One, you will get a branded T-shirt.

Two, product roadmap changes are inevitable.

So how do you look fresh in your Next Level 6210 custom logo tee and work with a moving target that is the product roadmap? Well, it depends but you can stay ahead of the chaos by working incrementally; let’s take a deeper dive.

There are really two ways I look at this situation. The first is what happens when the marketing org is static and siloed and the second when it’s adaptable.

Let’s look at a scenario when a static plan is set and followed.

Jane is the head of marketing for a tech company and talks to Gary, head of product on January 1st. Gary and Jane talk about the roadmap, what’s coming and loose dates for these new features to be released.

Jane goes back to her desk, works up a big marketing plan and starts divvying up the work for the year. She’s built really good launch plans around the bigger releases and her and her team go to work.

On March 1st, Jane and Gary meet again.

This time, Gary shares that the big new feature for this release is being delayed because another, more important feature has jumped to the top of the list and will be ready instead.

Jane, feeling like the past 3 months of work has been wasted, sits at her desk and tries to figure out how she’ll cram 3 months of work into 30 days to meet the launch deadline. Shit.

I’ve lived this life and it’s not fun. It’s the result of too little communication across the tech org and a rigid plan that fails to account for changes.

Let’s look at another scenario

Tom runs product marketing and Cleo runs product management at a small startup. Every week Tom and Cleo get together to talk through the current product roadmap and progress and what Tom needs from Cleo to round out the marketing high-points.

Cleo’s team works in 2-3 week sprints with 1-2 weeks for QA and Tom’s team works in 4 week blocks. Tom’s blocks overlap Cleo’s by a week or two giving Tom’s team time to create any content needed for the current dev sprint.

Today, Cleo let Tom know that the current sprint won’t push a new feature forward, instead that will be released in the next sprint. Since Tom’s team already created the relevant content to address this new feature, his team will just sit on it until it’s actually pushed. There really isn’t any wasted work in this scenario due to open communication between two important departments.

Another scenario

Back to Tom and Cleo.

This time there is a big event coming in 3 months. Tom and Cleo list the recent bigger features that were released and get a grasp on what’s to come. Tom bundles these features into the Spring release for his company and proceeds to create a launch plan. This plan consists of a social teaser 3 weeks before the event, an announcement and digital push during the event and an ad campaign for 3 weeks after the event.

Tom has a 3 week buffer prior to accommodate any unforeseen changes to the release. Since he and Cleo bundled some recently existing features with new ones, they will definitely have something to talk about vs. our first example where the big feature was getting delayed.

In scenario #2 and #3 we see a pretty utopian view of how communication helps inform the marketing leaders. While the examples are basic and cuddly, they are pretty reminiscent of the cadences I’ve had with product people. Talk often, brainstorm and create a loose plan around the new feature(s).

Scenario #1 is also real-life for some people and something I encountered early in my career. The thought of the annual marketing plan was the trend of the day and just what you did. Your forecasted budgets, programs, releases in November of the year prior. It’s stupid, but that’s how it was done.

I’ve lived all the scenarios above and believe adopting some agility will help deal with inevitable development shifts.

It leaves little room for changes and what ends up happening is delayed marketing launches to make up for divergence from the ‘plan’ or even worse, leads to lackluster marketing performance through the year.

So here are my quick tips on dealing with roadmap changes as a marketer:

1. Communicate. It’s not platitude if you really do it. Talk to product managers, dev managers or whoever will have a significant impact on the work you will produce. Also, I cannot stress the benefits of having a daily chat with your marketing team. This spreads the information you may gather from product and lets it live and breath across the org. Everyone knows vs. 1/2 people and it creates a better ability to roll with the punches.
2. Don’t plan too much. This really can’t be stressed enough. It’s OK to have a loose, loose annual plan, but your plans only become more solid as you build from real information. Meaning, your product manager has verified work complete or to-be-complete. Plan a little, do some work, communicate and repeat (in the instance of the ‘big event’).
3. Chunk. Whatever you want to call it: sprints, shapes, blocks, chunks – it doesn’t really matter. What matters is you’re breaking up work for a period of time that addressing a roadmap that really exists. Your team is aligned with the dev team, so you can break up work that’s more current and likely to happen vs. going heads-down in January only to have your dreams crushed in March due to a shift from the original plan.

Wrapping it up, basically you can best-deal with changing roadmaps by communicating and breaking up work into chunks with realistic source material.

