Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, sometimes requires human interaction to make sure you're company is growing higher in rank on the search engines. In SEO, outreach is very important when you are earning links. There are several tips that will help you interact better with your particular prospect. It is also important that you keep these prospects as contacts for the future. In order to do this, you must build a relationship with them and make an impression. That way they know who you are and that your intentions are good. Below, I have given several tips on how to build long lasting relationships when you are outreaching for marketing purposes.
Remind them you are a real person
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Most people you are contacting, probably get 75-100 emails every couple of days, so you want to send them an email that shows you are a real person and not an automated system. Some ways you can achieve this are to make it personal and use their name or company in the subject and greeting. You can also state their company name in the body of the letter. Also, you want to be yourself because if they see the true you, they will know it is not an automated message.
Reciprocate
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A great way to hook your prospect is to offer then some sort of reciprocation. In SEO, there are several ways that you can reciprocate with other companies. You can contact schools and offer them discounts to their employees or students. This will then allow them to place your link on a discounts page. Also, if you company has a scholarship, you can offer the schools a scholarship for their students and in return they will link to your website. We sometimes offer a link to one of our clients websites if they add ours to their website. This is a little trickier than it sounds. You have to make a very compelling argument for why they should exchange links with your company.
Be Different
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As I said before, the people you are contacting probably get many emails in a day. You want to stick out. The best way you do this is to make the subject of your email stick out among others. You do not want it to seem like spam or they will treat it as such and not open your email. Make sure you put thought into your subject line. Some great ways for your subject line are to make sure it is informative and very persuasive, but not so persuasive that it seems like a sales pitch.
Relate to the prospect
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Once you have captured your audience, make sure you relate to them in some way or another, so they can see that you are not just doing this because you are a marketer. They want to see that you have some sort of passion in the subject so they can relate. They will be more willing to help you out this way. One way to do this is to tell them a short story about yourself and why you are interested in working with that particular person or company. Make sure you do your homework, so you can seem educated in their field and their company.
Be an expert
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Sometimes it helps to have an expert on your side. For example, when you are outreaching to law companies for a law client you are working for, it helps to have that authority and experience with another law firm. When you associate yourself with an expert, you become an expert. You want to provide trustfulness and you can do this by associated yourself with a trustful source.Make sure you mention the source in your email. For example, make sure they know that you are working for a lawyer. Giving their link might be a good way to show their authority and connection to you.
Always Follow up
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The most important part to outreach is to always follow up. Not only should you be follow up after you have contacted, but you should also make sure that they know want to start a relationship with them. You can do this by following up with them ever month or so and asking if they are having a good month, just to let them know you are there for them and that you have not forgotten your relationship. This shows the company that you are caring for them even when you are not marketing to them.
If you pay attention to these several tips, you will most likely have great success and make a lot of important and new relationships along the way. I personally, have built a lot of new relationships using these techniques during my time at Ethical SEO Consulting. I have always been myself and I believe they have respected me for taking the time to write them an email rather than automating everything.
This Post is By Nicole Rende at Ethical SEO Consulting
Greg Sherwood is CEO of DBC Digital, a marketing agency based in Denver, Colorado. With over 30 years of marketing experience with traditional and inbound (internet) marketing, Greg helps mid-sized businesses get a better return on their marketing dollars.
You can reach Greg at (303) 357-5757 or at dbc@dbcdigital.com
The Technorati 2013 Digital Influence Report is out; and among its most insightful tidbits of data is that blogs are driving more purchases than social media. Blogs rank third when it comes to what consumers think are influential resources, right after retail sites and brand sites (ranked 1st).
So what does this mean for your Internet marketing strategy? Here are three things to focus on:
1. Use Blogs More
This is the most glaringly obvious step to take after findings like that. But your specific use of your blog will dictate how effective it can be in driving purchases. Three typical focus areas to, well, focus on include:
- Targeting - Are you targeting specific segments of your market audience or are you always publishing posts for a wider audience? Remember: the more specific your target market, the less your audience will be, but the greater your chances of conversion will become. Your blog posts should be a mix of content that targets different sizes and segments of your audience.
