion rate instead of its actual conversion rate. After all, the goal of your marketing is to provide value to your sales team, so you’ll want to measure your leads through the same lense. 5. Put it all together: determine your “Magic Number” The “magic number” represents the amount, in dollars, that a qualified lead is worth to your sales team. The equation to determine this is as follows: Average Client Value x Sales Conversion Rate = Magic Number Now, you have to determine what your company is currently paying for the leads you’re providing. For each channel, determine an average cost per lead by this equation: Channel Cost / Total Channel Leads = Cost Per Lead (CPL) All that’s left to do now is compare. Any channel that is producing a CPL equal to or below the Magic Number is providing positive ROI, and anything producing a CPL higher than the Magic Number is losing money. You may be surprised to find that channels you’ve come to rely on as a steady source of leads are actually a net negative because the leads they are providing cost more (on average) than the revenue they generate. Some channels may be beyond repair and should be discarded, but remember that many will be close enough or central enough to your lead generation that you can work on ways to bring the CPL down to acceptable levels. See? I told you it was simple. Have any other easy ways to solve this problem? Please share in the comments! Michael Holley Simple Machines Marketing http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2013/02/20/simple-way-to-calculate-b2b-marketing-roi.aspx http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2013/02/20/simple-way-to-calculate-b2b-marketing-roi.aspx Wed, 20 February 2013 00:00:00 2661 http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2013/02/13/approaching-content-marketing-from-the-bottom-line.aspx If you happen to work in marketing at an agency or on the brand side, chances are good that you want content marketing and authorship to be a big part of your marketing strategy in 2013 — if it’s not already. Every day, we see more evidence of content’s importance in inbound marketing and its brand-building potential; at the same time, we’re witness the fading effectiveness of old school anchor text and link building tactics in the race for SERP.   Now, if you're a business owner or executive who oversees your marketing, your valuation of content marketing is coming from a different place. You likely don't have the time or inclination to research the details of changing search algorithms or the evolving relevance of Google authorship in the post-Panda landscape. You want to hear about ROI, profit and the bottom line. You need to consider the tangible value of content marketing in terms of the big picture, not the minutiae.  Highly Qualified Leads Unlike someone who happened to click on your ad or answer your telemarketing call, a lead that’s generated by your content marketing efforts has likely contacted you because they’ve found your expertise useful and they’ve already developed a level of trust regarding your business. These are highly qualified leads. Work with the sales team to project what sort of close rate could be expected with these types of leads, then work backwards to see what it would take to achieve your business’ goals for growth. The Longevity of Good Content Consider the life span of the typical piece of advertising or marketing material: An average radio spot is over in 30-60 seconds; a telemarketing call is over in a few minutes; a PPC ad disappears the second the marketer stops paying for it. Now, consider a well-written e-book, an insightful white paper, a clever and useful blog post, video, article or infographic; these forms of content, when well-executed, have the potential to be discovered and shared not only right after you creation it, but for years after the fact. As ongoing content development and promotion drives more eyes to existing content, the momentum of this strategy continues to build — creating more opportunities for your business as it goes. Who wouldn’t be interested in this kind of staying power from their marketing output? Less Money Spent on Ineffective Channels A sound content marketing strategy includes a few key tenets: hone your business’ value proposition, make honest and unique connections with your audience, and put the interests of your customer first. By emphasizing these principles, your marketing efforts are much less likely to veer off into shortsighted or gimmicky campaigns with poor returns. Content as Flexible Currency Content is an investment that can pay off in a number of different ways. A good piece of content can drive leads directly, it can be used to access and influence new audiences, it can improve organic search traffic, it can be exchanged for more good content, and it can build and strengthen relationships. When we understand the many forms of value that content delivers, we understand why content marketing is a smart strategy for business at every level — including the bottom line. What are some of content marketing’s biggest selling points for your business? Let us know in the comments.     Charlie Nadler Simple Machines Marketing http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2013/02/13/approaching-content-marketing-from-the-bottom-line.aspx http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2013/02/13/approaching-content-marketing-from-the-bottom-line.aspx Wed, 13 February 2013 00:00:00 2871 http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2013/02/07/invest-in-marketing-before-you-have-a-revenue-problem.aspx I know, I know – coming from a guy who works for a marketing company, that headline sounds like a poor attempt to drum up demand for sales. But the truth is that the inspiration for this post has come from our clients, not from our leads. Think about this: which marketing channels can you simply “turn on” and expect immediate results? Now, which of those will produce leads that close quickly in the sales process? Well, let’s go through some broad categories: Organic SEO/PPC Search: The more opportunity that exists, the longer this channel takes. Typical SEO projects can take 3-12 months to get to page one, and just as long to get from rank ten to rank one. Results vary with market and how much you’re willing to spend, of course, but don’t forget about the website itself. If you’ve never done any kind of SEO, odds are you’ll want to redesign the site first, both to be a good platform for search optimization and to be a good platform for conversion – and that can be a 3-6 month project on its own. Search ads can bring quicker results than SEO, but at a much higher upfront cost. However, you still need to create and optimize your website, you still need to split test ad copy and landing pages to get your quality score up, and you still need to hire, train, or outsource to cover daily management. Cold Calling/Telemarketing: While it’s been dead in B2C for years, cold calling remains among the most effective and scalable B2B lead generation channels. The downside is that it requires a large amount of momentum in order to be successful. It is very difficult for even seasoned telemarketers to land business appointments on the first contacts they make with their prospects; the overwhelming majority of appointments are landed after several strategic contacts following the initial interest. A mature telemarketing is pipeline is a reliable and projectable source of leads, but the pipeline must first be built and the message to build it must be tested and honed. Even in the unlikely event that you nail the message and script on the first try, you should expect several months before your efforts approach their maximum potential. Display Advertising: The penultimate medium for mass brand-building, display advertising is notorious as a cost with difficult-to-measurable results. One of the