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This is the third in a series of articles on building your own word-of-mouth link campaign. To start at the beginning read Looking Differently at Links.

Social Networks & Blogs

Social networks – such as Live Journal, My Space, Facebook and many others – is a complex topic and each one offers a great number of possibilities to promote your company.  The basic idea comes down to the fact that a lot of people come to these sites and hang out there regularly. Social networks and blogs are a great way to find a target market group, but remember – just like groups and forums – you need to contribute to the group, not just market to them. 

Social networks are considered separate from websites on the internet, especially in searches. How often do you see Facebook content come up on a Google search results page?  Additionally social network have their own internal search systems that provide results from within their own pages. This means that when someone is on Facebook and does a Facebook search they are only going to find information available on Facebook. An internal search won’t find a regular webpage. This is why many companies have MySpace pages to supplement their regular website.

There is much controversy about the value of social networks for companies – especially those providing business-to-business products and services. It’s true that placing a company on the social networks is not for every business out there, but it is something to consider – especially for specialty companies selling to the general public.

Online Magazines and Articles

There are an amazing number of online magazines and other outlets where you can post news and articles. Writing an article to be published and referenced by others is a tremendous source of buzz and can drive a great number of people to your website. 

Keep in mind that it takes more than just a single article to generate traffic through this method. It requires a steady output to see results.  And, your articles need to be more than just press releases for your company. Articles need to contain the sort of information people will use and want to share with others. 

The advantage of this system is that you only need to focus writing the articles. The distribution is done by other people. The challange is that you have to be (or hire) a skilled writer with something to say, and you have to find someone interested in publishing your articles.

E-mail 

I want to make it clear that I am not talking about spam. E-mail is a wonderful and very powerful promotional tool, but it can be easily abused. There are many good ways to use email without getting a bad name.

The most basic type of e-mail promotion is a simple electronic newsletter system, where people sign up for information and can cancel their subscription themselves whenever they wish. This tactic is used extensively by everyone from large well-known retailers, such as Borders and Sephora who send out graphically heavy html messages containing discounts and specials, to local quilt shops letting their customers know about upcoming classes with simple text messages. This is a very low manpower system that can generate an amazing amount of traffic and sales on your website. 

Even every day email can be used to generate links. I am shocked that anyone forgets one of the simplest things possible with e-mail: place a link to your website within the signature portion of your e-mails. The e-mail signature can contain everything from the sender’s name to business hours to the company legal statement. Think of the total number of e-mails that your company generates. Each one has the potential of being a small advertisement for your company. 

Are the sites and ideas I’ve mentioned over the last few articles the only places to pursue a word-of-mouth web campaign?  Of course not, but it is enough information to get started and to help you think about different ways of publicizing your business and your website on the internet. Time spent reaching out every day will snowball you into real success.

Technorati Tags: email, link building, word-of-mouth, seo

I’ve been talking about building a word-of-mouth link program and in this article I’ll take a closer look at places your potential buyers might hang out and what to do when  you find them.

Message Boards

Message boards are really old school; they predate blogs and other social networks. They began in the 1980s back in the beginnings of the internet, and they are still around and used by people to share information and socialize. Think of them as group blogs where one person makes a comment and others then respond to those comments. 

When you find a message board that attracts your target audience, start by creating an account with a link to your website. If the board lets members create custom signatures – a little text and maybe a graphic at the bottom of each message – go for it. That can be a plug for your website.

Once you are a member you need to participate. Read over the messages and comment on the topics being discussed.  If you have new information or questions of your own create your own posts. As people read your information they will discover you and your website. Warning: do not spam the board with advertising. At best it will be ignored. At worst it can create a negative impression of your business, as well as get you banned from the board. 

Yahoo & Google Groups

Like message boards, both Yahoo and Google have their own groups covering a wide range of topics. Find the topics which best suite your company and, just like on the message boards, go ahead and join in. 

Both Yahoo and Google limit the number of groups that you can join in one day, so it might take a week or more before you join all the groups you’ve picked out. Before joining any group make sure it is active. If no one has posted comments for over a month, then the group may not be worth your time. 

Yahoo Groups also has a place to post a permanent link in each group you belong to, once you are a member of the group. Like the message boards slowly comment and post information within these groups to build up a following and lead people to your site. 

Web directories

These are websites which are nothing more than a giant list of links with descriptions but they have the websites organized by subject matter. You should be able to request a spot in the directories without any problems. However, if the directory is not professionally run, the updating process may take a long time – so be patient.

