Famous 20^th Century industrialist John Wanamaker made legendary his quote, “I know that at least half of my advertising dollars are wasted, I just don’t know which half.”

Image by Moma, Sao Paulo, Brazil

This was true of most advertising all the way up until digital technology and the Internet started to dominate how we broadcast marketing messages. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is still a relatively new way to advertise although it’s been around since Google and other search engines have commercially operated (no pun intended).

Buying space in print and time on broadcast networks is largely a “spray and pray” method whereby you can begin to narrow down channels that your target audience may be more likely to see/hear your ad. But if you’re like most businesses, only a small fraction of the audience you pay for will have any interest in your offer. Even if your message is in front of an interested prospect, you rely on his or her whims at that moment. An unknown distraction can divert the attention of someone intending to respond to your ad and, poof! The prospect forgets all about you.

Now there’s a way to assure that every dollar you spend buying advertising will be the direct result of physically engaging a person with your message online based on keywords, phrases and questions they are typing into search fields. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) has given you control over the type of online shoppers you would attract and exactly how much you will spend to reach and engage each single prospect or customer. Analytics programs such as Google Analytics will track and measure the direct results (clicks and website interaction) of your advertising campaign in real time. John Wanamaker would be impressed! He might say, “Now I know exactly what my advertising dollars are doing. I just wish online shoppers weren’t so fickle!”

Google is the dominant search marketing giant and wants its customers to get results. To that end they’ve put together a nice best practices guide which this article will encapsulate.

We’re curating the basics of SEM success directly from Google:

1. Keywords – Effective keyword management helps you reach the right customers and grow your business. Your keywords should reflect all of the different types of user queries that could help someone find you when they’re looking for something you offer. Keyword research and analysis is a fundamental step you must take initially to make sure you reach your target audience searching online for your products & services.

• Negative Keywords – Words or phrases that allow you to filter out who your ads will be served to in the search results page. Upon deciding that a term is irrelevant to your campaign, you can add that term as a negative keyword. Whenever someone searches on Google with that term included, depending on match types, Google will refrain from showing your ad and you won’t waste money paying for an irrelevant click. To help you determine negative keywords for your campaign, here’s a free negative keyword tool.

2. Your Ads – One of the most important things to get right in your search ad is “the Creative” – the key message you put into it. Creative relevance drives more qualified clicks. Make your ad relevant and resonant to pull qualified click through engagement.

3. Your Advertising Budget – Google AdWords lets you set daily budgets for your campaigns with the flexibility to change them at any time. A key benefit of developing and fine tuning an SEM campaign is your ability to measure, adjust and actually begin to control your response rates within a spending limit. This helps you manage your growth and marketing administration costs.

4. Reporting & Analytics – AdWords and Google Analytics together offer insights into the performance of your campaigns and those insights help you become a better marketer. By carefully measuring, analyzing and making adjustments to your keywords and messaging, you will continually improve the ROI performance of your SEM campaign.

There is more science to the practice of Search Engine Marketing than this overview reveals. Within each of the four major components of SEM listed above, there are entire sets of best practices with various tactical options that will help you customize your campaign to generate the best results. For more in depth education, go to PPC University.

If you would like a free evaluation and consultation regarding an SEM program for your business, feel free to contact us at 603-345-7223.

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Seth Godin is one of the most brilliant and prolific business thinkers of our time. He understands human motivation and behavior. That’s why I go to him for ideas. You might say I’m in his “tribe.” I choose to follow him because his ideas are valuable to me. And I’m a customer, having purchased one of his books and patronized his advertisers. I’m sure that Seth would be glad to know that I’m a follower and consumer.

On the other hand, let’s take the CEO of say, Proctor & Gamble. Right now I have no idea who that is, although I can find out in a snap. He or she might care about me as a consumer though, and really want my business for multiple products. Should I be loyal to their brands, I would spend hundreds of thousands, potentially a million on P&G products throughout the course of my lifetime. Multiply me and the numbers are staggering. I know I’ve used their products but I’m indifferent to them and most of their competitors’ as well. I’m bombarded with messages from them delivered through mass media every day and it hasn’t made a bit of difference in how I feel about their brands.