big mistakes that smaller companies can make is trying to play on this stage without really having the budget – the cost for a cycle or two in a big-time publication or network can be reasonable, but the cost adds up very quickly when you consider the frequency and run that are necessary to see forward progress. If you’re going to do print, you must be ready to commit to it for a long time. Most of the value in this medium comes from keeping your brand “top of mind,” because the vast majority of your viewers will not be ready to buy when they see your ad. There are lots of other channels to consider, of course, but I think you get the idea – like nearly everything else in business, marketing requires infrastructure and a lot of attention to keep it running efficiently. Don’t get so caught up in the present that you forget to plan for the future. Don’t get so wrapped up in Plan A that you forget to consider contingency. You wouldn’t want to suddenly find yourself short on supply to sell, but being short on people to buy it is just as big a problem. Michael Holley Simple Machines Marketing http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2013/02/07/invest-in-marketing-before-you-have-a-revenue-problem.aspx http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2013/02/07/invest-in-marketing-before-you-have-a-revenue-problem.aspx Thu, 07 February 2013 00:00:00 2908 http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2013/01/29/why-no-one-reads-your-press-releases-and-how-to-change-that.aspx Press release, news release, media release—a piece of newsworthy communication directed to the media about your company. For a little over 100 years, press releases have announced new products and services, addressed issues of concern, addressed allegations, promoted discussion of booming sales, and provided industry perspectives regarding trends, data, and statistics. It was and still is an important form of communication used to attract the attention of the media to “juicy” pieces of company information. Unfortunately, claiming this publicity is not as easy as it sounds. As a small business, it might be the case that you have great things to say and wonderful items to release to the media, but when you make your announcement, there is no one that notices. It’s a common challenge—press release after press release with no publicity, no increased sales, no celebrations of achievement. It can feel like pitching news to a house cat. In this scenario, there are a few tips that will fine-tune a press release into an effective piece of marketing. Suffice to say, conciseness is the key.  1) Headlines that are entirely too long, are unclear in their description, lack attraction, include company names that are so lengthy that they text-wrap in a tweet, or include so much information that the headline begins to resemble a statement within a paragraph, should be avoided at all costs. 2) Make the relevant information noticeable. Okay, so you’ve made a splash using a headline that zings and zags and grabs the attention of the media. You should NOT proceed to place the details of the headline, the feature of your work, the purpose of this release in paragraph three. Don’t delay the main course of this one-dish meal. 3) Your press release shouldn’t be a novella. Professionals in the media don’t have time to read every thought about a new product. They don’t have time to digest all of the uplifting news about two companies merging and ever since the start of their relationship 5 years ago, they’ve experienced so much growth together and withstood countless tribulations in order to reach milestone, after milestone, after milestone, after milestone…you get the picture. All minor or major details about the company that aren’t relevant to the topic at hand can be provided via links. Links are good, as they provide a gateway to more information about your company. For the rest, say what needs to be said, don’t fluff the jargon, and then make an exit. If a media source wants to use your story and needs more information, you will be contacted for more information. 4) Avoid excessive promotion. There might be a misconception that a press release is an advertisement. It is not. Do not tie your emotional investment of the news into your writing, otherwise it can become a review of a product with so many descriptors that the media will think the press release was written for consumers. 5) Let the experts give you a grade.      After giving these tips a shot, why not let someone scrutinize your work? PRWeb offers a tool that analyzes four components of your press release: content, multimedia (images and video), keywords, and links. The process is simple and it’s free. Before you publish your next press release, check out the tool at https://us.vocuspr.com/PR/ReleaseGrader/. Benjamin Bullock Simple Machines Marketing http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2013/01/29/why-no-one-reads-your-press-releases-and-how-to-change-that.aspx http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2013/01/29/why-no-one-reads-your-press-releases-and-how-to-change-that.aspx Tue, 29 January 2013 00:00:00 2661 http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2013/01/09/are-you-getting-enough-feedback-from-your-customers.aspx It sounds simple enough: feedback from your customers helps you to improve your customer service, your marketing, and your business in general. Your customers can give you a wealth of valuable information, from how they found you to how they liked you, and the more information you can get from them, the better. So every business must be out there gathering feedback as you read this, right? Not necessarily. In fact, a 2012 study showed that more than half of businesses ignore their customers’ feedback on social media completely – and that’s feedback that didn’t even need to be gathered. There are several explanations for why a business might be hesitant to ask for or monitor feedback – from being afraid of the answers to being afraid of the costs. None of these are good reasons, and here’s why. Getting Customer Feedback Doesn’t Need to be Expensive You don’t need to launch an elaborate, yearlong data collecting mission to get useful customer feedback. Take advantage of the many free and inexpensive ways to get your customers’ thoughts: Send out online surveys via email and social media Include a brief voluntary survey and/or feedback form on your website and in your store Monitor customer feedback on platforms like Yelp and Angie’s List Train frontline employees to ask targeted questions of customers Talk to customers who call or visit your business, and offer to take a few of them out to lunch Make it easy for customers to contact you You're not Going to Scare Away Customers Whenever you’re interfacing with your customer, you have a chance to get their feedback. If they’re busy, they’ll decline to answer your questions, but you’re not going to lose customers by asking polite questions aimed at improving their experience. Keep in mind: since you or your frontline employees are going to ask your customer for feedback, you might as well figure out ahead of time what you really want to learn from them. While asking questions like “How was everything today?” are fine, your customers aren’t likely to offer you nuanced feedback in response to questions like these. A Lack of Complaint is not Necessarily an Endorsement If you’ve ever seen an episode of Restaurant: Impossible (yes it’s over the top, and no I can’t confirm whether any of it is real), you know the show’s pattern: the restaurant owners have no idea why business stinks until the show’s host talks to the diners, who quickly admit that the food wasn’t so delicious and that they aren’t likely to ever come back. Hearing criticism like this hurts, but not hearing it is even more painful in the long run. It’s tempting to assume that if your customers