Now do be careful because some web directories are nothing more than a scam. There are a great number of possible scams involving web directories and the most common one is insisting that you pay to have your link posted. Do not pay, no matter how low cost as you will not get a return on that investment and it could be a phishing expedition for your ID. 

There is an exception to this rule. It can be worth paying for a listing on a web directory that’s run by a membership organization such as the Better Business Bureau. With membership organizations there are benefits beyond the web listing that make them worthwhile. 

In the next article, I’ll look at social networks and blogs, online magazines, and email.

Technorati Tags: seo, word of mouth, link building

As many of you know, I have a tendency to get very cranky about money being wasted on marketing. It’s just so dumb. With all the tools at hand for tracking, measuring, and optimizing marketing campaigns, there’s no reason to burn money.

Yet companies do it all the time.

And here’s one method that is particularly irksome: don’t follow up. Or if you do, make sure you wait a while.

Several years ago I saw a statistic on the number of companies that fail to follow up with contacts after a trade show. I don’t remember the exact number but – trust me – it was huge. Somewhere well over 50% of all the companies who spend tons of money planning and participating in trade shows simply never follow up with the prospects they meet. 

I thought this was outrageous until I saw a MarketingSherpa report containing information about how companies respond to email requests. Specifically, the report talks about marketing to engineers, but there is a message in it for all marketers.

Engineers, not surprising to anyone who has worked with them, prefer to communicate by email. So do a lot of other people. They will research products online and then send an email requesting more details. 

What happens to that email at your company?

MarketingSherpa found only 17% of suppliers responded to an email request within 24 hours. The majority (53%) took between one and two days. And everyone else took longer. 

Now think about this for a minute. I want to look at this from two angles. One, you’ve spent a lot of time and money building a solid website that addresses preliminary concerns and questions of your prospects. Your efforts have succeeded in interesting prospects enough to have them reach out, identify themselves and ASK you to contact them. Why would you wait?

The second angle is from your own perspective. Assume you’ve carefully researched a purchase. You’ve eliminated as many sources as possible and now you want some additional information from your top choices. This decision is top of mind with you right now. You send an email. Two days (or more) pass before you hear from the company. What are you thinking now? Are you still as hot to talk to a sales rep?

Probably not.

Things happen fast on the internet. We’ve become accustomed to immediate responses – even if they’re only automated ones. Other things being equal, the sale will almost always go to the team that is most responsive.

What a great opportunity! If you just make sure your marketing or sales team is responding to email requests within 24 business hours you could beat out 83% of your competitors. 

Technorati Tags: email, responsiveness, conversion

Here’s the final 3 “How to Invoke Response” tips from the blog entry I started on April 21st.

How to Invoke Response Tip #7: Don’t expect miracles with one message.
Say it in different ways, and say it multiple times.

As kids we knew this well. When we were really little, we’d break our parents down by continually asking them for that candy in the store. As we grew older, our techniques became more clever. If, for example, we needed their permission to go out Saturday night, we waited until the “right” moment when we thought our parents would be most receptive to our request.

Bear in mind, I’m not suggesting that we try to “break” our readers by bombarding them with messages. Quite the opposite, this is a sure way to lose subscribers!

What I am suggesting however, is that prospects, like parents, will have moments when they’ll be more receptive to your message. If your message happens to arrive on an especially chaotic day in the office, they’ll probably ignore you, but if you send the exact same message on a less-stressful day, say three or five days later, they might actually “hear” you.

Some marketers already do this (I see this all the time with webinar announcements), but if you really want to boost response, don’t just parrot the same message. Mix it up a bit, using different arguments, analogies, and language to convince and compel readers to action. The different messages will catch a different group of prospects each time around.

How to Invoke Response Tip #8: Give them a reason to act NOW.
I’m amazed at the number of promotions I receive that don’t have a clear call to action. Maybe there are a lot of marketers sitting on a big wad of cash to burn, but if that’s not you, then I recommend you make it very clear in your promotions what action you want readers to take.

Setting a deadline works to move procrastinators and fence-sitters, but be careful not to set the limit too far out into the future because their enthusiasm for your product or offer will wane over time. I like to set deadlines that are at most one or two weeks out. When I give prospects more time (e.g. 30 days), I lose a portion of the initially-interested audience.

How to Invoke Response Tip #9: Give them something for free.
Last but not least, take a cue from all those infomercials that promote freebies with their offer. What do they know that we don’t? People love getting something for free. If you don’t believe me, watch how people behave at a trade show. Grown men go absolutely crazy for light-up toys, whirly-gigs, and stress-release balls.

Again I’m not suggesting you give away Ginsu knifes or a toy to boost response. Give instead, an e-book, one-page excerpt from a research report, or handy checklist that will whet the prospect’s appetite, while at the same time helping to establish you as a credible resource.