Sidenote: I produced the featured image using DALL-E – using the keywords: a cheetah holding a bullhorn, Banksy – wild stuff

The post Working With Product Roadmap Changes appeared first on Travis Arnold.

At 42 I still daydream about the ocean that left behind massive piles of sandstone like Monument Valley, the Grand Canyon and the Canyonlands. It’s mind-boggling.

[insert extremely clever segue from me liking the SW to a book set in the SW]

I was listening to ‘The People of Darkness’ by Tony Hillerman and a line stood out to me: ‘understand the big to understand the little’. 

It’s what Navajo tribal policeman Jim Chee recalled his uncle telling him about trying to understand people’s differences.

To me it sparked some thoughts on marketing and a short story about a former colleague.

First, the story.

When I was learning to code my work buddy Jay Pennington was beyond helpful. We’d riff on design ideas, code organization and more. Jay’s code always looked like art to me and was a really big inspiration on my approach to the parts of an app you’ll never see.

One day I was talking about learning jQuery and he said “why don’t you just learn javascript instead; it’ll make it all make more sense” – by learning the big, the small would make more sense.

I’ll be honest, I never really mastered vanilla JS, but I did learn enough to make jQuery and other JS derivatives make more sense. Thanks Jay!

Now onto marketing.

When I hear of a new ‘growth hack’ or brand, spankin’ new ABM strategy I go back to the root; if you know the big (marketing), then the small (whateverthefucknewthing) will make a ton more sense.

Marketing is a collection of a bunch of different things like brand, demand generation, product marketing, SEO, SEM, advertising, messaging, positioning, blah, blah, blah, blahblahblah – and understanding how it all fits together and each purpose will make it easier to break-down the next surefire thing to come along.

Understand the big to understand the little.

The post Understand The Big To Understand The Little appeared first on Travis Arnold.

Everything from why choose clipless MTB pedals over flat pedals to death by 1000 cuts – how little things add-up to kill your website.

Some are left with a title, outline and some key points; others are nearly finished, but for one reason or another I abandoned them and left them to sit in stasis in my IA Writer sidebar.

So, here I am (again) writing a blog post that may or may not see daylight. What’s this blog post about? I think it’s just going to circle around how hard it is or isn’t to get started again.

Like I said, the ideas come easy, but when it got time to write or edit or finish, I just didn’t have the give-a-shit to keep going.

One reason could be that we had our first kid, a girl, last year. I don’t really think that’s the reason, but when given the choice to write or watch a miniature human discover bananas for the first time, bananas are gonna win every time.

Another reason could be the lack of focus. I’ve *almost* written things like:
– how to break down problems to the asphalt level
– how to install rock sliders on your truck
– why I suck at bike nutrition
– endurance is the entrepreneur super-food
– marketing sucks, here’s why

And so on…

I’ve always bounced around mentally, but not having a company to worry about for the first time since 2012 really threw a wrench in my mental keyboard. Maybe this is how variety magazines got their start?!

So if a new distraction or lack of focus aren’t it, what else is there?

Maybe it’s just time. Time between doing something always requires a little rust to be removed, doesn’t it? Haven’t ridden your bike in awhile? Then throw some lube on that chain. Haven’t coded an email in bit? Then take a code refresher.

Perhaps it’s just a combination of all three. Yea, that’s gotta be it.

So dear reader, I’ll leave you with the ramblings of a has-been on why I, and maybe you, aren’t writing.

– a new distraction
– a lack of focus
– time away from the ring

I guess that’s it for now. I’m going to go half-write a tutorial on installing a tongue and groove ceiling.

Until next time.

The post Rambling About Not Writing appeared first on Travis Arnold.

I went with the Noico 50mil and 80mil deadener

Also, harper7 has a good amount of pics showing the cargo area – I have the slide out tray, so may show that removal process.

There are 3 screws you’ll need to remove on the panels. Once they’re out, you can work the snap clips out pretty easily. You’ll also need to unhook the top window/lock control, door pull cables (2) and the bottom kick light.

The naked door

I removed the plastic sheet since I was covering with Noico.

Removed the styrofoam factory deadener

There is plenty of room in the door to work, so you can go crazy and get really good coverage.

Next, I started covering the flat spots on the inner skin.

Finally, the inside of the door panel was done. I wasn’t too concerned here and used remnants wherever there were big flat spots.

I also made a short video with the non-deadened passenger side and deadened driver side. It may not be audible, but the difference IRL is pretty awesome. Nice solid feel and no tinny sound.