aren’t complaining, everything must be fine. The truth is that if your customers are unhappy with you, they’re probably going to take their business elsewhere before they take it upon themselves to have a potentially unpleasant conversation and explain to you what the problems were. If you are polite and ask specific questions about what was good, what was bad, and how you might improve, they’ll be much more likely to provide you with honest criticism – and possibly give you the chance to make those improvements next time. It’s not difficult to see why customer feedback is worth taking seriously: by getting the feedback, sharing it with your employees and making continual improvements, you’re growing your number of happy customers. What type of feedback do you solicit from your customers, and what changes have you made because of it? Charlie Nadler Simple Machines Marketing http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2013/01/09/are-you-getting-enough-feedback-from-your-customers.aspx http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2013/01/09/are-you-getting-enough-feedback-from-your-customers.aspx Wed, 09 January 2013 00:00:00 2661 http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2012/12/10/setting-realistic-expectations-for-your-marketing-campaigns.aspx Launching a new marketing campaign is kind of like dating; your level of satisfaction has a ton to do with your expectations, and those expectations are better shared sooner than later. Just like the guy who tells himself he’s just having a casual fling and suddenly finds his partner ready to tie the knot and pick out baby clothes, businesses and their marketers can find themselves in uncomfortable situations if expectations aren’t established early on. Where do Realistic Marketing Expectations Come From? Ideally, expectations will be established between a business and its marketing department/agency before any wheels of the campaign are in motion. In that first kickoff meeting, the following items should be discussed and confirmed: What is the execution budget and how many hours will be used? How much revenue is generated from each lead that converts into business? (This may be a range or an estimate) How will conversion data be passed from sales to marketing to ensure a proper line of sight? What is the company’s typical closing rate? How many leads will need to be generated to create enough new business for profitability? Is this volume of lead generation feasible given the hours and resources available? When you have answers to these questions, you’re positioned to start your campaign with realistic expectations in mind. Avoiding Communication Breakdown Along with taking the time to address the points above in order to set proper expectations, there needs to be clear communication on both sides. There’s a big difference between telling someone something and being on the same page as that person. Don’t settle for ambiguous feedback. Be clear about what results are going to work for you and what won’t. Ignoring red flags and hoping things will just work out is not a good strategy. (Again, kind of like dating.) What to Expect When You’re Expecting Results After you’ve set your marketing expectations, try not to dwell on them too much during the initial weeks of the campaign. Especially if the channel has not been tested recently, you shouldn’t anticipate hitting your expectations right off the bat. Any new tactic will involve a period of trial and error and honing of execution. What’s critical to the beginning of your campaign isn’t that you reach your goal immediately; it’s that you are carefully measuring results, identifying areas for improvements, and making needed adjustments. Once the campaign is in full swing, you can come back to those expectations as you assess performance. How do you set your marketing expectations? How often are those expectations met? Charlie Nadler Simple Machines Marketing http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2012/12/10/setting-realistic-expectations-for-your-marketing-campaigns.aspx http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2012/12/10/setting-realistic-expectations-for-your-marketing-campaigns.aspx Mon, 10 December 2012 00:00:00 2661 http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2012/11/30/guest-post-on-drews-marketing-minute.aspx Simple Machines has been featured as a guest blogger on the blog "Drew's Marketing Minute."  The post discusses the benefits of getting an outside marketing audit - along with some of our own examples. Check out the post here! Charlie Nadler Simple Machines Marketing http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2012/11/30/guest-post-on-drews-marketing-minute.aspx http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2012/11/30/guest-post-on-drews-marketing-minute.aspx Fri, 30 November 2012 00:00:00 2661 http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2012/11/26/how-to-respond-to-negative-online-reviews.aspx Depending on what industry you’re in, positive customer feedback on user review sites like Yelp, Google Places, and social media can have a big impact on your business. For small restaurants, local service companies, and mom and pop retailers in particular, those compliments and four and five star reviews deliver the social proof needed to establish a good reputation and drive in new customers. As we have witnessed firsthand, there is also the flipside to these sites: the negative customer reviews. Sometimes these complaints are legitimate. Sometimes they’re not. While sites including Yelp use filters to block what appear to be fake reviews, there’s really nothing the business can do to stop users from posting anything they want – as long as it’s not profane. If and when you get one, how should you respond to a negative online review? Step 1: Claim your business profiles If you haven’t already done so, claim your business’s page on the user review site. Doing so will give you greater control over the information on your profile, and you’ll be able to monitor activity and respond to negative reviews. The process of claiming these sites is simple and straightforward: Search the review site (Yelp, Google Places, Angie’s List etc.) for your business and click on your profile Find and click on the link asking if this is your business or prompting to manage the page Fill out any required information and complete the authorization process (this is typically either an automated phone call or mail confirmation) Step 2: Take a deep breath There’s a 98% chance that if you get a bad customer review online, the first thing you’ll want to do is go online and publicly obliterate the credibility of whoever the clearly insane person is who would dare speak negatively about your business. While it probably sounds like a cathartic experience, this is not a good idea. Even if there’s zero truth to your negative review, you have nothing to gain and much to lose by going on the offensive with your response. Before you start writing a single word, take a moment to make sure you are calm and clear-headed. Step 3: Craft your (civil) response Consider your bad review an opportunity to showcase and improve your customer service. If the complaint has any shred of truth to it, start your public response with a sincere apology. Assure your customer that you appreciate their business, that you are taking their complaint seriously, and that you are working to resolve the problem so that it won’t happen again. (It’s probably a good idea to actually follow through with this, too.) Most rational people don’t expect businesses to be able to please everyone 100% of the time; if there is a complaint and users can see that you are engaged and care about their satisfaction, you should be able to minimize the damage from the rare negative online review. If the complaint is unfounded, keep a civil tone while assuring the user (and anyone visiting your page) that the accusations are incorrect.  