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Groundwork For The Modern SEO

By now, you should have figured out that traditional marketing methods are becoming both ineffective and expensive, an that neglecting to market your business online, or at least do social media marketing, you’re missing out on the powerful business results that an effective internet marketing strategy can bring about.

Whether your business is a startup or is just getting started with web marketing, you need a foundation to implement and in turn, create a successful internet or web marketing strategy, step by step.

If you really want to attract visitors and potential customers to your business’s website, you need to do more than simply build it, you need to optimize it. Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the key to getting your website discovered via search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo.

The traditional approach to SEO involves two sets of tactics, called on-page SEO and off-page SEO. On-page SEO is the strategic implementation of keywords on your website, including in page titles, headers, meta descriptions, and more. Off-page SEO, in comparison, refers to improving your website’s overall authority on the web, which is determined by what other websites are linking to you. The goal with off-page SEO is to attract inbound links or backlinks from relevant, authoritative websites.

While on-page and off-page SEO are helpful concepts, they are rooted in an approach that is going by the wayside. In the past, the goal of SEO was to impress, or trick to some, the search engines so that they’d give you higher rankings, with the ultimate goal being to achieve the coveted number 1 spot in the search results for one of your target keywords.

Today, search engines are smarter. They can tell the difference between spammy websites that are designed to game the system, and legitimate websites that are providing, relevant high quality content. Modern SEO is about optimizing for the searchers, not the search engines.

Facebooks Aims Recatigorization

In recent months, Facebook has introduced a range of tools and additions to better position itself as the place to be for journalists and news makers – and by extension, news consumers. There was the introduction of “Instant Articles”, which encourages journalists to post content direct to Facebook by providing better publishing tools to improve the reading experience. Then Facebook updated their algorithm to factor in time spent reading, which, of course, benefits longer form content, giving journalists more incentive to post inside Facebook. More recently, Facebook opened up access to their new live streaming tool to journalists, urging them to post breaking news and content direct to Facebook and the 1.49 billion users of the website.

Facebook is very keen to have more journalists posting more news content on the site. And more exclusive material means more content for users to read, which means users stay on-platform for a longer amount of time. In line with this, Facebook has launched a new tool for journalists to help them discover trending content and information on the stories and issues resonating with the Facebook audience. And given that Facebook is one of the leading source of referral traffic for a great many sites, reaching that audience is increasingly critical.

Facebook’s new tool, “Signal”, is a dashboard which journalists can use to discover relevant content from across the Facebook network. This type of search functionality has traditionally been difficult to navigate on Facebook, as while you can use the “Trending Content” tab to find out what’s being posted about current topics on the platform, what’s displayed via Trending Content is specific to you, based on your historic actions and preferences. Signal’s listings provide a more general, unfiltered perspective on what’s popular, enabling users to find wider insights and trends.

These tools will help uncover more targeted and refined content, which journalists will then be able to use as reference material for their work. The use of location tags is particularly interesting, in a journalistic sense, as this will enable creators to find relevant content around news events and add that to their posts for context, quickly and easily. In  the  marketing  world,  when  Signal  is  opened  to  more  users, it  could  give 

web marketing, social networking, advertising people and even the startup entrepreneurs and small businesses, the ability to look at how other businesses and individuals are discussing specific events and what’s resonating, helping to create better content.

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Personalization Generates Leads

Today’s prospects independently research products and services before making a purchase, which creates numerous interaction touch points. Now, organizations are starting to realize the importance of personalizing those touch-points and providing an engaging, valuable experience for each visitor. But realizing the importance is different than actually implementing a personalized experience. You need to build a successful branding or personalization strategy.

Personalization can be obtained by finding out who your key audiences are, and what the defining characteristics are of your target audiences. And you also need determine which content assets are most valuable to your ideal persona, such as blog posts or case studies and which channel you are focusing on.

If you’re looking to generate new leads or nurture existing leads and further educate them, start by choosing only two or three use cases that make the most sense or will have the most impact on your business. If you’re B2B, you can consider employing account based web marketing to target specific companies, industries, or even personas that are what is considered, of higher-value.

After you’ve selected a few use cases to focus on, go one step further by detailing the specifics. For instance, for some companies this may entail listing account names or regions that are most valuable to your business. For others, you can zoom in on a particular behavior or specific product interest.

