San Diego Marketing Round Table – Starting the Conversation
July 26, 2010
At this month’s Round Table, we discussed blogging and how to most effectively use it as a tool to market your business. One of the attendees, Jessica Barna of Kitchens Resolved, wrote and typed up notes that I thought would be good to share. Enjoy!
Topic: The Art of Blogging – Starting the Conversation
Blogs:
Can’t just be all the wonderful things you do
Must provide some type of useful or entertaining information
Helps develop trust with potential customers
For best results: should use an integrated system of blogs, video, email marketing, etc.
Cannot get the full benefit from a blog without using other social media marketing
Need to use all the tools available to us
Portray yourself through your blog
Get involved in a person’s thinking
Can be demanding, blogs require constant updating
Common practice: Offer services to influential bloggers, hope that bloggers talk about your product/services.
RSS Feed allows you to subscribe to blogs, can create reader accounts and have your selected blogs update your reader page automatically.
Takes 6 Touches to get business – use blogging to start touching clients without much time or money from you per touch.
Don’t be “salsey” in your blog. No one wants to be sold, but everyone likes to buy.
Video Blogs:
Idea: Provide a video “power tip” on You Tube. Post a new tip daily, to keep people coming back.
Develop your own You Tube Channel
Mike recommends having out more than 100 videos. Start with 20 or 30, and daily update.
With so many blogs nowadays, how do small businesses create a blog that competes with others?
Placement,
Comment on blogs in your field,
Always provide a link to your website,
Make your blog useful every post
Takes time and effort.
Hire Marketing help.
Optimize your blog for people to find you when they search, SEO.
Cross-pollinate with other bloggers to get exposure to their readers (What is right name for this practice?
The Art of Blogging – the four E’s
- Education
- Engagement
- Enrichment
- Entertainment
Organizing your blog for search-ability: can have keywords for each of your posts, can have a search feature so people can find your writing about any subject you blog about, really good blogs usually have search features.
Blogs used for marketing businesses usually have 1 or more of these 6 goals (adapted from a list by S. Gardner):
- Inform or educate the public and your current customers
- Provide customer service, or help to use a product or service
- Convey a sense of company personality and culture
- Entertain readers and customers
- Drive readers to take an action
- Encourage dialogue with customers
Tools and references:
4 Square – condenses various social media outlets
Alltop.com is a blog directory
Next month topic: Guerilla Marketing
PPC Keyword research and the B2B buyer
May 30, 2010
This webinar dealt with B2B buyers, the way they buy and how companies can adapt their PPC keyword strategy, and how to use the best keywords for B2B buyers.
There are three different categories of purchase for B2B buyers. First, repeat purchase, which is a purchase that is repeated and when the buyer is referring to the same company, an example of repeat purchase can be copy paper. Then, repeat modified purchases, which is when the buyer changes a product he needs by another product that falls into the same category (e.g. computers). And finally, Blank state purchase is when the buyer never bought the product he is buying. This type of purchases led to a lot of online research. These three different types of purchase influence the keyword strategy as well as other significant factors.
Online research is extremely significant in buying decisions, for simple purchases buying is more often online. On the other hand for complex and more expensive purchases, buying is less done online but the researches about the product are done online. Search plays an integral navigational role and the structure of query can help understanding intents and consumer behavior.
Besides, in every decision buyers are making a balance between risk and reward and the level of risk in B2B purchasing is high. High risk means more online researches to gather more feedbacks and information about the product. The risk is present for both users and buyers. From the point of view of the user the risk is the product, that is why the user wants a product that will be more efficient and make him more productive. For the buyer, the risk is in the purchase. In other words, how risky the transaction can be for the company and how credible the vendor is. Risk varies also according to the type of purchase.
Applied to the keyword strategy, vendors should determine the degree of risk and uncertainly for the customer to buy their product as well as defining the prospect’s vocabulary and intent. Quantitative and qualitative research should be conducted for the keyword list. The qualitative research should include one to one interviews, vocabulary exercises, over the shoulder observations and online surveys. The higher the degree of risk is, the more qualitative the research must be.
As a conclusion, B2B buyers will conduct more researches than B2C buyers and the main reason is the high level of risk and the facility and rapidity of online purchases for repeated purchases. This means that suppliers should considerately develop their PPC keyword strategy for B2B buyers.
How to Increase Profits by 45%
May 30, 2010
Recently I was at a workshop led by a couple business coaches and they put forth a formula for building business that I hadn’t seen in the 10 or so years that I’ve been in marketing. This formula breaks down piece by piece the key to profits:
(((# of Leads x Conversion Percentage) x Avg No. of Transactions) x Avg Dollar Sale) x Margin Percentage = Profit
Now for those of you who don’t remember your high school algebra (and I had to struggle a bit to remember myself), start from the inside parentheses and work your way out. Like this:
First multiply the Number of Leads x Conversion Percentage
Ask yourself how many leads you’re bringing in on a monthly basis (whether it’s through sales people, lead services, etc). For conversations sake, we’ll say 200.