- Engagement - Are your blog posts engaging enough that readers don't just bounce back into search results or close their browser tabs after reading? Check your Internet marketing analytics to see your bounce rates, exit pages, and time spent metrics. Take a gander at your comments. Count the likes, shares, tweets, +1's or whatever social engagement buttons you might have added in your blog.
- Calls to action - Just because your blog is getting a lot of organic traffic doesn't mean you can sleep on the job when it comes to calls to action. The illusion of "more traffic, more conversion" might cause you to become lax in your CTAs. Always tweak your CTAs to reflect value, show relevance, and create urgency.
2. Don't "Force it" on Social Media
Another obvious takeaway from Technorati's finding is that since blogs are shown to beat social media when it comes to driving purchases, then reduce your attempts at pushing for sales in social media because they will ultimately become wasted efforts. Focus instead on the other, equally important uses of social media such as:
- Word-of-mouth marketing - Identify the influencers in your social audience and take advantage of their constant interaction with your brand. Publish content that is sure to be engaging to the specific crowd you know will be hanging around specific social networks and platforms. Internet marketing also encompasses branding, and the good image positive word of mouth can lend to your social efforts can go along way, even if you can't count it in cold hard cash.
- Customer service and client relations - Social media websites are ideal platforms for open communications between businesses and their social audience. Extend your customer service or client relations to your social efforts and you can create more social buzz and establish a positive image for your brand online. Things that happen in social media easily go viral: show the World Wide Web how much of a "good guy" your brand is.
3. Use Blogs and Social Media in Tandem
Don't focus too much on blogs and abandon social media in light of these findings - you can use these platforms in tandem to reach the specific goal of increased sales:
- Use social chatter to drive referral traffic to your blog and then call your blog readers to purchase actions.
- Actively promote your social media pages through your blog posts to initiate a cycle that increases your social following and improves your referral traffic which can then be lured into your buying cycle. make sure you offer incentives that only social followers can avail of.
- Blog about a social media event and then lead attendees to product or service or landing pages.
These are just a few ideas for your Internet marketing strategy. With a bit of imagination and creativity guided by concrete and reliable data, you can make your own path straight towards increased purchases.
Greg Sherwood is CEO of DBC Digital, a marketing agency based in Denver, Colorado. With over 30 years of marketing experience with traditional and inbound (internet) marketing, Greg helps mid-sized businesses get a better return on their marketing dollars.
You can reach Greg at (303) 357-5757 or at dbc@dbcdigital.com
The transition from outbound marketing to inbound marketing has been propelled by search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo as well as the ever growing social media channels to gain information like Facebook, Google+ and Twitter. As these applications and informational mediums get more and more convenient with technology, the effectiveness of inbound marketing continues to grow. Below are some of the facts on the growing effectiveness of inbound marketing.
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Greg Sherwood is CEO of DBC Digital, a marketing agency based in Denver, Colorado. With over 30 years of marketing experience with traditional and inbound (internet) marketing, Greg helps mid-sized businesses get a better return on their marketing dollars.
You can reach Greg at (303) 357-5757 or at dbc@dbcdigital.com
Many enterprise-level companies enter a phase of using outsourced marketing agency partners before they build everything in-house. In our case we are often called upon to act as an outsourced marketing department for our clients while they grow.
In fact, most companies that grow large enough to support in-house marketing departments still continue to outsource many of their marketing efforts, especially their on-line marketing, because it is often more affordable, more effective, and they've found good outsource partners they can trust and rely on.
So the question arises: “Do you outsource everything?” “How about strategy?” Branding? Search Optimization? How about email? Social media? Mobile? Creative?
In fact, it is usually best to define what the scope of Internet marketing actually covers beofre trying to answer the question. Simply put, online (internet) marketing is the means by which you communicate your business’ and your products' value to your online consumers.
It is important to remember that Internet marketing is a wide field that encompasses search, social media, email, mobile, and even branding -- this means that, similar to traditional advertising, you need to work closely with your new agency partner to effectively coordinate and maximize your Internet marketing efforts.