But before starting to run any campaigns, determine what you’re going to measure and how, so establish analytics. This can help you understand how each key audience interacts with you. Set up your measurements to determine baseline metrics for the different verticals and audiences and start testing personalization campaign or brand marketing results to measure uplift. And track performance by checking how many visitors from each specific segment visit your website, how they behave on-site, and what type of content they prefer.

Personalization is an excellent way to push prospects down the funnel, but once they turn into leads, it’s a marketer’s responsibility to turn them over to sales. Use the same segmentation capabilities to provide your sales teams with real time sales intelligence about their target customers.

Drive Customer Satisfaction With CRM's

To drive customer satisfaction, organizations deploying CRM solutions must think about the customer relationship in an integrated and comprehensive way. In today’s multichannel world, this is particularly important. Customer interactions take place everywhere. From sales, support, service, finance and on the web. Beyond traditional sales and support management, companies need to be able to see real time, cross channel views of all interactions to deliver superior customer service, whether the interaction occurred on the web just seconds ago or in person with a sales rep yesterday. This enables every customer interaction to be based on a holistic view of a customer’s history.

Self-service has also become a critical driver of customer satisfaction. Many organizations are deploying customer self-service portals to meet their customers’ expectations around the ease of doing digital marketing business with the company on the web. Customer portals enable customers to view outstanding quotes or orders, or even request returns, improving service while reducing the cost to serve. 

On the call center side, the support team can benefit from cross departmental customer visibility, with a detailed order history allowing the support team to check service level subscriptions. This also gives the team an opportunity to deliver customized up sell and cross sell offers that both anticipate customer needs and drive revenue.

For organizations whose business model requires delivering ongoing service for their customers, project management is a critical but often forgotten component of CRM. This includes the tactical aspects of creating jobs and linking them to specific customers, as well as tracking estimated end dates, percentage of work completed, actual end dates and the income and expenses associated with each project. Project management is particularly important for businesses whose models are predicated on customer renewals or subscription revenue.

The final area of customer satisfaction is billing. Billing errors can create significant customer attrition, and in many cases, billing errors may stem from manual processes in the original sale, project management issues or simply duplicate or out of date customer data.

Designing An Agency Structure

Structure your team, around your business goals. Perhaps you’re trying to build new service offerings into an existing team. Or maybe you’re trying to grow your team to service the growing demand from your brilliant inbound marketing or web marketing efforts.

There are many different types of organizational structures, and a world of pros and cons to each. But pros and cons don’t exist in a vacuum, they need context. So in order to assess the suitability of one structure above another, you need to evaluate them against your own goals.

Traditionally, decision making is centralized in an organization and often sits, and often slows, with senior managers. In the kind of agile content and digital marketing agencies we’re seeing prosper today, specialists tend to sit in the middle levels of the organization. Give them the power and responsibility to make good decisions for the client, and you’ll not only see strong, speedy decision making, you’ll be creating a true sense of ownership and pride in your leaders of the future, your corporate motivators.

For smaller agencies that are trying to grow quickly, a more generalist approach allows for more flexibility as your people can tackle a broader array of tasks. This increases your productivity and the value of each hire. However, for larger and more established agencies, refining some specialist areas will make it easier to establish your agency as a leader in certain areas. Don’t be afraid to create new roles for stellar specialists that come your way, particularly if their skill set is in high demand.

Employees love an opportunity to learn new things. And once you have the right structure, it is easy to see who could potentially pick up a new job related skill. Before you jump into training mode though, check off a few things.

Does this person have a natural aptitude for similar tasks? Do they pick things up quickly and apply them intuitively? Are they interested in the field you want them to grow in? Once you’ve decided who should do what, get them involved in finding the best training or mentoring program for them, and create a plan with a timeline for completion and commercialization of their new skill. Remember, always try new services and skills out on your own web marketing or social media marketing process to refine it before you take it to market.

Making A Selling Point

You need to develop a unique selling point, or USP, a reason for people to buy from your company. There are thousands of companies very similar to yours, and you are competing with every one of them around the globe for every single customer. Even the person that is standing outside your physical premises has in their pocket an instant connection to the Internet and every business that is online, doing small business web marketing or social networking from all over the world.