Now ask yourself what percent of those leads you actually close on a monthly basis. Don’t high ball it, if anything, go lower. For the sake of this conversation, we’ll use a 10% conversion rate.
Multiplying these two numbers gives you the number of new customers you bring in every month. With our 200 leads per month at a 10% conversion rate, we’re bringing in 20 new customers every month.
Now multiply that by the Average Number of Transactions per Customer
If each customer is buying an average of five widgets from XYZ Corp, then on a monthly basis, you’re completing 100 transactions.
Now that you have an idea of, on average, how many transactions your company is processing each month, multiply that number by the Average Dollar Sale and you have your monthly revenue.
So, based on our 100 monthly transactions, if each one was an average of $1,000, you’re looking at $100,000 in revenue per month.
Finally, multiply that revenue by your Margin Percentage and you have your profits.
$100,000 per month is a great sales number but remember you have to pay your sales people, your rent, for production, etc. If you have relatively low overhead, you might get to keep most of that. If your margins are lower…well you get the picture.
For the sake of this conversation, we’ll say that you have a 50% margin.
So that brings our grand total to $50,000 per month in profit!
Now a lot of you are probably reading this and thinking “thanks, Captain Obvious, I’m pretty sure I could’ve figured that out on my own,” but you’d be surprised at how many business owners have simply never thought about it.
Now think about this: If you could increase each one of those variables by 5% what would that do to your bottom line? Do that math and let’s talk about ways to make it happen.
Paid Search and Big Brand Marketing
May 30, 2010
How Intel Coordinated Search into a Global Ad Campaign
Search powered marketing is today part of marketing campaigns and represents a vital element and an important budget. With the recession, advertisers are more accountable for media budgets. Every dollar spend on a search powered marketing campaign has to provide results. Advertisers also have much better ways to coordinate campaigns. This webinar examines the last campaign of Intel and explains how Intel incorporated a search program into a global Ad campaign.
The Intel Company integrated search into the overall advertising campaign that started last year in May. The campaign “sponsors of tomorrow” is a globally integrated campaign featuring TV, print, retail, events, banners, video and web. All supported with paid search and PPC campaign. This campaign was designed for the brand itself and not for Intel’s products. The company wants to increase the notoriety of the brand and what Intel is doing and the fact that Intel is the “brain” behind PC’s. Intel wants to reach the target through the name, and want to tell people more about what Intel is and the fact that Intel is a forward thinking company. This campaign has no purpose on selling anything; it’s only about sharing information with the audience and let them know about the benefits of Intel.
The campaign is search marketing oriented in order to pick up key words when people go online after they saw the ads on TV or other offline support. Social media and specific landing pages on the blog were also a support in this campaign to allow viewers engage with Intel and giving feedbacks on the campaign and on Intel and on how they see the world of tomorrow. The landing pages also allowed navigating on the historic of the company, the products, the social media section etc. This gave Intel the opportunity to evaluate the effectiveness of the campaign and observe the tendencies from the different landing pages. The possibility to view Intel ads on YouTube has been facilitated by Intel. They created a YouTube page and could also analyze the video search PPC.
This campaign linked and combined off and online media. Each Offline support used for the campaign had a direct link to a web page or online “area”. This strategy allowed Intel to trace and measure the impact of each media used in the “Intel sponsors of tomorrow” campaign and if the campaign reached its goal. It also allowed Intel to evaluate manage they investments for the future campaigns.
Interactive Marketing Review (2009)
May 30, 2010
Despite the recession, the interactive marketing environment is still growing and diversifying. This development creates many opportunities for actors of the interactive marketing market. The recession forces people to be more creative and more competent with their marketing campaigns.
The forecast for 2010 and beyond in interactive marketing is promising. The spending in interactive marketing (mobile marketing, social media, email marketing, display advertising, search marketing) will be significantly increasing for the next 5 years.
At the end of 2009 Google added some new ad formats. Site links, with more links appearing for the ranking results. Every result on the top page will have more clickable links, which can be seen as an opportunity for interactive marketers. Google’s product search is also another update. Product extensions and listings are getting more developed on the ranking results. When doing a general research like laptop, in addition to websites, you have a product view with a link and the price of the product. Make sure to have your images optimized if you want to benefit from this feature.