The post Sound Deadening 5th Gen 4Runner appeared first on Travis Arnold.

Google Analytics (GA) is foundational for any website and the data gleaned for UX, SEO and a lot of other things is extraordinarily valuable. So, if your data is dirty, you might make decisions that you wouldn’t have otherwise. Not to mention it’s annoying as hell.

Luckily there are a few ways to kick GA spam to curb and save your sanity. Did i mention spam sucks?

Setup Filters

Filters make it pretty easy to filter out traffic from certain domains, countries or to hostnames. If you’re unfamiliar, go to GA > Admin and you’ll see the screen below.

You’ll notice 2 areas for filters. On the left is for the entire Account and the right is just for a certain view. For referral spam I like to use the Account level filter to avoid repeating filters across views.

Ok, now that we know where filters live, let’s add one.

1. Select Filters
2. Click + New Filter
3. Give your filter a name like Referral Spam Destroyer
4. Select filter type of Custom
5. Click the Exclude radio button
6. Select the Filter Field of Referral

For the next step, I like to use regular expressions. This avoids adding a bunch of exclude filters for each spam referrer. It also makes it pretty easy to add a new spam domain when you spot it. And if you set it at the account level, it’ll add it to all views.

• Add the below to the Filter Pattern

(best-seo-offer|buttons-for-your-website|semalt|4webmasters|trafficmonetize|free-share-buttons|free-social-buttons|event-tracking|Get-Free-Traffic-Now|event-tracking)\.(com|org|net)

Copy it all and click Save.

To add new domains, just add a ‘|’ along with the domain (no subdomain or TLD).

You can also use the above method to stop direct traffic spam to random hostnames. Simply select Hostname instead of Referral and follow the steps.

Referral Exclusion List

If you aren’t comfortable with RegEx, then you can add each referral domain in the Referral Exclusion List in the Admin section.

1. Go to Tracking Info under Property
2. Click Referral Exclusion List
3. Click + Add Referral Exclusion
4. Click Save

This will do the same thing and exclude referral traffic for the views, just a bit tedious IMO and can’t be copy/pasted easily like the above RegEx filter.

Other Google Analytics Spam Resources

• Eliminating Bot Traffic from Google Analytics Once and For All
• Finding and Excluding Bot Traffic in Google Analytics

• How To Filter Google Analytics Referral Spam & Bot Traffic

The post Kicking Google Analytics Spam to the Curb appeared first on Travis Arnold.

The conversation ranged from ‘how do we do this marketing thing?’ to ‘what’s next with marketing?’. As the founder of a marketing agency that solely works with B2B software companies, the last question struck a chord.

See, I’ve kept a finger on the software world for as long as I can remember and two fingers on the marketing software world for some time. One thing I’ve noticed is the shift from big, all encompassing platforms, to segmented solutions that fit specific needs.

Look at marketing automation; big players like Pardot, Hubspot & Marketo are great tools that can be fit into any B2B marketing scenario. The problem is, fitting it into your scenario is tedious and requires training and pretty deep marketing know-how (something all the above companies help people learn).

My point is this – it’s OK for companies with the manpower and know-how to go down the full platform path. But for companies that can’t, finding solutions tailored for their industry is appealing. My prediction at the startup seminar was specialized software, especially marketing automation, will start cropping up and help companies that can’t build the infrastructure get started.

It’s this thinking that led to Herefish, a candidate engagement platform I co-founded with fellow Sendouts alum Jason Heilman.

Herefish solves the age-old problem recruiting companies and HR departments have when it comes to keeping their pool of candidates engaged. Here’s a typical scenario – company spends time, money and effort sourcing 100 candidates for a position. They may email all 100, then get to a handful of calls which results in 10 people who agree to a conversation. Out of that 10, say 2 go in for a final interview with a hiring manager and maybe 1 gets hired.

But what about the 90 that didn’t respond? Was it because they were bad candidates? Not likely, remember, they were sourced from all over because they fit certain criteria. The reason they didn’t respond is because they haven’t been nurtured (no, sending a job post email blast isn’t nurturing) and don’t really ‘know’ the company with the job opening. Just think, 80-90% of a recruiting or HR orgs database is full of neglected candidates that could be the perfect, homegrown talent pool.

Herefish solves the age-old problem recruiting companies and HR departments have when it comes to keeping their pool of candidates engaged.

Just like marketing automation captures leads and nurtures them til they ready to buy, Herefish nurtures candidates on behalf of a company so the next time a role opens (and it will open) they recruiting company can simply dip into a warm pool of candidate gold.