The Vast Realm of Internet Marketing
A primary reason why companies outsource some or all of their marketing function is because of the sheer vastness of its multiple fields, all of which are equally challenging and essential. The horizontal and vertical knowledge demands are often best left to those agencies that focus on certain parts of the process. But it's a balancing act -- a subtle tug-of-war between client and agency, because the agencies know what they're doing, but it's your business.
You have to find the middle ground that successfully bolsters the growth of your business; avoiding the extremes of control and direction coming only from the agency or only from your company. Otherwise, you will limit the profitability of the partnership for both of you.
In our experience, there are great advantages to the organization when bringing in an outsourced agency, but there are three major challenges that larger companies should focus on if they are considering this solution. These include:
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1. Communication
Large businesses often struggle with ensuring that their internal communications efforts are efficient and effective due to the sheer size of their organization. This same challenge can be present in outsourcing, where communications accuracy or timeliness may suffer and projects may become delayed unless protocols are set up in advance.
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Your goal is to optimize and streamline your communications, and ensure that the lines of discussion between agency and client are unencumbered.
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2. Awareness and agreement
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Even without outsourced marketing partners, businesses often experience problems gaining agreement across all levels of the organization from management to the rank-and-file.
This can happen when department managers possess some valuable insight that their employees aren’t aware of because of company confidentiality issues or simply a lack of awareness on the manager’s part that the employees, in fact, don’t know what the manager knows.
The same issue can exist when agencies enter the picture -- they're not at the center of the company’s system, they're external to it. The solution is to implement a standardized method of ensuring awareness such as Salesforce® or Highrise® Project Management Systems where the agency is a part of the PM system.
3. Strategy and creative control
For the most part, this challenge stems from the fact that businesses need the expertise of agencies, but once they avail of it, they hesitate to embrace much of what their agency recommends either through fear of something new, or a fear of not achieving their goal.
This is a very good way to waste money invested in outsourcing.
The limitations of strategy and creative control are somewhere in the middle: you need to know your business best and have an idea of what direction you want to take it, and you then need to trust that the marketing expertise of outsourced agencies will help you get there.
Remember, it's your business, your outsource partners merely help you develop the most efficient and effective ways for you to reach your audience through as many digital marketing channels as possible.
Greg Sherwood is CEO of DBC Digital, a marketing agency based in Denver, Colorado. With over 30 years of marketing experience with traditional and inbound (internet) marketing, Greg helps mid-sized businesses get a better return on their marketing dollars.
You can reach Greg at (303) 357-5757 or at dbc@dbcdigital.com
Often a bit overlooked by many developers and SEOs alike is microdata. This is a development in the past few years that helps to mark up HTML, and certain text, or objects, to make them easily identifiable. Many SEO's may have noticed the trend of the review-rich snippets about a year ago, having a display in the Google search results that gave you a star rating. There is much more to microdata than just doing a review markup anymore, though. It has really evolved into it's own language. As an SEO, I'm going to show you a few practical uses and implementations of microdata and how to make sure you're doing it correctly.
Schema.org Overview
Before diving headlong into microdata, let's quickly breakdown what it is. Schema is the most common language for microdata anymore, it can be a way for Google to easily identify events, organizations, people, businesses, products and their details, and reviews to name a few. They even get as specific as food recipes, music, or movie identification. If you have a business, event, place, product, or thing, you can likely mark it up with Schema. This is a language that Google can easily crawl and identify. In some cases, they even use it for rich snippets in a search result. For those who don't know, rich snippets are an addition to a normal search result. For example, this result has a recipe rich snippet, which displays information to help better identify what the page is about for the user.
For more information about Schema and the more specific markups, you can use check out their website under Organization of Schemas.
Microdata for a Local Business
The most common and simplest Schema mark up is for a local business. This can often help your local SEO rankings. For Google, it helps identify that address being associated with the business name. The code is done like so:
Copy and paste this where you want your address, and then fill in the fields of your business name, address, and phone number. You should use this code as a way to list your business's NAP (Name, Address, Phone number) as a structured citation. This will help your local SEO just be consistent with your Google Places' NAP.