Google Caffeine will be released “sometime after the holidays”; it will bring some significant changes in interactive marketing. It will have direct effects on crawling, ranking and indexing. Google Caffeine will focus on real-time results by creating frequent content updates and participating in social media communities. Under websites links will scroll some recent social media activity as tweets for instance. This is another chance to maximize your ranking. It will also provide faster results. Page load time will be an algorithmic ranking factor. With webmaster central, Google gives you the time your page takes to load compared to the majority of websites. Page loading time will have an effect on quality score for PPC and SEO. The last point is that Google Caffeine will provide more blended search results as images, videos, blogs, social search, maps, etc.
In order to benefit from Google Caffeine you have to drive more traffic to your website through increased channel as social media and real-time. Use Twitter and other social media to increase inbound links to your site. Increase your brand visibility on the internet. Be careful when having a social media policy; be sure to develop a content strategy with frequent and consistent updates.
Don’t forget Bing and Yahoo! The factors when optimizing for Bing are almost the same as when optimizing for Google. If you follow the same strategy you should succeed. Be aware that your ranking results won’t be the same for Yahoo and Bing even if they have a partnership.
As a conclusion, in the future be sure to have SEO and content strategies for web, images, videos, social media, news and real-time.
The Pay Per Click Long Tail
May 30, 2010
This podcast will discuss the relation of Pay Per Click and the Long Tail and their importance for your website. We’ll also discuss the limits of broad matches and explain you how to manage cost effectively your keyword list and your tail.
In order to have an accurate definition of the tail we need to define the head. The head could be defined as a number of keyword and everything else would represent the tail. The head represents a measure of traffic volume. In this case the head is defined as, either the top 250 keywords by click volume or the keywords with 500 clicks or more in 90 days. The tail is represented by everything else.
The importance of the tail is determined by several elements. The tail varies according to the type and size of your business and more specifically of the number of the products or services you propose on your website and how people search in the category.
The tail is, or can be treated with a broad match strategy. The use of broad match has to be carefully managed. Broad match can be unprofitable and less efficient. If we take the case of a landing page for example, a visitor who is looking for something specific will arrive on the home page and will probably not continue its research on your site. Better landing pages means better conversion rate from each visitor, which signifies much value coming out of the traffic of the targeted keyword.
Because the traffic has different values you can differentiate the bids. With a higher value keyword you’ll spend more money, with a lower value keyword you’ll spend less. In other words more targeted bidding brings better resources allocation and a bigger program with better efficiency.
When building your keyword list, you need to spend a lot of time on the head about the language and how people are going to search for your products. For the head, your list has to be done by a human and not by automated software robot. Your keywords needs the right attributes as well as the landing pages need human verification. Whereas for the tail, you can use tools to build your keyword list, but you still have to control the results and the coherence.
When managing your keyword list, you must have sophisticated stats in order to make an accurate evaluation of your needs. Classification scheme and URL checking software is vital when you provide a wide range of products or services. It will help the classification of keywords and keep your strategy organized.
To conclude the best alternative is high bidding on exact match keyword ( for the head) and low bids on broad match and negative keywords (for the tail) is the most beneficial solution when managing your PPC plan.
What is Link Building and How to build Links?
May 30, 2010
Link building, as Pay Per Click advertising and keyword optimization is part of the search engine optimization process. Link building consists of maximizing your ranking on search engine by having your websites link on other websites. How many links you’ll have associated to your site will determine your ranking on Google for example.
A good way to make links is to build links from sites that are related to yours. They are several ways to have your link on a website. An easy example is becoming a member of a website from your community. You can also participate and write guest posts for a blog or forum. Don’t aim the quantity of links but focus on quality links. Choose relevant websites, pages and link text. If you decide to write an article, try to make it valuable and pertinent, in order to build a good and strong image of your website. You can also include some editorial links to relevant content on your site.
They are two types of links, reciprocal links and one way links. Reciprocal links is when you agree with a website that you will both display the others links on your website. One way links is when your website link is posted on a website but you don’t post anything on your website. Notice that those one way links are more valuable than reciprocal links for search engines. Be careful when managing links; avoid involving with site with bad reputation, and bet on quality, not on quantity.
As a conclusion, we could insist on the fact that link building is a key tool in search engine optimization. Besides increasing your ranking on search engine, link building can also lead people with similar interest to follow your link and be an excellent advertising method.
Score Consulting and Corporate Volunteerism
May 30, 2010
Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about volunteerism. This has come primarily as a result of me actually getting involved in different causes in my local community of San Diego and doing quite a bit of volunteering myself.
Lately, I’ve been volunteering by offering music, marketing assistance and supervision to groups in need of help and every time, I’m amazed at how rewarding it is. Not only do I come away feeling like I’ve done something worth doing, but when someone offers you heartfelt words of appreciation and gratitude, it’s a feeling like none other.