You should not apologize if your business was not in the wrong, but if you choose to ignore misleading negative reviews, other users might assume that the reviewer was rightfully upset and that your business didn’t even care enough to respond. Beyond the negative review and the complaining customer, social review sites function on a larger level as a piece of your marketing, and they are part of the face you present to your audience. This is why it’s important not to fight back. Regardless of the nature of the complaint, keep in mind that your response will affect potential future customers as much or more than it will affect the complaining customer. In just about any imaginable circumstance, the viewers of the review will think highly of your business if you respond professionally, and they’ll think poorly of your business if you respond unprofessionally. Have you had any negative online reviews? How did you respond? Charlie Nadler Simple Machines Marketing http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2012/11/26/how-to-respond-to-negative-online-reviews.aspx http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2012/11/26/how-to-respond-to-negative-online-reviews.aspx Mon, 26 November 2012 00:00:00 2661 http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2012/10/24/do-all-businesses-really-need-to-worry-about-branding.aspx Consider a small business owner who’s just getting started. We’ll call him Paul.  Branding might strike Paul as more of a Miller vs. Budweiser problem and not something that has much application when it comes to his company. He’s pretty confident that his business model is strong enough to stand on its own, and it’s not like he’s about to launch a national brand awareness campaign or anything. So, on the occasion that Paul does think about branding, he considers the fact that his daughter works for him and that they’re good with the customers. Now he’s got his brand: family-owned small business with good customer service. Done! This is a common way for smaller companies to arrive at a brand. Here’s the problem. Branding Considerations While it may be true that Paul’s is a family-owned small business with good customer service, the method in which he arrived at this brand fails to consider a number of factors.  The most obvious issue is that there’s no thought to the brand being used by his direct competition. If his brand is indistinguishable from his competitors, he may be blowing a big opportunity to gain a serious advantage. There’s also no thought to a host of other considerations, including: How his prices compare to his competitors The size and scope of his company Trends and data affecting his target market The quality of his services/products The convenience (or inconvenience) of doing business with him Beyond the Logo Along with considering what factors might affect your brand, it’s equally important to think about how a defined brand could in turn strategically influence aspects of your business.  In the scenario above, Paul probably equates branding with bigger budget pursuits like logo design and widespread name recognition. However, a strong brand will also encompass the smaller nuances of how a company presents itself, and just like other channels, branding scales with budget. If his business is going to establish a fun, lighthearted brand, for example, that should dictate things like how his employees answer the phone, what his invoices look like, and how he delivers his service. Value in the Process When we perform marketing research and recommendations for our clients, we always build a strong foundation for informed branding recommendations – even if we have a sense, right from the first kickoff meeting, that branding is not likely to present a strong opportunity to compete.   It’s easy enough to skip brand strategy by following the line of thinking that goes something like this: “I have the lowest prices in town, and that’s the only thing that really matters to my customers.” In some cases, realities such as this will certainly be the case. Nevertheless, an educated approach to branding means doing a thorough analysis of your market, your competitors, and your own strengths and weaknesses. By following through with this process, you are gaining valuable information, even if you end up confirming that your original hunch was right on. And who knows – maybe the process will reveal that, in order to reach your customers to advertise those low prices, you need to zoom out on your market. Or perhaps you’ll discover that your customers can be segmented, and that branding is in fact important to one or more of these segments. So, to answer the question: while not all businesses should focus on branding, that doesn’t mean that not all business should worry about branding. How much does your business think about brand? Tell us in the comments! Charlie Nadler Simple Machines Marketing http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2012/10/24/do-all-businesses-really-need-to-worry-about-branding.aspx http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2012/10/24/do-all-businesses-really-need-to-worry-about-branding.aspx Wed, 24 October 2012 00:00:00 2661 http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2012/10/15/how-to-create-a-media-plan-that-s-built-for-roi.aspx Imagine that you’re sitting on a ten million dollar budget to spend as you see fit on advertising this quarter. Sounds nice, right? Now, you might already be having visions of James Cameron directing your five-minute underwater mega-commercial, but let’s also assume that you’re still on the hook for positive ROI. In other words, if you blow the budget, you’ve got problems. So where do you start? Whether your ad budget is ten million or ten thousand, the challenge and significance remain the same: you need to figure out how to create a media plan that will put those precious dollars to best use. Research and Strategy Before we discuss how to create a media plan that will produce results, let’s look at how NOT to create a media plan: Start by setting an advertising budget Choose media based on what you think you can afford Spend the budget and wait for the phones to ring This is the wrong way to approach a media plan because these decisions are not driven by strategy. Marketing decisions can be limited by budget, but should never be dictated by budget (for more on this, read our post on marketing budget meetings). For every marketing initiative, there is a minimum investment level that must be made in order for the initiative to produce profitable results. Countless marketing dollars are wasted every year on executions that are forced into insufficient budgets. If you can’t afford to do a channel the “right way,” you’re better off not doing it at all. Much of a media planner’s work is analyzing target markets in terms of demographics, psychographics, and consumption behavior, then obtaining rates, ratings, impressions, and other information from several potential media vehicles, and finally choosing the best fit based on their work. Once you have determined where and when your ads should be based on this type research, you can solidify what budget would be required for a campaign – and then decide if you can afford it. Create a Test and Define Success When we consider how to create a media plan built for ROI, what we’re really talking about is how to set up an effective test with tangible goals for success. I say this because a) even a long term campaign is best treated as an ongoing test, and b) there’s a chance that you may not see a strong ROI from a particular medium, in which case your test will determine that you probably want to test elsewhere. Success, naturally, is determined by the objective of your media strategy. For example: If your objective is to create brand awareness, success will be