**Remember this is HTML, and must be embedded in HTML mode. Otherwise, it will not be displayed properly. If you are using WordPress, be aware that going from your HTML editor to your visual editor will erase the code you have inserted.
Microdata for Events
If you are promoting an event, offering a class, hosting a dinner, or putting on any type of actual event, you will want to use microdata as a mark up. This will help to display your event(s) in your search result and their specific time and date. This can really help to increase your sign ups and the awareness of your event. To make this even easier, Google recently released the Google Webmaster Data Highlighter feature which is an excellent way to have a short cut to using microdata as they will structure the data for you. While crawling your website, it can actually identify your event data and if you use a consistent markup, with time it will automatically structure your data properly. This is an awesome feature, and, unfortunately, is only works for event structuring right now. I eagerly await other markup and ways to just highlight and structure your data.
If the highlighter isn't working for you, there is a great event schema generator that allows you to input your information, submit it, and it will give you the HTML you need for making your events structured. Again, if you are using WordPress, make sure that you update your page in the HTML editor.
Microdata for Products
Last, but certainly not least, on useful microdata (or structured markups) is products. For eCommerce websites, this can be hugely effective, and, unfortunately, there is no easy way to implement this. For that reason, many sites are not using these mark ups yet. The real benefit to using product Schema or microdata is that it can display in the search results more information about the product such as reviews and price. If you happen to be an eCommerce site owner, I wish I could give you a simple use this HTML answer. But with how many different platforms that exist, it really differs in the implementation. Instead, what I am going to do is give you the code and what data goes in each field.
This is fairly complex. So, I suggest that you consult a developer to help you implement this.
The benefits of product markup are great, and sometimes so can be the complexity of how to accomplish it. Above is just the example code, please make sure to work this around your product pages to format them and make them well styled as the user experience is most important.
Checking your Microdata
Using microdata can be some confusing business, and you might be wondering is there a way to check it and see if it is correct? The answer is yes, Google has a Structured Data Testing Tool in which you can input a live URL or HTML (if you are still in development) and see the structured data and even how your search result might appear.
If you have multiple pages to check I suggest looking at The Structured Data Testing Tool Bookmarklet by AJ Kohn. You can use the bookmark to easily check the URL you are on in the Google Structured Data testing Tool.
Speaking the Language of Google
These are just a few of the many markups that can be used from Schema.org. This is a language, and a very new code that Google is using to help searchers find what they are looking for, and for Googlebots to better identify the relevance in a structured form. The structured data will make your website, and important information, easier for Google to understand and read. This is something that is not soon to go away, and using it now will get you ahead of the curve.
This is a post by Frank Scharnell(@fscharnell) at Ethical SEO Consulting.
Greg Sherwood is CEO of DBC Digital, a marketing agency based in Denver, Colorado. With over 30 years of marketing experience with traditional and inbound (internet) marketing, Greg helps mid-sized businesses get a better return on their marketing dollars.
You can reach Greg at (303) 357-5757 or at dbc@dbcdigital.com
Is Your Message Connected?
Do you ever feel that your core marketing message is somehow disconnected from your Internet marketing activities? You know what your value proposition is, but when it comes to making it work for you across the web and in social media, something gets lost.
Here are some important action steps to take to ensure your unique value proposition gets through regardless of the platform you are engaging your clients with:
SEO
Bringing your value proposition into your Search Engine Optimization efforts means expanding your keyword targeting efforts to include more than just your primary and secondary keywords. Your goal is to turn your tagline or Unique Selling Proposition (USP) into context-building factors that increase the value of your search engine listings for your audience. For instance:
- Add a “value proposition page” the same way you would add a mission, vision, and "about us" page. Of course, you don’t need to call it a value proposition page, but including a page that is called something like: “What Makes Us Different” will ensure a clear distinction between you and your competitors.