Why should they buy from you? You must give them a reason to do so or they will buy elsewhere. Your branding or brand marketing and USP are your tools. They are the only reasons they will take out their wallet in your store or on your website today.

Ideally they will be aware of your branding, granting you have persevered in your web marketing efforts, before they’re standing outside your store or viewing your website, but even if this is not the case, your branding can still win you the sale. If your branding is welcoming, with great customer service then they will likely complete a sale. They’re also more likely to come back for future purchases and to recommend your company to friends and contacts.

If your customers were just half as loyal as Apple customers then your business would be a run-away success story. Yes, Apple makes great products, but they do have imperfections. Their customers are so forgiving because of the loyalty they feel towards the brand. They overlook the imperfections and high prices because they need the brand more than they need the product, so they are prepared to pay a hefty premium.

Making sure customers come back should be a top priority for every business. They have made one purchase and if they are happy they are likely to become repeat customers. It’s your job to make sure they are happy.

Small Business Branding

As a small business, it’s a daunting task to stand out from competitors. You know you need to, but every other company like yours is also trying to stand out. And regardless of the size of your business, branding brand marketing or brand visibility, is so important that you can never just leave it to chance. It is just as important as product development, because of you get it wrong, your product will never sell or your serAs a small business, it’s a daunting task to stand out from competitors. You know you need to, but every other company like yours is also trying to stand out. And regardless of the size of your business, branding, brand marketing or brand visibility, is so important that you can never just leave it to chance. It is just as important as product development, because of you get it wrong, your product will never sell or your service will never be used.

Your customers’ brains are overloaded with new information every day. Done right, your branding will find a way of cutting through the clutter. Just think about the visual and auditory information that is assaulting their senses on any given city, street, television channel or website. Every aspect of your customers’ lives is like this. In all this ever changing mental clutter, a consistent company brand image is essential to any company’s survival in the 21st Century.

Your company branding should tell people who you are, what you do and why you do it. It should indicate your market positioning and your unique selling points. A customer should be able to see consistency across every channel they use to communicate with you, so should include every aspect of your business, including lighting, colors, ease of access and staff attitudes, physical and even virtual assistants, as well as the more obvious logo and name. Even the smell of your office or storefront is part of your brand.

Let your brand do the preselling for you. This is how names like Apple manages to sell so many devices, as people are buying the brand. Many buyers do not care if the product will last beyond the guarantee period, they must have it because the brand is part of the image.

It takes time to establish your brand’s unique selling point, but once established it will enable selling to your target customers come easy enough. They will have decided to buy your product before ever contacting you about the details. This is the power of preselling.

Corporate Motivators, The Power In The Middle

With the rise of social media, consumers demand compelling, relevant content, developed internally or through a community of key influencers. While they appreciate product information from brands, what influences their purchase decisions the most are opinions from people just like them. New moms want to know what products other new moms prefer and marathon runners want product feedback from people familiar the pains of racing. Socially savvy, business influencers, corporate motivators and directing advisors represent something a brand cannot, and that is the perspective of another consumer.

Marketers can authentically tap this trust by partnering with influencers who show a natural affinity for their product and brand values. For instance, Udi’s, a national provider of gluten free food products, works with dozens of bloggers who specifically create and share content about gluten free recipes and products. Their readers trust their opinions and the products covered and a partnership is win-win-win for the Udi’s, the bloggers and their readers.

Finding, engaging and collaborating with influencers used to be a very manual process and only allowed marketers and web marketing pros to coordinate and manage the efforts and content of a handful of influencers. That, combined with the assumption that big numbers meant big influence, motivated web marketers to just want to work with bloggers and influencers who had high monthly unique visitors or millions of followers on Twitter or YouTube. This meant that the same bloggers ended up working on programs over and over. Those top 5% might represent big numbers, but they don’t necessarily represent the millions of consumers who have targeted needs and therefore follow niche influencers who produce highly targeted content. These include marathon runners, cat lovers, military families, cancer survivors and those with allergies or special diets. Collectively, the millions of influencers who cater to these audiences are impacting exponentially more consumers than the top 5%. This is the power of the middle.