primarily measured in reach and frequency among your target audience. Rather than a direct ROI, you’re looking more for targeted impressions If your objective is to sell more lampshades through your online store, success should be measured in conversion rates and, ultimately, whether your ads are generating enough lampshade profit to justify the spend If your objective is to finally star in a used car dealership commercial, success is yours the minute that work of art hits the airwaves. (Consider not approaching any media plan with this objective, if possible) Don’t Cut Corners on Frequency Occasionally, when we ask businesses what marketing they’ve used, they’ll say they’ve “tried radio and it didn’t work” or “tried print ads and it was a waste of money.” Then, we find out that by “tried,” they mean they ran an ad once or twice and called it a bust. You might be testing Facebook PPC ads or national TV spots, but in either case you need enough frequency to properly assess the results of your test. Yes, it will cost more to buy 20 radio spots in a variety of dayparts for a two week test than it will to just run two spots over the weekend, but at the end of the two week test you’ll have enough results to determine whether it’s worth continuing or not – and that’s valuable information. Creating a strong media plan is a lot of work, but by building on a foundation of strategy, clear objectives for testing, and adequate frequency, you can prevent a situation in which your budget is blown with nothing to show for it. Have any of your own tips for creating an ROI-focused media plan? Share your wisdom in the comments! Charlie Nadler Simple Machines Marketing http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2012/10/15/how-to-create-a-media-plan-that-s-built-for-roi.aspx http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2012/10/15/how-to-create-a-media-plan-that-s-built-for-roi.aspx Mon, 15 October 2012 00:00:00 2871 http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2012/09/25/marketing-budget-meetings-keys-to-better-results.aspx I’ve sat in on several marketing budget meetings with clients, and have found that most people seem to find it a grueling experience. The ones that get stressful seem to have one thing in common: the goals of the meeting quickly feel insurmountable. There are two commonalities I see in these stressful marketing budget meetings that can be prevented easily – for a stress-free budgeting meeting, avoid these mistakes! Marketing Plan Before Marketing Budget: A marketing budget meeting is not a place to create your plan – the plan must come first. If you wait until the budget meeting to come up with your marketing strategy, two major problems are likely to occur: (1) you will make poor decisions without the benefit of research or enough time to think, and (2) you will look to last year’s budget to inform the coming year, and will fail to consider new options for improved results. It’s important never to confuse channels with strategy – it’s never a good idea to try something simply because you can afford it. Set your strategy first, then think about channels that can be used to execute your strategy, then think about how many of those channels will fit into your budget. If the scope of the marketing budget meeting is only the third part of the previous sentence, the exercise will be a breeze. Cut the Fat: You might be surprised how often I see clients earmarking money for a specific advertising channel or set of marketing materials for no reason other than “it was on the budget last year.” Don’t buy more pens and folders for sales unless you have planned to use them for something. Don’t advertise in the Yellow Pages just because “you always have” – the technology exists now to measure the return you receive from things like the Yellow Pages or other advertising ventures. So cut the fat from the budget. Make sure you evaluate the success of your campaigns so you can stop what doesn’t work and reallocate the resources to something that will. These are just a couple common pitfalls that occur in marketing budget meetings. What other problems have arisen in your experience? Please, share in the comments section so we can all avoid them! Michael Holley Simple Machines Marketing http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2012/09/25/marketing-budget-meetings-keys-to-better-results.aspx http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2012/09/25/marketing-budget-meetings-keys-to-better-results.aspx Tue, 25 September 2012 00:00:00 2661 http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2012/09/13/a-simplified-approach-to-mobile-app-marketing.aspx So you just came up with a mind-blowing idea for an app that's going to change the world and inevitably land you on the cover of Wired. Great job! So, now what? Before answering that, take a second to imagine all of the fish in the world thrown into a fraction of the ocean. Now, assume that the number of fish is multiplying as you read this, and that only the most popular fish have a chance of surviving. See where this is going? Development aside, getting an app noticed once it's on the market is no easy feat. Furthermore, with a rapidly evolving, technology-driven landscape to keep up with, just about every step of the process can feel intimidating. Here are a few back-to-basics tips to help you take a smart approach and maintain a strategic mobile app marketing plan: 1. Competitive Research It may seem obvious, but the importance of performing a thorough competitive analysis before taking any steps toward development can't be overemphasized. Even if you think your app will be 100% unique, chances are high that there's at least one app out there with some overlapping functionality.  app store(s), and through firsthand use. Pay special attention to feature sets and customer reviews.Take the time to know your primary competitors through the lens of their websites, their presence in the You might have an extremely thorough and well-funded mobile app marketing operation in the wings, but if you skip this step, you'll be jumping into a fight blindfolded. 2. Opportunity vs Market Saturation Once you've identified and analyzed the competition, you'll be equipped to determine whether opportunities exist for your app - or whether you're faced with market saturation. When it comes to mobile app marketing, your attention should be focused on analyzing a few primary areas: Competitor Features User Reviews of Similar Apps Funding and Market Penetration of Primary Competition This is your crossroads: if the market is in fact saturated, it's back to the drawing board (or the day job). Keep in mind, developing an app is not especially cheap. If it's not saturated, you can determine where the strongest gaps exist among the competitors to come up with your "must-have" feature set - which will help guide decisions like the interface, aesthetics, required budget, and the price of your app. 3. Concentrated Visibility and a Good Story Having performed the necessary due diligence on upfront, your app will have a much better chance of success once it's been developed - but the work is hardly over. A successful mobile app marketing plan creates a high level of visibility in a concentrated period of time, increasing the chances for a spike in sales and a self-perpetuating strong position in app store rankings. Assuming you have a killer feature set and are serving a unique niche, another great tool is to establish an interesting angle and/or topical story around your app, making it even more irresistible to reviewers and the media. 