- Use unique Meta descriptions in each of your webpages to ensure that they "talk" to your audience in search engines. Meta descriptions are those short sentences that are displayed when the search engines show your website listing. Make sure your descriptions describe why you are better.
- Use Title tags in each of your major web pages (like your home page), and don't just list your keywords but instead highlight your USP or tagline, like "Connecting Realtors, Agents, and Homebuyers, Hassle-free."
- Use “Alt” attributes in images, videos, and other webpage elements that search engine bots can't read, and also ensure that the file names you use for these images are descriptive and relevant.
- Use context building keywords as anchors, preferably Latent Semantic Indexing phrases. For real estate, try "home market," "real estate agents," and other similar phrases.
- Include branding messages in every webpage in a uniform fashion; but don't force them. You don’t want to sacrifice readability. Add a tagline such as "Connecting Realtors, Agents, and Homebuyers, Hassle-free" in the template of every webpage, always in the same position, just like a shopping cart button.
In addition, consider including press releases and other promotional blog posts in your blogging calendar with the sole purpose of reinforcing your brand and proving your value proposition.
Email Marketing
Email continues to play a central role in Internet marketing as a powerful lead nurturing tool that focuses on expertise and relevance to the subscriber. If you own a CPA firm for example, then:
- Show off your core competencies by sending emails that offer tips, tricks, or expert advice. Include personalized ROI calculators or in-depth accounting advice that the subscriber will undoubtedly be interested in.
- Send only relevant email by ensuring you have as much information about your subscriber as possible. You can include a small part of a lead capture form to ask what your reader is interested in or in what areas of accounting they need help with. Take their answers into consideration when planning your email campaigns. Also, triggered emails (drip campaigns) are an excellent way of staying in touch with your clients and prospects and we highly recommended them.
- Highlight both your expertise and relevance when sending emails when focused on calling your readers to take action, such as downloading material, visiting a blog post, or setting up a consultation schedule.
Social Media
If the key to email in Internet marketing is expertise and relevance, the focus when it comes to social media is brand “persona” and engagement. Let's say you own a law firm and you want to increase your presence in social media. You should:
- Effectively communicate your brand persona to your social crowd. Most law firms are seen as more formal institutions, so for the most part you should portray this approach in your brand persona: an advisor always available to give meaningful advice. Your brand persona ties in to your value proposition, so be clear about your brand and how you want to portray it.
- When possible, be open and ready to give advice in your area of expertise. Use your social platforms as open discussion areas and turn the conversations into calls-to-action for further counsel as a service. It's an excellent way to drive social engagement since your fans and followers will appreciate your expertise.
- Use social engagement as a means to avoid estranging your audience. Since you deal with legal conflicts and issues, many people will view your law firm as a third party trying to settle their legal issues for them. What you want them to see instead is an adviser and partner they can rely on, and social media can help you with that.
Greg Sherwood is CEO of DBC Digital, a marketing agency based in Denver, Colorado. With over 30 years of marketing experience with traditional and inbound (internet) marketing, Greg helps mid-sized businesses get a better return on their marketing dollars.
You can reach Greg at (303) 357-5757 or at dbc@dbcdigital.com
Content versus Context
Despite being one of the most established fields in Internet marketing, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has always been beholden to search engine algorithm updates and global search trends. Today, SEO is focused not only on keywords, but also -- and perhaps more importantly -- context.
This new stage of SEO, albeit more complex than simple keyword optimization, will benefit Marketing Professionals and professional services firms that have been trying to play the old SEO game of keyword targeting to little effect.
Keyword Optimization Gives Way to Context Optimization
The focus on keywords, keyword densities, and keyword proximity has always been overrated. While keyword research and targeting are important, targeting specific densities and measuring how far keywords are from each other only provides the illusion of mathematical precision while, in fact, only Google knows which numbers really matter.
Another inherent weakness of relying soley on keywords is that the system can easily be gamed and cheated, and content can be "optimized" for irrelevant keywords. Search engines like Google are constantly improving their systems to minimize this and thereby provide better results for their end-users.