To learn more about Herefish and to learn about candidate nurturing, visit http://herefish.com

The post Casting A Wide Net: Herefish appeared first on Travis Arnold.

In mid-August the team at Bullhorn reached out to rebuild their website. Their website was built on Drupal, had multiple language sites and consisted of nearly 130 core pages excluding blog posts. Oh, and the timeline was about 6 weeks!

play…So, at the end of August we began the project. As with any project, our first step was to deep dive into the industry, understand their audience and product offerings and layout the information architecture the site would rest upon. Lucky for us the recruiting software industry is one we know very well so our learning curve was fairly short.

Our goals were to bring a consistent design throughout the site, optimize conversion, bring it to WordPress, go mobile and make it easy for top and mid-funnel visitors to find and consume information.

The result is what you’ll find below. For a real-live view, take a look at www.bullhorn.com.

The post Introducing the New Bullhorn.com appeared first on Travis Arnold.

Uncovering what your potential customers want and need is the foundation of a solid content marketing framework. The goal is to find topics that help prospects perform their jobs better and present that content in a compelling and creative manner.

While a lot of companies have a sense about what their customers want to hear, they don’t always have a set process or method to follow. Continually coming up with ideas can be exhausting, but there are ways to tap into your customers that can keep the content machine humming.

Invite the front line to your world
A lot of times, the marketing team lives in their bubble and work independently of other teams. But working in silos can leave content ideas on the table.

Front line employees often have a wealth of information about current and prospective customers, even if they don’t know it.

Salespeople can provide insight into what potential customers care about. Questions like “What are customers having problems with?” or “What features are the most impressive to them?” can shed light on what pain points prospects have. In my experience, there is an ebb and flow to problems, so tapping sales members to find the current hot button issue can help stay on top of prospect’s interests.

For current customers, your support people are treasure troves of ideas. For one, they can help uncover issues related to your product which is good for support-related content like webinars or knowledgebase articles. And two, support often helps customers do something. This something is what they need to do with your product and it’s a safe bet prospective customers want to do the same.

Expose your secrets
You know an incredible amount of information as it pertains to your product and industry. As marketer’s our inherent desire is to “keep secrets” from our prospective customers. That is to say, we don’t want to tell them about the processes that make our products valuable to them.

For example, your software helps freelancers manage the multiple clients, projects and files. Your software keeps things organized and allows for collaboration with clients.

While your solution is more efficient, there are ways a freelancer can manage without your software. These are the things to expose. Helping non-customers with their day-to-day will help establish you in their mind as a thought leader, that just so happens to sell software to freelancers…

Use analytics
It’s very likely that you have Google Analytics or another web analytics software installed on your site. Taking a deeper look into specific content areas on your site will likely show a few patterns.

Using our fictional freelance software company again; let’s say we have a blog and resource hub on our site. The first step is to segment traffic to these areas. Using these segments, you’ll be able to glean a few things.

• What content is the most popular by channel – What paid content do people gravitate towards; what non-paid content?
• How do users in these segments interact with the rest of the site – Are content downloaders and readers more likely to signup for your product? Are they more likely to revisit?

With this data you can focus on what prospects naturally gravitate towards and expand upon that topic.

Curate
When all else fails, curate.

Leveraging what others are writing about can be a great source of ideas. My recommendation is to keep an ear to major industry publications or influencers and use some or all of what they’re talking about. No, no, don’t plagiarize, use them as inspiration and craft the article to appeal to your direct audience.

Coming up with content ideas doesn’t have to be a head-palming or painful exercise. By listening to prospective and current customers, taking the lid off your secrets, understanding content metrics and curating topics, you’ll be able to spin out fresh content your audience craves.

The post Something To Talk About: How to Come Up With Content Ideas appeared first on Travis Arnold.

All you really needed to do was submit your site for indexing, add the keyword meta tag, tweak HTML and let the spider do the rest of the work.

As search algorithms got better, these technical moves became obsolete and other, more relevant methods adopted for better search results.

Fast forward to today where SEO requires strategy, technical expertise, content skills and PR chops.

Speaking of technical expertise, there are still a number of technical factors that can deep six a site and keep pages from ranking.

Usually, technical factors can be fixed relatively quickly and can turn a site’s visibility around. Also, in my mind, technical factors are things that involve programatic knowledge and not things that are content related (potato patato).