4. Channel Execution Finally, the mobile app marketing plan should execute on a number of channels best suited to reach your target audience. These can include but are not limited to: Website and blog Social media Press release and reviewer outreach Promo codes Submittal to app directories Mobile advertising Cross-app marketing Online and print advertising Post-launch user engagement and app updates Like any good marketing plan, your mobile app marketing strategy should be guided by sound research and analysis. What successes and failures have you encountered marketing your apps? Let us know in the comments below. Charlie Nadler Simple Machines Marketing http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2012/09/13/a-simplified-approach-to-mobile-app-marketing.aspx http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2012/09/13/a-simplified-approach-to-mobile-app-marketing.aspx Thu, 13 September 2012 00:00:00 2661 http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2012/08/16/kill-the-clutter.aspx Another way to think about the theme of this blog - using the fundamentals of marketing to solve seemingly complicated problems - is the idea of getting rid of marketing clutter. Clutter, in this context, could be a number of things that are sidetracking or diluting the execution of a sound marketing strategy. For example, in an earlier post we looked at how trying to be cutting edge and impressive (clutter) got in the way of listening to the customer and prioritizing results (a sound marketing strategy). By simplifying and getting back to the basics, we are, in effect, aiming to kill the clutter. After considering this idea for a moment, it occurred to me that killing clutter is really a regular part of what we help clients with all the time - not just at the higher strategy level, but also on a more micro level. When assessing the pieces within a broader marketing strategy, it is often useful to look for ways that clutter could be eliminated at each step. Positioning and Branding: In determining what position in the market should guide your brand, recognizing which segments of the market you should not be targeting (the clutter) is just as important as identifying your opportunities. When businesses cast too wide of a net and try to appeal to segments outside of their target market, they typically get lost in the crowd and end up appealing to nobody.   Design: One surefire way to screw up a website, logo, or advertisement is to overload it with too many design elements. An effective design should work to make the brand recognizable and - ideally - memorable; the clutter of busy design tends to have the opposite effect. Messaging: I can't count the number of times I've come across a business' homepage or landing page only to find paragraphs and paragraphs of text covering the minutia of what they do, how they do it, the generic principals they follow, the dry history of the company, and so on. In looking for messaging clutter that can be eliminated, we're also determining the most important themes we want to get across - and the most concise way to do it. These are just a few examples of areas in which a little clutter killing can help tighten up and focus areas of a marketing strategy. What clutter can you find in your own marketing operation? What might be gained by getting rid of it?   Charlie Nadler Simple Machines Marketing http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2012/08/16/kill-the-clutter.aspx http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2012/08/16/kill-the-clutter.aspx Thu, 16 August 2012 00:00:00 2661 http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2012/07/23/social-media-as-a-vehicle-for-your-content.aspx There have been countless articles, blog posts, and discussion forums that ask the same question: should your business "be in" social media? The answer, of course, invariably comes to a common conclusion - it depends entirely on your business, your goals, and your target market. Yes, social media has proven to be an invaluable branding and customer service tool for many consumer-facing businesses, but setting up a Facebook account for your new commercial laundry equipment distribution business probably doesn't need to be at the top of your priority list. One of the underlying assumptions about social media in these conversations is that it's yet another channel that requires a lot of fresh, new content in order to enter - and who has time to keep developing all of this content (or the budget to hire someone else to do it)? What we've noticed, however, is that a lot of businesses are already generating a healthy amount of fresh content, whether it's in the form of research, white papers, articles, books, or blog posts (see also: 3 Reasons Your Website Should Have a Blog). For these businesses, the periodic development of these types of content is important to maintaining their visibility, reinforcing their brand, and establishing their expertise in the industry. Rather than considering whether or not to enter social media as a separate marketing channel, these businesses can gain valuable perspective by approaching the question from a slightly different mindset: I have content; could social media be an efficient channel with which to get some of this content out to my market? This isn't to say that every piece of your content is a nugget of social media gold just waiting to be shared and re-shared by the masses (although if that is the case, can we please buy you lunch?); the idea is that viewing this channel through a different lens may open up some possibilities that had not been previously considered. For example, perhaps one section of that eBook chapter might make a good foundation for an update on the blog or a guest post on another site, which could then spark a good conversation starter on LinkedIn and/or twitter. Ideally, social media thus serves as a tool to create more visibility for your content - and helps to establish your business' brand and authority. There is no shortage of advice out there on how to use social media effectively, but an important step is to ask the right questions from the beginning. Most importantly, what is to be gained by utilizing social media? How will that help you meet your business goals, and how does it align with your values and mission statement? If there appears to be good reason to employ social media as a channel for your content, how can you make that content relevant and shareable? What sites and platforms is your market active with, and what questions and conversations are they interested in having? By answering these types of questions ahead of time, you'll be better positioned to avoid channels that don't fit and to make the most of the ones that do. Charlie Nadler Simple Machines Marketing http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2012/07/23/social-media-as-a-vehicle-for-your-content.aspx http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2012/07/23/social-media-as-a-vehicle-for-your-content.aspx Mon, 23 July 2012 00:00:00 undefined,2661 http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2012/06/15/4-common-problems-with-business-website-content.aspx Everyone's heard it before: Whether your website is being used to increase sales, generate leads, or deliver information, professional and engaging content is crucial. It seems like an obvious point to make, but those who have visited their share of business websites can attest that a lot of them are tedious, sloppy, ambiguous, confusing - or some combination of the above.  So where are these sites going wrong? There are of course several ways that a business website's content can fail to be effective, but below are some of the most common underlying problems. 1. There's No Defined Purpose First and foremost, your website should have a clearly defined goal or purpose - beyond "I've heard that my business should have a website, so now I have one." The site can have multiple functions, but ultimately you want your visitors to convert by taking a specific action: buy a t-shirt, request a quote, download a brochure - whatever the case may be. Once that purpose has been established, each page of the site should serve a specific role in moving visitors toward a conversion. Furthermore, the conversion pages should include a call to action so that your visitors know what they're supposed to do. This "path to conversion" framework should guide the direction of the site's content and navigation. 