By focusing on context, Search Engines are gradually succeeding in this battle. So the bottom line is that we all need to play by Google's rules or suffer penalties in ranking.
The Impact on Professional Services Firms
Context optimization is all about making sure the keywords that websites use in their SEO efforts are relevant to their topics, i.e. the keywords are used in their proper context. For example, keywords can have vastly different meanings in different contexts: e.g. "Kings" can be the plural form of the male monarch, chess pieces, a sports team, or even a restaurant.
As context slowly (but surely) becomes the new focus of SEO, it will inevitably become an essential part of Internet marketing. Luckily, you can easily tweak your Internet marketing efforts-- particularly search marketing -- to optimize your context through a number of approaches, including:
- Linking-out to both your internal and external webpages through "LSI" keywords. Using keyword-rich anchors for linking is still a best practice, but using “Latent Semantic Indexing” (LSI) keywords as anchors should be a priority as it helps search engines better understand the other words or phrases (that show context) in your content. For instance, targeting the keyword phrase "house for sale" can use LSI keywords like "home market," "Realtor," and "real estate" so long as they serve as valuable anchor text for your outbound links.
- Improve localized SEO by publishing content that is relevant to the area - For accounting, real estate, law, banks, or other similar professional services firms, local SEO is a critical facet of Internet marketing. Instead of just adding the locality into your targeted keyword phrase, you should publish content that actually talks about that area. Leverage local activities and news, and consider adding press releases that relate to the area into your regular blog posting schedule.
- Integrate your value proposition in your SEO efforts. In order to ensure you are maximizing your company’s brand positioning, you’ll want to integrate your tagline and other branding elements with your Internet marketing efforts. Make sure you are combining your SEO activities with your company’s branding so search engines can better support your brand and your value proposition to your audience.
- Note: A good way to test how effective your branding is with the search engines is to search the web for your business' specific tagline or USP (Unique Selling Proposition). Don't wrap the phrase in quotation marks when you are doing your search so you will see the broader results for your phrase. If your business shows up as a top result, you know your SEO and branding are well integrated.
- Position the experts in your professional services firm as regular content publishers and build their “author rank.” Google displays authors of web content pieces alongside their work in search results if the authors are using a Google+ account and tie their account to their articles via an HTML code snippet. The more articles published under an author's name that is spread in social media (Google+ and +1's) and in search, the more their author rank is improved. You can increase context optimization through author expertise and authority, which, like website PageRank, helps your business rank higher in different search types.
While many marketing professionals have been focused on SEO for quite some time, professional services firms have been only dabbling at SEO. Thanks to the updated techniques used by search engines to prioritize context optimization, these professionals can finally take advantage of the same benefits their B2B marketing counterparts have been benefitting from.
Greg Sherwood is CEO of DBC Digital, a marketing agency based in Denver, Colorado. With over 30 years of marketing experience with traditional and inbound (internet) marketing, Greg helps mid-sized businesses get a better return on their marketing dollars.
You can reach Greg at (303) 357-5757 or at dbc@dbcdigital.com
Blogging, as part of your inbound marketing plan, has the potential to increase web traffic and give potential buyers a way to see that you know what you’re talking about.
But, there’s blogging—and then there’s exceptional blogging. What’s the difference? Well, in our experience it’s the little things that add up to big success. Anyone can blog, but to really do it well you to know the importance of blogging to inbound marketing, and commit to doing the little things it takes to get good results.
Here are 7 tips for ensuring that your blog gets read and shared:
1. Craft attention-grabbing headlines
Why do some blogs get read and others don’t? The answer may be as simple as the title. Your headlines are the reader’s first clue about the content, and if yours don’t hook them with an intriguing question, actionable solution or otherwise clever intro, odds are good that people won’t read further.
2. Incorporate links
Internal and external links are "value-adds". Link to product pages on your site from your blog, and vice versa. Link to your blog from other webpages using keyword-rich anchor text. Links make navigation to product pages, resource articles and landing pages easier which, in turn, encourages readers to stay and buy.