Now, I’m sure Mr. Alan G. Lafley (I just went to Google because I wanted his name.) would be concerned to know that most consumers feel as I do about P&G brands – indifferent to them vs the competition (product parity and no attractive differentiation). P&G broadcasts its messages at me and Seth Godin simply gives away his specialized “product” on the Internet, and somehow I find it because I seek it. He knows what I’m looking for because he specializes in understanding my professional needs. When I need something of his that he isn’t offering free, I go to Amazon and buy his book to be edified. In essence, I’m a micro market to Mr. Godin.

Whatever approach you use to push your message (create and buy advertising) in mass media to reach a mass audience, use the opposite approach on the Internet. Seth Godin gets the fundamental difference between Internet marketing and everything else (mass media; TV, radio and print advertising). Let me sum it up succinctly:

Web = “I seek and want your offering.” All other = “What do you want out of me?”

Seth himself points out, “When someone wants to know how big you can make your audience, your market share, your volume, it might be worth pointing out that it’s better to be important, to be in sync, to be the one that’s hard to be replaced. And the only way to be important is to be relevant, focused and specific.”

Mass media relevance is fading because the messages are mostly phony and manipulative. Seth goes on, “Mass marketers don’t like this and they often don’t even see it. They’re struggling to turn Snapchat and Twitter and other sites into substitutes for TV, but it’s not working, because it’s an astonishing waste of attention [for the consumer].”

Broadcast media exists mostly to enable mass marketers to do their job. Broadcast technology (TV) was essentially invented for that purpose, but the Internet was not invented to enable big brands to reach their audiences. It was first developed for the purpose of sharing information quickly among scientists – highly specialized knowledge.

On the Internet, whether it’s your website & SEO strategy, blog or social media channels, you need to think micro. Appeal genuinely to individuals who would benefit from the use your product or service and develop relationships with each one that connects with you. Since you read this far, we probably have a relationship and I want to thank you wholeheartedly for it! <3

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Twitter is the place where industry thought leaders, celebrities and other news makers break their ideas on the public scene first. It’s the place to chronicle short bursts of thought, leading followers and the online public to a new video, website, landing page, blog post, news article or single idea.

Twitter has absolutely nothing to do with telling a group of followers what you happen to be doing, which is what most people thought it was at first. Sure you can try and use it for that but few will notice or care about your tweets. Twitter is really the driver of breaking news around the world as well as an amazing connector of people with the same or similar interests.

Of course, people tweet whatever they want and Twitter can be a great medium to share inspirational quotes and ideas whenever they occur. I very often use it for that purpose myself. I enjoy scrolling through my Twitter feed now and then when I’m in need of some ideas. There is never a shortage of them springing from the well of minds out there in the cyber world.

The hashtag (#keyword) makes Twitter the most powerful search engine for real-time conversations. When you include a hashtag in your tweet, it will automatically and instantaneously be indexed and bundled into a group of individual tweets using the same hashtag – every single one in the world. Hashtags are created for every big event going on – business, social and political.

Enter the hashtag in the search bar and you will see every single tweet using it in chronological order. Do you see the usefulness of this in connecting like minded people worldwide at any given time, including potential customers?

See the twitter feed here? It’s a snapshot of what’s being tweeted around the world about the recent Consumer Electronics Show #CES2014. Notice the big tech brands making hay over it.

Talking Twitter 101 can be a reminder to us marketers about how important this powerful social and business conversation engine can be for getting our messages noticed on a worldwide scale. The key to using it successfully, like anything else, is how relevant and interesting you can be to your audience.

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Marketing Automation is for Small and Medium Businesses!

By Casey Cheshire

My first experience with Marketing Automation came when I assumed responsibility for the Marketing program at a small consulting and training company. There were several major problems to address.