2. There's Too Much Copy In this search-driven age, more and more companies are feeling the need to stuff their website with massive amounts of jargon-heavy copy in hopes of landing on the first page of Google results. Other businesses fall into the trap of over-explaining the intricacies of their services or including too many details about their business. Whatever the reason, deploying an excessive amount of copy isn't beneficial for your website's SEO - and it definitely isn't helpful to visitors of your site. Unless you're publishing a literary journal, your readers are probably not especially interested in diving into several paragraphs of dense messaging. The most effective business websites use concise, digestible copy that gets right to the point. If there are nuances of your business that could be explained or discussed on a more in-depth level, that's great material for a blog or a white paper - but it doesn't belong on a landing page. 3. There's Not Enough Copy On the other end of the spectrum are the businesses that don't provide enough information on their websites. Especially for service-oriented businesses, it's critical to include enough messaging to establish your value proposition for potential customers. Before a visitor can be expected to convert, they need to be clear on what they're getting - and why they should want it. 4. The Content Is Sloppy  In order to save money, many small businesses opt to take the DIY approach when it comes to writing web content. This isn't an inherently bad idea, but the truth is that strong, effective business copywriting takes time - and I don't know many small business owners who have a lot of extra time on their hands. When a website's content is thrown together and includes grammatical errors, awkward wording, or poorly articulated concepts, it can make the business look unprofessional and careless. To avoid creating this poor impression, it's often worth the relatively small expense to hire a professional copywriter who can help write and manage online content.  Charlie Nadler Simple Machines Marketing http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2012/06/15/4-common-problems-with-business-website-content.aspx http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2012/06/15/4-common-problems-with-business-website-content.aspx Fri, 15 June 2012 00:00:00 undefined,2871 http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2012/05/25/target-market-101-when-to-zoom-out.aspx Defining your business's target market is a crucial and foundational step in your marketing strategy. Sometimes, it's a really easy step - if you're selling, say, iPads or something. But most small businesses sell a product or service that fits more of a niche, and while you may be able to easily define a prototypical customer, how you define the group in which you are looking for that customer can be  an entirely different thing - and the difference in success or failure. To illustrate with an example: a company wants to sell tools to small construction companies. The company has reasoned that its ideal customer is the manager/owner of one of these companies, who likely works onsite in addition to making purchasing decisions. Unfortunately, the company can't find many channels that cater specifically to managers of small construction companies, aside from a few online forums that sell banner ads. How will the company reach these construction managers? The answer is to "zoom out." The ideal customer in question is elusive, so the company needs to find a larger, more easily identifiable group to which its particular audience belongs. The company did some research and found that construction workers and contractors are almost all male, with an average age of 47 (range of 26 - 69) years, and of generally average socioeconomic status. The company then reasoned that managers of small companies among this group will tend to be more experienced, and thus skew to the older end of the typical age range of 26- 69 years, excepting the oldest segment, which tends to be largely composed of private contractors. Further, since these ideal customers are often the owners of their companies, they can be expected to match the slightly higher socioeconomic status of a typical small business owner. Now, the company is aiming at a much more visible audience; something like upper-middle class males aged 35-55. The company can now target myriad established marketing channels aimed at this clearly defined group of people. The above example is purely fictional and highly simplified, but the deductive process holds true. When your audience seems impossible to catch, take a step back and consider casting a wider net. Michael Holley Simple Machines Marketing http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2012/05/25/target-market-101-when-to-zoom-out.aspx http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2012/05/25/target-market-101-when-to-zoom-out.aspx Fri, 25 May 2012 00:00:00 2871 http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2012/05/08/marketing-and-the-infinite-test-improving-roi-without-a-visible-ceiling.aspx In my opinion, the biggest reason that marketing can be frustrating to business owners is this: when you're dealing with marketing, you're dealing with probabilities. With most other phases of production, you can make projections based on some concrete numbers - if you put in x number of hours and y amount of materials, you'll end up with z products. With most marketing channels, you can plan what you put in, but you can never really know what you're going to get out, and even then, it's difficult (and sometimes impossible) to know if you could've gotten more. Sure, big businesses have elaborate models to estimate market saturation based on reams of data, but most of us don't have access to a sample large enough to make those conclusions. The problem is that the fickle nature of the field of marketing doesn't excuse an uninformed approach - you can't just throw your hands up and sink money into something without some way to evaluate a return. You must be able to evaluate because you must be able to optimize. The good news is that you can still do both, just like with any other business process - you just have to get comfortable doing it without a visible ceiling to your results. Any successful business owner or executive knows how crucial it is to measure results, and marketing is no different - but not everyone is utilizing that information to optimize campaigns and investments. Many of our clients manage marketing channels like this: Investigate channel that was suggested or discovered Determine level of investment based on current budget Execute Analyze results Drop channel, continue channel, or increase investment in channel It's a simple and intuitive thought process, but it's incomplete. What's missing? The optimization. Everyone should view every single marketing campaign as a test, even if that channel has already proven to be profitable. Since you often don't know if you've achieved saturation for a given channel, you always have to assume you can do better. Here's a hypothetical example: Company X is running online ads via a network that is targeted to its ideal audience. Company X is testing two different ads with distinctly different copy - one ad focusing brand-heavy message to differentiate it from its competition, and the other ad taking a more basic approach and just listing Company X's services. Company X's budget for the channel is split evenly between the two sets of copy, so they'll receive the same amount of impressions. After a few months, Company X