Housekeeping Items

• Install Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools and get them linked together. Using both, you’ll be able to monitor site changes pre and post technical.You’ll also be able to examine traffic, crawl errors and easily submit your site and sitemaps to the index.

The Checklist

• To www or not to www – Go to your browser and type your domain with www. and without, what do you see? If your site resolves with and without www, then you need to do a redirect. Why? Your site’s overall trust can be diluted by splitting your link profile and indexing in half. Search engines will see them as separate when they’re really the same.
• Have a united front – If you’ve got multiple domains resolving to one webhost, then 301 redirect that traffic to the main domain. For example, you may have misspelling domains or used to use another domain and just left it around. Pulling the traffic together gives your site a united front for search engines.

  

• Header codes – Crawl your pages and look for the passed header status code. An ‘all good’ code is 200, while a ‘page not found’ is 404. Commonly I see error pages that should be 404, pass 200 header status codes which makes them tricky to track down and could be leading to a bad UX.
• Canonicalization – This long, confusing word is another way of saying ‘there are a few versions of the same page, let’s programmatically make that 1 version’.Say you have mysite.com/donkey.html?ver=1 and mysite.com/donkey.html?ver=2. To make this all one, you’ll need to add a canonical tag like so:

  <link rel="canonical" href="http://mysite.com/donkey.html">

  The canonical tag is telling search engines that both, dynamic versions are to be treated as one.

• Robots.txt nano nano – This simple text file can really help or really hurt your site depending on its contents. This file tells search engines what to crawl and what not to crawl and should be found in the top level directory. If there are sections or pages on the site you’d like to remain hidden (hmmm) then a properly setup robots.txt file can make that happen.
• Sitemap.xml, the nerd version – You’re probably aware of an HTML sitemap – the one in your footer with a list of pages on your site. But another, equally important one is your sitemap.xml.Sitemap.xml is another way to help the search engines understand what can be found on your site. Basically it lists URLs, modification dates and change frequency in a highly readable format for crawlers.Ideally the sitemap.xml file will automatically be updated when you publish a new blog post, update a page or unpublish a page. There are CMS plugins that make this easy, just do a Google search.

• Sitespeed – This is important. Sometimes your server, markup or architecture can put the brakes on page load times. Page speed is a big factor in ranking success and can be dramatically sped up using Google’s own tools. Check out Page Speed Insights or Pingdom’s Website Speed Test to see where you can improve.

Like I said before, proper technical setup is a big factor for SEO. Most of the above tweaks can be knocked out in a day by an experienced developer or SEO firm and can impact how your site is seen by search engines.

Just make sure you understand what you’re doing before pulling the trigger. And, once you do pull the trigger test, test test and keep a close eye on Webmaster Tools and Analytics to spot any problems.

The post Getting To Know Technical SEO appeared first on Travis Arnold.

For everything stated above (social, search, content) you can apply the label of inbound marketing. Inbound marketing, for those that don’t know, is the art and science of drawing potential customers in rather than pushing our brand or offer out.

All of these inbound disciplines intersect with one another. For example, say you have a new, core piece of content. That content will be split into social posts, a few blog articles and a download page.

• The social posts help your audience interact and consume the content
• The blog posts are published and the subscribers are alerted via email
• The main piece of content is added to the resource library and visible to regular website visitors

The catalyst for the above content types is a great, core piece of content. The offshoots of this content have a specific purpose and appeals to different sub-sets of buyers; some are found on Twitter, others are email subscribers while others are organic searchers.

Where Does SEO Come In?

SEO comes into play in the beginning, middle and ‘end’ (I say ‘end’ because ongoing measurement, analysis and tweaking will occur). Way before the core content was produced, a planning meeting or standup was held. During that meeting the buyer persona was explored, what they care about discussed and the content planned.

We first addressed the buyer and how we could produce content they care about. The second step is to understand how that buyer would find our content or what robots care about.

• Is there a relevant #hashtag they may search for this type of resource?
• What language do our users use to find things in this category? In other words, what are the keywords or phrases buyers would likely use to find this type of resource?
• Where can we link our content so it’s easier for our potential buyers to find?

As you can see, during the planning phase we marry our buyer interests with keywords and phrases they use to fulfill those interests. This includes the on-page content and the social search methods like #hashtags. We also explore where we can link our content to extend it’s exposure.

SEO adds to the overall effectiveness of each discipline or component. By thinking about how the resource could be found online from the beginning, you reduce the stress of ‘optimizing’ later on.

The post The SEO Intersect appeared first on Travis Arnold.