To start, there were no inbound marketing initiatives to drive people to the website. Once there, a Newsletter Signup and Contact Us page were the only ways in which prospect information was captured. Those two types of gateways are extremes – people were either vaguely interested in keeping in the loop or being contacted right away. The majority of the visitors, who fell in between those two types, weren’t being converted.

Further into the Sales & Marketing process, four Account Executives had almost entirely shifted to prospecting work instead of making sales as the quality of daily incoming leads was always in question. No wonder they were frustrated! The bulk of these “leads” were simply people subscribing to a newsletter and not yet ready to buy.

Does this sound bleak (and familiar)? The good news is that we solved all these issues in about three months with Marketing Automation. Several new product solutions in this space had recently appeared on the scene and made the automation tools, once reserved for stock ticker brands, available for SMBs (small to medium sized businesses).

There are several areas where Marketing Automation can provide 10 times the value of its cost to implement (roughly $1,000/month in my case).

Capture – After taking the time to target search phrases on Google, demographics on LinkedIn, and a multitude of other channels, it’s very important to have optimized landing pages to capture those leads. In many cases, you pay for the visitor’s click regardless of them actually completing a form.

Marketing Automation had me hooked at “forms creation.” Some key features include ease of creation with & without HTML, customized fields, and lots of different automatic options after completion. But the most fantastic of all is progressive profiling; the ability to have smart forms that can pre-populate or remove a field if the answer is already known. Taking it a step further, you can ask additional questions that will help your lead make an informed decision.

Conversion (and reconversion) rates skyrocket with smart forms and the ability to progressively profile your leads moves them through the marketing funnel at a much faster rate.

Nurture – Gone are the days of monthly newsletters for prospects. In addition to taking gobs of time to produce frequently, they leave you in a news reporter challenge: “What should we write about now?” Chances are you’ve probably already addressed key questions your future customers were asking in articles from last year’s October issue. Repurpose your content!

With Marketing Automation, I transformed my news desk back into a marketing desk with a series of nurture email campaigns. Often called “drip nurtures,” these campaigns were specific to the industry of my customers and delivered critical content to prospects on a biweekly basis. From engaging demo videos to helpful case studies, prospects were offered a strategic series of our best content designed to aid them and also aid our sales process! Even better, the emails were all personalized in name, email, and signature from the individually assigned Account Executive.

Score – Lead scoring is a hot topic because there are now low cost options available to B2B businesses from large to small. The concept is relatively straightforward: Give your Sales Team the most qualified and active leads possible! Lead scoring is the mechanism to reward demographics & behavior with points or letter grades which can then be classified and prioritized.

Contrary to popular belief, lead scoring models don’t need to be complex. If you build in too many options at the start, you may find that too many or too few prospects make it through. It’s best to start with a few key engagement areas- like form completions and adjust over time. It’s also not a bad idea to separate a lead’s demographic grade (Decision Maker in the Right Industry) from their individual activity score (Visited the entire site over a period of 3 days.). Doing this allows you to focus on the best leads and avoid spending your sales calls on students doing research.

In conclusion, Marketing Automation is no longer the future, it’s “the now.” Simple emailing platforms will be replaced over the next several years by more the complete Marketing Automation packages. Businesses that adopt this new technology will see faster growth from a multitude of automated, personalized, customer touches. These automations will enable Marketing to get back to marketing and Sales to close more deals.

There are several major players in the space and a few to avoid. Which solution is right for you? It’s a question I answer often and would be happy to assist readers of the Chuck Sink Link in answering at no charge.

Casey Cheshire is an online marketing consultant and marketing manager for a global software form. Feel free to contact Casey at: caseychesh@gmail.com  On the web: www.caseycheshire.com

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The website user experience (UX) your organization purveys will either drain you or sustain you in business. Plenty of money can be spent serving up completely different experiences to your audience depending on whom you choose to design your online marketing programs. The difference to your website visitors can be dramatic! One design may have their interest soaring while the other, they find, is utterly boring. Okay…

Bouncing visitors can be very disappointing and even costly, especially if your firm spends money on Pay-Per-Click advertising. You allocate a budget for search engine marketing and get great click through rates to a dull static website with no real value or entertainment to draw visitors in to interact and take action. Or maybe the information layout is difficult to navigate and confusing so they leave the site after 2 or 3 seconds. Then you wonder why your website doesn’t seem to be doing anything for you. (Hint: It must do something for them first!)