3. Add visual content
According to SEOMoz, posts with videos embedded in them bring 3x more inbound links than those without. And, adding compelling images can actually drive traffic in two ways: 1.) searchers who find your images during search will be taken to your blog; 2.) your visual content can be shared with others via social media. Add keyword-rich "alt tags" (descriptions of the image you used. Remember that Search Engines can't "read" photos...yet.) to your pictures, and SEO meta descriptions to videos and infographics, and searchers in your niche have another avenue for finding you.
4. Solicit guest posts
Your customers, colleagues and other industry experts can offer valuable information, insight and perspective to your readers. Solicit them for guest posts to expand your blog’s reach. Not only will other authors bring a fresh voice to your company’s blog—they will bring with them their own audiences. And, if they are active on social media, they will most likely link to their post from these accounts. Free content and free exposure for you!
5. Include a Call-to-Action
The most effective blogs not only inform and engage—they also tell readers what to do next. It’s not being pushy. Actually, if people like your content, they will want you to give them some direction about what they can do with it. Did you post information about how to use social media to drive traffic to your site? Follow up with a call-to-action that asks readers to tweet about it, or click the link for a special offer.
6. Develop a comment strategy
Subscribe to blogs in your niche and comment on them regularly. Include links back to your blog or site. And, take the time to respond to all comments left on your blog. It’s a networking strategy that pays off in increased backlinks and new connections.
7. Share on social media
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Plus and Pinterest are ideal vehicles for distributing blog content. If you have any or all of these accounts for your business, set them up so that every time you publish new content, your social media accounts will automatically post them for readers to see them and click on them.
What are your best tips for inbound marketing pros? Which strategies for business blogging are working for you? Share them here!
Greg Sherwood is CEO of DBC Digital, a marketing agency based in Denver, Colorado. With over 30 years of marketing experience with traditional and inbound (internet) marketing, Greg helps mid-sized businesses get a better return on their marketing dollars.
You can reach Greg at (303) 357-5757 or at dbc@dbcdigital.com
Improving Inbound Marketing's Success
Photo credit: Industry Leaders magazine
In the age of smart phones, tablets, app-based operating systems and social media advertising, are you still using email for inbound marketing? If you are, then good for you.
Is eMail Outdated?
Email may seem to be a decade outdated, but just as Forrester Research Inc. predicted in their Interactive Marketing Forecast, 2011 to 2016, email continues to be a mainstay of successful integrated marketing efforts, alongside rising social media and mobile channels. However, there are changes to the email marketing landscape that may impact how you should be reaching out to your leads via email.
The Case for Email Marketing
If you have been hesitating before beginning an email campaign, it is important to understand that email isn't a completely outbound effort, given spam filters and laws against unsolicited email which is the biggest no-no of permission-based marketing. It also isn't entirely inbound either, as it relies on marketing tactics to encourage prospects to subscribe to an email newsletter or regular marketing updates.
In essence, this puts email marketing in the later part of the inbound marketing process - something deep, slightly more complex because of its nature as a medium of direct communication. In exchange, email is a very effective lead nurturing vehicle and platform for building brand authority and loyalty.
As a result, email marketing is the bridge that moves traffic and visitors from being merely "interested" to becoming actual leads - it can even close a sale. A tool so powerful should be used properly, so let's look at email marketing as it stands today.
Email Marketing Today
Web-based mail, popularized by AOL, MSN, and Yahoo a number of years ago, is still the dominant method of email use today. Mobile platforms of email are on the rise too, however, with a substantial 34% increase of use from 2010 to 2011 alone, according to research conducted by Return Path. For instance, viewing email on the iPad grew by a whopping 73% in the twelve month period.
This means that the platforms people use to open their emails are diversifying. From webmail to app-based mail tools and of course, software such as Outlook or Apple Mail, the two leading platforms in that category.
How Do We Adapt to the New Platforms?