In today’s world, with unemployment at or near all time highs, funding being cut on a seemingly daily basis and everyone in both the public and private sectors crying mercy, it’s more important than ever to reach out and ask one question: “what can I do to make your life a little easier?” Regardless of whom you’re talking to, whether it’s an employee, a co-worker, a family member or a stranger on the street, that simple question could mean the difference between success and catastrophic failures in an organization, a company and especially a person’s existence.
Now I don’t mean to preach here but, when I read the paper every morning and I talk to the people who run these groups for whom I’ve been volunteering, I realize that there are troubling realities that can’t go unspoken or unattended.
So how can we fix it? In truth, I have no idea how to fix the larger problems. I’m not an economist; I’m not a politician or a lawmaker. What I am, however, is someone who manages a business that may be able to offer help.
Over the past year, there have been a lot of changes here at Score Consulting, as I’ve been trying to make some changes that, in a positive way, shake up the status quo. In the new year, I plan on adding staff to the rank and file of the Score Consulting: new consultants, new assistants and new project managers.
Along with these additions, I’m making a pledge to the communities in which Score Consulting employees reside. We will make mandatory one paid day of volunteering per month for everyone working in the company. The details will all be shaken out down the line, but essentially, we’re going to provide a full day’s pay, access to child care, any administrative and business support that our employees so that they can give back to their communities.
This isn’t a new idea, but I truly believe it’s a good one, and one that should be sewn into the fabric of my growing business.
The Four E’s of Blogging: Engagement
May 30, 2010
And here we are in the home stretch of The Art of Blogging series! For the past few posts, we’ve been discussing the importance of blogging, how to keep people coming back and how to make it effective. For the final post in this series, we’re going to focus on the final “E” of blogging: Engagement.
Engagement: So you’ve created your blog and you’re getting a few hits here and there. But why should people keep coming back?
The first rule of engagement is this: Be engaging! Seems pretty obvious, right? But still, there are people out there who just post articles, victories, news, etc. that has absolutely no interest to half of the general population.
If you read my bio on the site here, you’ll see that there was a time recently that I took a job with an Internet marketing company in San Diego. One of the groups they catered to mainly was lawyers. I remember talking about blogs with some of these lawyers, and they seemed to grasp the concept fairly well, but when I’d have my monthly calls with these lawyers, we’d go over their blog, and all that was up there, if anything, was recent legal decisions and law articles.
Now don’t get me wrong, those are important, too. They help with the reputation of these lawyers by showing how well they’ve done in the past and how well they know and understand the law.
My question is this: How am I supposed to relate to it? How am I supposed to comment on a legal decision that I only understand every third word of?
In any blog platform worth using, you can create different categories. If you’re going to have a category detailing legal decisions and articles, at the very least try to have another one explaining the significance of those articles for me to understand. Otherwise, you’re just throwing information at people, most of whom have no chance of understanding why they should care.
And, just like that, you waste valuable space.
Obviously, this is a very specific example to a very specific industry, but the concept applies across the board. Think about your industry. How much industry jargon can you use while writing an article that your consumer just won’t care about? I know I can talk about CMSes, SEO, SEM, SMM until the cows come home, but unless I’m talking to another marketing expert, no one’s going to have the first clue as to what I’m talking about, and they’re not going to engage in the blog itself.
The Four E’s of Blogging: Enrichment
May 30, 2010
By now, if you’ve been reading regularly, you know that we’re dead set in the middle of a series on blogging. If not, you should go back and read the past few installments 
. Here we are, in the home stretch and moving onto the third “E” of blogging.
Enrichment: This is an interesting one. How can we, as business owners, enrich our readers through our blogs. This one, to be honest, kind of stumped me for a little while. Then I did a search for the definition of the word “enrich” (you can find the search that I ran here).
Personally, my favorite definition of the word is apparently from Wiktionary: To make (someone) rich or richer; To adorn, ornate more richly…
The reason I love this definition so much is because it defines my business perfectly. The mission of Score Consulting is, and always has been, to help each and every one of our clients succeed in their field. We aim to, quite literally (according to this definition), enrich our clients. One of the ways that we do this is by blogging and offering free advice through our blog to our clients and the business community at large.
How do you enrich your readers? Do you offer free advice? Do you teach people? Give them more information than they have now? Maybe some information that’s not typically available to the public (nothing that you would get in trouble for revealing, of course) would make your readers lives easier.
Don’t get me wrong, we’re all in business to make a profit (even non-profit organizations need to make a profit to operate), and we don’t need to make any excuses about that. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t make things better for our readers outside of that.