Your website is your most valuable communication asset.

Work with a web partner that demonstrates a knowledge of user experience and information design as well as traffic generation. The author’s opinion is the horse has to come before the cart.

You have the choice to serve your online visitors or be indifferent to their experiences. Make certain your site’s UX is worthy of their time. Then go ahead and invest appropriately in traffic generating activities.

So how is your website performing these days? When people land there are they apt to explore and ask for more?

The post SIMPLE Website Best Practices (Please read!) appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

Engaging customers and potential customers in social media is very tricky and generally requires giving something. Let’s keep this concept blunt and simple. Nobody cares about your company or the success of your business. They have neither obligation nor desire to share your company message and be your loyal brand steward unless they will benefit from doing so. When visiting your business pages, people are not thinking: How can I help this guy get rich? Instead they’re thinking: What will I get out of this? So before posting, sharing content or promoting your page, always ask yourself: What’s in it for them?

People are on Social Media mostly for 4 reasons – the 4 E’s of social media engagement: Ego, Entertainment, Education and Enrichment. Companies have to feed those needs and desires or they will be ignored in this space. When interacting with Likes (Friends), Connections, Followers, Circles, Fans, etc. you’re really networking with them online and you need to bring something to the table or you’ll be thought of as just another self promoter or corporate advertiser. So what are you willing to give your potential brand advocates that they will appreciate and want to share with their friends? Contests and giveaways work well for consumer and retail businesses.

Exhibit A: One of our clients, a furniture store, took 2 years to get 200 Facebook followers. Most of their posts consisted of advertising messages and nobody interacted with the page. Then we worked with them to design a custom landing page based on a substantial giveaway contest – a recliner chair was given away each week for one month to a randomly picked Facebook friend  just for Liking their page. In 3 weeks they shot up to over 500 Likes. Page interactions increased 1700 percent! This promotion combined Enrichment with Ego. The store publicly congratulated winners and thanked new Likes by name. Viral reach exploded and customers on the showroom floor are now talking about how they Liked the business on Facebook and told their friends. The page comments from real customers are overwhelmingly positive. That’s word-of-mouth on steroids!

Social media is about online networking more than anything else. The same principles apply as when meeting people face to face. You need to share ideas, develop relationships and nurture friendships. The best B2C (business-to-consumer) brands on Facebook interact with consumers in a way that feels one-on-one to them. Coke, Starbucks, Oreo, Redbull, Converse, Skittles and Playstation are among the most Liked brands on Facebook. Check out their pages and see for yourself how well they engage consumers.

When dealing with B2B (business-to-business) social media, LinkedIn is a great forum to share ideas, best practices and connect with like minded businesspeople. Twitter is a world of real time discussions in countless categories. It’s a wellspring of ideas and fresh information. It’s also an amazing search engine for online conversations surrounding narrow and broad topics alike. Facebook is a great connector of people to share one-on-one or group dialog. Its potential reach is enormous!

Google+, YouTube, Foursquare, StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, biznik, blogs… There are so many platforms today. They all keep us linked and grow our networks, leading ultimately to profitable relationships so long as we stick with the 4 As & Ps of social media; You need to be:

Active; Participate.

Attractive; Position value.

Alert; Pay attention. 

Accessible; Permit dialog.

Be social when attempting to grow your businesses using social media. Your friends and followers are just like you and me. Remember those 4 Es. We all have Egos and love to be recognized. Everyone enjoys Entertainment. Our inquisitive minds seek Education. For ourselves and our families we want Enrichment. How will your business feed those desires online using the social media platforms freely available to you?

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