Tangible items (things the prospect can feel and touch) work best, and never forget to assign an actual dollar value to your bonus item. The value will reinforce in the reader’s mind that what they’re getting for free is something other people will pay for.

If you decide to test out one or more of these tips in your next campaign, I’d love to hear back from you how they worked. You can reach me at: sanderson@evoicecommunications.com. 

Have a great Memorial Day!

Sue Anderson
Marketing Lure, Inc.

Sometimes it helps to look beyond our own industries to discover what marketing tactics others are using successfully. According to an OMMA research brief, a recently published Forrester report, called Retailing Online 2009: Marketing Report, provides a good opportunity to do that. 

Amidst all of the data included in the report, two things have real significance for non-retail marketers.  Online retailers are using: 

1. Search engine marketing (SEM) for customer acquisition and 
2. Email for customer retention.

If you’re interested in the numbers, SEM is the marketing tactic most often mentioned as an effective acquisition tactic (83%). Search engine optimization is the second most frequently mentioned tactic (51%). And affiliate programs come in third (41%). Email is the most frequently mentioned successful overall marketing tactic (89%).

This is not terribly different from what we find successful in the non-retail world. While search engine marketing alone is rarely – if ever – the only tactic needed to acquire a new customer, it is by far the most effective and efficient way to start the process. Unless of course no one is looking for your product or solution, which is a different challenge altogether.

Business-to-business company owners and marketers often come to us torn between conventional lead generation programs – direct mail, email, or telemarketing – and online search or advertising programs. Our advice is nearly always the same: 

Start with search.

The reason is really simple. When people are actively searching for a product or solution like yours, you are relevant. You do not have to fight a bunch of noise for their attention. They are looking for you. Your only competition is the other marketers taking advantage of the search situation.

There is also a simple reason online retailers don’t find email marketing to be among the most effective customer acquisition tactics. When email is used for initial engagement, it faces a big list of obstacles. At the top of that list are delivery issues and competition from everything else in the prospects inbox. In the business-to-business world, this can literally be hundreds of other email messages. 

This is not to say that email isn’t useful. In fact, it often plays a major role in successful non-retail marketing campaigns. Not only can we use it for customer retention – as the online retailers do – we also need it for lead development. 

In the non-retail world, most purchases are multi-stage. You are not, for example, going to be able to use a search marketing campaign alone to sell an expensive software application or consulting relationship. We know that a high percentage of prospects (75% to 80% or more) are not going to be ready to buy when they first make contact with your company. Email is a great way to build and maintain an on-going relationship and turns those semi-interested visitors into real leads.

 So, you need both – search marketing and email – for an effective new customer marketing program. You also need a great website and consistent conversion optimization, but those are subjects for a different article.

Technorati Tags: seo, search engine optimization, conversion, customer acquisition, lead generation

In my last article I talked about inbound links and how, rather than just putting links onto random websites, it would be better to create what I call a word-of-mouth link campaign. In a word-of-mouth link campaign, instead of just going for a large volume of links, the focus is on creating links that will drive real people to your site.

Let’s skip over Pay-Per-click campaigns and other forms of paid advertising and just talk about soliciting free links.  Links from unpaid independent people and web pages are worth more those you buy, and these can be generated by getting people interested in talking about your business and your site. 

In other words, you want to get a ‘buzz’ going about your website. And you want to get that buzz going in the right places. Just as a major studio that’s marketing an action movie isn’t going to advertise in a gardening magazine, you want to avoid wasting time on places that don’t attract your prospects.

So, the first step when starting a word-of-mouth link campaign is researching where your potential customers and clients hang out. These are websites, blogs, message boards and other locations where your potential customers go to look for information related to your subject.  

Start by looking at your bookmarked web pages and talking to co-workers and friends to find out where the latest and greatest information related to your site is located. Because this is your company and your own area of expertise it shouldn’t take too long to come up with an impressive list of different type of sites and groups. 

You can start your link building as soon as you find one one good spot. You don’t need to create a five page plan with every location detailed before you start.

Over the next few articles, I’m going to talk about the different types of locations where your target audience might be, and what to do with these locations once you find them. Briefly, here’s what I’ll cover:

• Message boards 
• Yahoo & Google Groups 
• Web directories 
• Social Networks & Blogs 
• Online Magazines and Articles 
• E-mail 

You are going to be sending a lot of emails out for this process, and you might want to create a new e-mail account just for your word-of-mouth link buildling efforts. Unfortunately, going through this process can generate a large amount spam in your inbox.  