So what are the implications of these changes for your email marketing efforts? Webmail still reigns, so any effective strategies you have in place for email marketing specifically for webmail should be maintained. If you have yet to develop a specific strategy for mobile, however, now is a good time to do so. At the very least, you should develop email campaigns tailored specifically for smaller screens and native smart phone and tablet email apps.
Let's also touch on improving the user experience. PulsePoint documents an excellent case study on how a better user experience with email helped New York Media decrease its unsubscribe rate by an impressive 76%. The trick? An email "preference center" solution.
The preference center allowed New York Media's email subscribers to tweak their preferences, update their data, and choose which topics to subscribe and unsubscribe to - a vast improvement from the one-click, no-questions-asked unsubscribe feature that New York Media's previous email effort offered. Again, it's all about user experience.
The Bottom Line
Email is indeed a powerful tool in your inbound marketing repertoire, and as such, it should be given due attention. We'll delve into more email marketing soon.
Greg Sherwood is CEO of DBC Digital, a marketing agency based in Denver, Colorado. With over 30 years of marketing experience with traditional and inbound (internet) marketing, Greg helps mid-sized businesses get a better return on their marketing dollars.
You can reach Greg at (303) 357-5757 or at dbc@dbcdigital.com
Before "engagement" became an overused buzzword in inbound marketing, its most typical usage involved a couple in love, a proposal, perhaps a dowry, and marriage.
But in a sense, its use is quite appropriate given how businesses of any scale aim to woo their target markets and, well, receive a dowry, and finally, remain in a long and committed relationship.
Why Does Engagement Matter?
As early as 2005, inbound marketing started to focus on experiential approaches, where customer experience and user engagement were central to the task of bringing leads deeper into a sales funnel. This is why "engagement" matters - it's the very heart of today's marketing efforts, driving people from being interested to becoming "in love" with a brand. Forrester defined customer engagement back in 2008 as having of four different levels :
1. Involvement
The first time their eyes meet, or the first time they bump into each other in utter serendipity - the first contact between brand and user, regardless of how (website or physical store visits, mass media impressions), triggers the first phase of engagement: involvement. This engagement level helps measure client activity after discovery, thus helping form the first few data sets for market behavior, research patterns, and overall interest through sources such as Web Analytics and store traffic reports.
2. Interaction
The first date; the first few things people do while within the touch points that may or may not have been their method of discovering the brand or business. Notice that the process can proceed at a breakneck pace: the first-time a brand and user meet may very well be the first date. If businesses have their way, it certainly will be. Any form of interaction (aside from the action that led to discovery) can probably be measured, and these measurements can show brands how credible, accessible, and relevant their solutions are to their date's needs.
3. Intimacy
Now the relationship passes the "It's Complicated" stage. This stage of inbound marketing engagement is markedly difficult to work with, as measurements of a user's aversion or affection for a brand is the subject of measurement. There is little to no definitive numerical measure businesses can attach to how much a person likes or dislikes them, but they can usually get a clue, at least, through monitoring social buzz, conversations, sentiments on blogs, comments, and forums, and more. Obviously, the level of intimacy between brand and user dictates how long before the brand receives its dowry.
4. Influence
Finally, the union between brand and client - at least in as much as the client is willing to advocate for the brand. This level of engagement endeavors to measure how likely someone will become a standard-bearer for the brand in terms of purchases or spreading good word-of-mouth marketing - hopefully both.
Reviews, satisfaction ratings, and total purchases tell the tale here. In an age of social media, how much influence any single client brings is a very important to factor in the grand inbound marketing world.
That's engagement for you. As complicated and ruthless as a real-life courtship can be. It helps businesses measure and monitor the complex middle of the sales funnel, where competitive analyses, peer reviews, user-generated content, and friend recommendations complicate things, and where leads become either buyers or contributors to a business' marketing efforts, or both.
Greg Sherwood is CEO of DBC Digital, a marketing agency based in Denver, Colorado. With over 30 years of marketing experience with traditional and inbound (internet) marketing, Greg helps mid-sized businesses get a better return on their marketing dollars.
You can reach Greg at (303) 357-5757 or at dbc@dbcdigital.com