evaluates results and sees that the latter (basic) set of copy performed significantly better than the former, and that the results produced by the more successful set provided a positive ROI. At this point, many companies would simply drop the poor performing ad, focus the entire budget on the better performing ad, and re-evaluate next year. Company X, however, decides to divert just three quarters of the budget to the better ad, and use the remaining quarter for further tests. Now that they know that customers will respond to the "basic message," all new tests will feature different approaches to this message. For example, the first test may list pricing, the next test may try a different headline, and the third may list products or services in a different order. Each test that outperforms its control group will become the new control group for further tests. Company X may never know when their online ads have reached peak effectiveness, but they will know that they're always moving in the right direction. By treating all of your marketing campaigns as tests and constantly improving your tactics based on your data, you can be confident that you are maximizing your ROI, even when you are dealing without a line of sight to your ceiling. Michael Holley Simple Machines Marketing http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2012/05/08/marketing-and-the-infinite-test-improving-roi-without-a-visible-ceiling.aspx http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2012/05/08/marketing-and-the-infinite-test-improving-roi-without-a-visible-ceiling.aspx Tue, 08 May 2012 00:00:00 2871 http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2012/04/05/3-reasons-your-website-should-have-a-blog.aspx Clients frequently approach us about the value of having a blog. Many of them are interested because of how popular blogs seem to be, but are skeptical about the value it would bring for their company. We understand the skepticism, but the fact is that every business that has a website can benefit from a blog. Here are three reasons why: 1. Visibility It doesn't matter whether or not you sell you products online - your business will be affected, positively or negatively, by its online presence. Even if you acquire customers almost exclusively through referrals, those customers will be using the internet for their due diligence. Because your online presence can control your customers' buying behavior, it's important for your business to control its online presence. By optimizing your website for search and social media traffic, you put yourself in a position to create and control the message that customers see. A blog is a boon for both search engine optimization and social media. First, Google prefers and promotes websites that are updated frequently with new content, and there's no better or easier way to keep your website full of fresh, high-quality content than via blog. Secondly, blog content provides an easy way for your site to stock up on long-tail keyphrases, or very specific searches that are tangentially related to your site's typical targets, and traditionally provide a low volume of high quality prospects. Finally, a blog provides valuable ammunition for social media - that encourages your followers to click through to your site instead of just reading a post or tweet. 2. Clarity The keys to successful website copy are brevity and digestibility. Studies show that typical web users skim pages more often than they read them, so a successful page must be concise. However, sometimes there's more to say than what's optimal for your homepage or landing page. A blog gives you the flexibility to write about the nuances of your brand or pitch at greater length. Many serious prospects will take a deeper look at your message, and you have the opportunity to speak to them without convoluting the rest of the site for the ones that just want to find the contact form and convert. 3. Agility These days, all types of information - good and bad - travels like wildfire. The barriers to entry for broadcasting knowledge have been reduced to nothing more than access to an internet-enabled device. With so many people saying so many things to so many others, your company's brand and position can be viewed in a different light at any moment - moreso than ever before. The only way to fight the wave of public perception is to join it. A blog gives to a method to enter the conversation. It could be a reaction to a negative review or bad press about your industry, it could be an announcement of a new service in reaction to an external event, or simply a new thought about how to describe your value proposition. No matter what industry you're in, the ability to communicate with your audience in real time in an invaluable advantage, and there's no reason to believe that will change any time soon. Michael Holley Simple Machines Marketing http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2012/04/05/3-reasons-your-website-should-have-a-blog.aspx http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2012/04/05/3-reasons-your-website-should-have-a-blog.aspx Thu, 05 April 2012 00:00:00 2870 http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2012/02/14/a-simple-lesson.aspx Very early in my marketing career, I learned a simple, but very important lesson: what I prefer and what customers prefer are often very different things -- and it's the results, not my opinions, that truly matter.  I had just been tasked with managing a segment of the Sears direct marketing business. To give you an idea of how long ago this was: Business-to-Consumer telemarketing and direct mail were not only still relevant, they were our two most successful channels. One of the direct mail pieces that I was managing was this bland and unimaginative piece that hurt my sensibilities just to look at. It had been the control mail piece for over 10 years, and resembled something that you'd find in a museum of marketing. I quickly reached for a report showing its results from the last several campaigns: not bad. Not spectacular, but solid, and clearly profitable. But it was so uncreative, so boring… I was determined to design a slicker piece that would beat it. It became my white whale and I was hell-bent to kill it. The first thing I did was contract with an outside creative agency to help design and produce two kits to test against the stuffy control kit. The agency was just what I wanted: young, smart, brash (though in retrospect, their brashness was disproportionate to their talent). Their designs were exactly what I was looking for: fresh, modern, and cool. Because I was still at the point in my professional development when I thought that the loudest voices were the most astute, and the flashiest colors were the ones most worth looking at it, I loved the new pieces. I thought they looked great. I was sure both of them would beat the control and that the only decision that I would need to make would be to choose the winner between the two test pieces. Then the results starting coming in. I walked into my boss' office, forlorn. "My test kits were annihilated by that ugly piece of mail that I would never open," I said to my boss. He smiled and said: "that's the thing, Tom. It doesn't matter what you like; it's what your prospective customers like that matters. And they like the control kit better than yours." Far too often, marketing agencies get caught up in impressing themselves with how clever they can be -- how unique, how creative - when their preferences aren't what generate new business. Customers will tell you what they like and what they don't like -- if you listen to them. The results are what matters. A simple lesson, learned. http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2012/02/14/a-simple-lesson.aspx http://www.simplemachinesmarketing.com/marketing-simplified/2012/02/14/a-simple-lesson.aspx Tue, 14 February 2012 00:00:00