Next week I’ll take a closer look at message boards.

Meanwhile, if this seems like a lot of work to you, you’re right! An effective link-building campaign is very time consuming but it’s critical both for generating direct traffic and for getting high rankings on the search engines. If you’d like some help, Tatum Marketing is a great place to turn. Check out our Search Engine Optimization programs.

Technorati Tags: seo, search engine optimization, inbound links, link building campaign, traffic generation

If you’ve been reading this blog long enough, you probably know that Flash is not my favorite homepage element. There’s plenty of evidence to show that it’s a bad idea for several reasons.

• Most website visitors don’t read Flash messages.
• The motion distracts visitors from other – more important – elements on your page.
• Business-to-business website users tell researchers they hate it.

But does it drive visitors away from your site? Maybe not.

We’re currently running an experiment with a technical software client. The company has a not-awful bounce rate of 40%, and we’re working to improve it further. Their homepage Flash image is one of the best I’ve seen. It actually shows what the product does – as opposed to most homepage flash sequences that just send pictures and words zooming across the page.

Still, Flash is annoying, right?

We decided to run an experiment to find out how much the bounce rate would improve if we eliminated the flash. The client actually came up with 4 versions to test against the original.

1. No animation at all.
2. Animation cycles once and then stops.
3. Animation pauses 30 seconds between cycles.
4. Animation cycles faster.

While the results are not yet conclusive, we’re seeing an interesting trend. Surprisingly (to me), the animation with the faster cycle appears to be winning. We’ve seen a reduction in bounce rate as high as 15% in this mode. The one with no animation is showing very little improvement – less than 1%.

Can we conclude from this experiment that Flash is actually a good thing? No. It appears to be working for this client, but it may not work for you. Even with this client, more testing is required before we could say that the Flash is good.

The point is it’s time to stop assuming we know what works and what hurts. It’s time to test our assumptions and let prospects tell us what they like and don’t like. Such testing is so easy to do these days even the smallest of marketers can test.

And I just might have to rethink my position on Flash. At least maybe I’ll stop automatically hating it.

I’ll let you know later which version ultimately wins in this experiment.

Technorati Tags: Flash, optimization, testing, measurement, results

Continuing with the blog entry I started on April 21st, here are  3 more “How to Invoke Response” tips.

How to Invoke Response Tip #4: Include a P.S.
Believe it or not, studies have shown that the P.S. portion of a message is the most read and recalled.

I understand this can be an especially hard concept to grasp, but here’s a case where I suggest you abandon what you “think you know,” relying instead on the marketing experts who have proven out this theory time and again.

To maximize response, use the P.S. in your promotional copy to reiterate the primary action you want the reader to take.

How to Invoke Response Tip #5: One call to action, please.
We all like options because it allows us to pick what’s “just right” for our situation, but sometimes when we give the reader too many choices, they don’t know which way to turn.
 
When we try to promote too many items within one single message, each item essentially competes for mindshare with the audience. As they dive deeper into their choices, they tend to forget earlier options.

Of course that’s not to say you should never promote more than one item in a message, but in these cases, make sure the list of items share a common thread, e.g. a holiday theme, special discounts for sales/marketing CDs, membership drive, etc.

A second, less obvious problem, can occur even when you’re promoting a single item. In this particular case, we give the reader too many choices (e.g. download this brochure, view this video, try our ROI calculator) that we distract the reader from the real action we want them to take.

Before creating promotional material, ask yourself, ‘What single goal do I want the reader to take?’ If the goal is to get them to “buy now,” everything in your promotional message should drive the reader to that one specific action.

How to Invoke Response Tip #6: Eliminate distractions.
This advice is a slight twist to tip #5.

Let’s say, for example, you’re tasked with promoting a webinar with a featured guest presenter. Your ultimate goal is to get the person to sign up for your event, but in order to do so, you need to sell the reader on the worth of this speaker. Redirecting readers to the presenter’s website might be easy, but what you’re doing is leading people away from your message.

Not the best idea. I prefer to use the copy within my own promotional message to sell the value of the speaker, highlighting what makes this person “the one expert” readers should listen to, and backing up my claims with a list of prior clients and/or a few testimonials. Sometimes I’ll link to a website page which lists testimonials, but more often than not I prefer to embed the testimonials in my own copy.

Sue Anderson
Marketing Lure, Inc.

We’ve all followed links from one website to another, but did you know these links are an important part of search engine rankings?

Over the past couple of years, links – especially inbound links pointing toward your website from other sites, have come to be a sign of relevance and authority.  The more people who point others to your website the higher value that Google places on your pages and the higher your site will score on a search results page.

Some people take this knowledge and start putting up links everywhere they can, thinking that any link is a good link. Some less reputable SEO consultants create websites with no content except a massive list of links, so the page resembles a spreadsheet.  This is how some consultants can honestly claim that they will place a website link on hundreds of pages. They are just tossing pages and links around the internet with no rhyme or reason.  So yes they will do what they say, but it won’t get the benefits you expect from your investment.

Google and other search engines really do pay attention to the sources of your inbound links. It looks at the linking pages to see if those cover similar information.  Links coming in from websites within the same framework are weighted more heavily than websites that have nothing in common with your site.

For example, if you sell shoes it will do you more good to have a link coming in from “Shoe fans” than from “Hat fans”.  This is not to say that you should tell “Hat fans” that you don’t want their link.  If it’s a link from a legitimate page it’s still good.  The only links you don’t want are the ones from places that will charge you to sit on their database.

So since links are important what should you do to get good links — and get a better ranking at Google?

What I suggest may sound a bit radical and not in line with what other SEO consultants have written about. but I say forget about Google! I say that when you are looking to build up your inbound links start by thinking about how to connect with your customers instead.

Question: “What is the most powerful form of advertising?”

Answer: “Word of mouth!”

Think of links as the ‘word of mouth’ of the web.  Every time someone links to your website, it’s the same as praising you to a friend.   In a way, a page link can be just as good as or even better than a word of mouth comment since a link can stick around for years.

The key to creating a successful linking strategy in this word-of-mouth method is to focus on getting as many links in front of real customers as possible. This is the whole point behind a successful pay-per-click campaign. With pay-per-click it’s easier – and faster – to get your links in the right place, but the downside is that those link ads only last as long as you are willing to spend the money.  Pay-per-click links can be very effective in a short term but word-of-mouth links last for years.

Taking the time to find people, groups and companies who will link to your site (and use your services) is a long term solution for your business.  Most people want to think of SEO as a problem to be solved once, rather than what it is: a process that needs to be done on a regular basis.

Think about this, what would you prefer? Driving more real people to your website or having a hundred links which may or may not raise your Google ranking?  The normal response to this question is both, but given a choice most people would always prefer customers.

How to build this word of mouth campaign?  That answer will be in the next article.

Technorati Tags: seo, ppc, pay per click, link building, strategies, word of mouth

Last month one of our clients, Adam Washington (not his real name), achieved a 24% increase in website visitors signing up for a demo of his software. He did it basically overnight and without spending an extra dollar to drive traffic to his site.

How did he do it? He simplified the request form.

Adam got rid of a bunch of questions that weren’t necessary and asked only for information he really needed: the visitor’s name and email address. (Interestingly, through testing we found that adding a field for the visitor’s country increased response.)

The original form looking like this:

The new form looks like this:

Instead of spending a ton of money to drive more people to his website, Adam focused on the visitors who were already coming there. As a result of the form change, he was able to get many more of his website visitors to take the action he wants – and needs – them to take: download his product demo. This ultimately resulted in more sales opportunities for the sales team at a much lower cost.

Think about that for a minute.

Imagine this is your company. Let’s say 20% of the people who fill out the demo form eventually end up buying your product and an average of 80 people download the demo each month. Let’s also say that each purchase is worth $5000. Your product revenue is currently $1,200,000 annually.

By getting 24% more people to fill out the demo form as Adam did, you would add another 20 people to the pipeline each month and – if everything else remains the same – that adds 4 additional customers (@ $5000 each) every month. At the end of the year, revenue has increased by $240,000 and it cost you nothing!

This is why we advise so many of our clients to focus on optimizing conversion rates and not just on generating more leads. There are an almost unlimited number of ways to get more prospects moving through your pipeline – and all of them are less expensive than generating the prospects in the first place.

In the spirit of full disclosure, let’s go back to Adam’s form for a minute. You may have noticed that the phone number is missing from the new form, and if you try to pass this directly to a sales team for follow-up you’re likely to get some very loud pushback. In fact, one of our next tests with Adam will be to add the phone number back into this form and see what happens to the signup rate. There are also other ways to get the phone number for the sales team, but that’s not the point of this article.

The point of this article is to show how a few minor changes within the marketing process can have a dramatic effect on the number of prospects who make it through this conversion point in your marketing process and ultimately on your revenue.

Is Adam’s success with the demo form experiment a fluke? It could be – time will tell whether or not the modified form maintains its high performance level. But based on our experience with other clients like Adam, it will almost certainly continue to provide Adam’s company with increased prospects week after week after week.

Technorati Tags: conversion, optimization, prospects, leads, website, revenue