Blog About Business Money Marketing

Running a successful business is not like a field of dreams; you can build it but they might not come. Marketing is all about leting people know about the product or service you offer, and persuading them to buy or use it. And for effective marketing you have to let people know about your product or service repeatedly.

To do this, you’re going to have to come up with both a marketing strategy and a marketing plan.

What’s the difference between a marketing strategy and a marketing plan?

The marketing strategy is shaped by your overall business goals. It includes a definition of your business, a description of your products or services, a profile of your target users or clients, and defines your company’s role in relationship to the competition. The marketing strategy is essentially a document that you use to judge the appropriateness and effectiveness of your specific marketing plans. The CCH Business Owner’s Guidebook has an excellent explanation and checklist that you can use to work through your marketing strategy.

To put it another way, your marketing strategy is a summary of your company’s products and position in relation to the competition; your sales and marketing plans are the specific actions you’re going to undertake to achieve the goals of your marketing strategy.

The marketing plan, then, can be thought of as the practical application of your marketing strategy. If you look at my article, “Writing The Marketing Plan”, you’ll see that the marketing plan includes details about your business’ unique selling proposition, pricing strategy, the sales and distribution plan and your plans for advertising and promotions.

So in effect, you can’t have a marketing plan without a marketing strategy. But a marketing plan without a marketing strategy is a waste of time. The marketing strategy provides the goals for your marketing plans. It tells you where you want to go from here. The marketing plan is the specific roadmap that’s going to get you there.

Just about every business with a web site does something to market and promote it. When those companies are asked about web analytics, it’s surprising how many look back with a blank stare.  This isn’t the case with mature online marketers but it does happen a lot with new business web sites and blogs.

For many companies that are new to web analytics the idea of digging in and finding useful information can be daunting.  It’s common marketing sense to measure what you’re marketing, but making sense of analytics data doesn’t always find time in the mix of duties a small business or new web site owner is responsible for.

The amount of information that analytics packages deliver isn’t always easy to sort through and turn into business decisions. So what should those that are new to web analytics do? Keep it simple and start off with the basics.

Each analytics package is different in features, price and learning curve. I’d suggest starting out with Google Analytics as it’s free, feature rich, and not too complicated to learn. Start off by looking at the items below.

• Unique Visitors – Unique visitors are are an important metric as it counts everyone as one for any given time period. This means that if you had 250 unique visitors, 250 different people visited your site at least once. If your unique visitor number is low, it could mean that your site is either having issues in search engines, or need more content.
• Traffic Sources – Are you getting traffic from Google, Yahoo, Twitter, or other sites? Referring information can help you see where your traffic is coming from which you can then use to make decisions on where and how to promote your future content.
• Referring Keywords – These are the phrases that someone put into a search engine and arrived at your site with. Ideally they’d be keyword phrases that related to your company. If not, then it may be an indication that you’re either not optimized, or optimized for the wrong phrases.
• Top Content – No matter what size your site is, knowing what pages get the most traffic can help you when building out new pages. Using the same format, or building out content on that topic, can help drive more traffic. These are also pages that call to action (CTA) buttons should be added if you want your visitors to do download a white paper or do something specific.
• Location – If your business wants a strong local presence, the location area in analytics can tell you country, state and city of where your visitors are coming from. Are your visitors actually local? That’d be a good thing to know.
• Campaign Tracking –  Track visitors from sources where you are marketing to a particular goal page or conversion.

As you feel more comfortable with Google Analytics you can then start to explore other actionable data including conversions, trends and features such as the most often used search terms on your internal search engine. Features like goals, top entrance/exit pages, bounce rates, and time on site are also a good metrics to use in understanding how visitors are interacting with your content. Visit the Google Analytics Help page to find out everything you need to know to make the most out of GA.

Web analytics can be overwhelming as there is a lot of information to be analyzed and then decisions that need to be made from that data. Instead of trying to jump in and consume it all, take it one step at a time.

Online ads are the Brave New World of marketing, an uncharted frontier of opportunity and danger. With online ads you can get an extremely high return-on-investment for just a little time and a little money. The danger of this, though, is if you don’t have the ability to craft an interesting offer–or find someone who can–be prepared for disappointment. Good writing is the key to results. It’s all about the words and the search engine’s ability to find them.

There are three ways to advertise “locally” online:

1. Your website. Insert words and phrases into your web page copy that web surfers in your town would likely type into a search engine. Example: A few months ago my wife made an appointment for me to see an allergist. Instead of opening the Yellow Pages, she logged onto Google and typed “Allergist Austin Texas”. Would you believe that only one allergist in a city of over a million people had bothered to create herself a website? Well, that simple little one-pager made her $1,200 that day. How often do you suppose this happens?

Let’s assume you sell wheels and tires in Tulsa, Oklahoma. For you to attract the attention of wheel shoppers in the area, you’re going to need to make sure all your brands are listed as text because search engines can’t read words that are imbedded in a photo.

2. The local newspaper. Is your local newspaper cashing in on the trend toward local ads online by creating a localized news site for your town?. a local electronic newspaper published by Austin’s principal newspaper, The Austin American Statesman. I’ve used Austin360 several times to find exceptional employees through its electronic Help Wanted section. But the key to getting results, as I mentioned earlier, is the writing of the ad itself. Bad classified ads are about you, the job you’re offering or the educational requirements of the applicant you seek. Good classified ads speak to the self-image of your hoped-for new employee. The goal of a great classified is for the right person to see themselves in it just as surely as if they were looking into a mirror. Here’s the ad that worked wonders for me:

“Do you love to write? Do you have boxes and drawers full of stuff you’ve been writing since you were 14? Do you read a lot? We’re a quirky advertising company serving small-business clients from coast to coast. Would you be willing to help turn their weak words into strong ones? You don’t need experience in advertising. You only need experience with ideas and with words. Send us a few samples of your writing. Don’t try to anticipate what we’re hoping to see. Just trust that we know a writer when we see one.”

That ad finished by giving them a starting salary and an e-mail to send their writing samples to along with their resume and a cover letter. We got 135 wonderfully qualified applicants. A Help Wanted ad written in the more traditional style would have received only two or three responses.

Yes, strong classifieds use casual language, and three or four times as many words as weak classifieds. Pay for the extra words–it’s a lot cheaper than hiring the wrong employee.

3. Localized national websites. Localized national websites often have more penetration into your city than any purely local web presence that might be available. Face it: Craig’s List and eBay probably have more traffic in your town than all the local sites put together. Unlike eBay, Craig’s List lets shoppers isolate to their own cities with a simple click. Do you wonder if anyone in your area is advertising there? Put it to the test. Spend a few minutes at Craig’s and your mind will likely be blown. My daughter-in-law was looking for a very specific, hard-to-find baby crib recently, and with just a few clicks of the mouse, she found one 12 miles from her house on Craig’s List.

Your web startup needs to cut through the clutter and reel in customers, and search engine optimization (SEO) can be just the ticket. SEO helps improve your search rankings so your website shows up higher on Google, Yahoo and other popular search engines. “SEO is really [fundamental]. It should be a line item when you’re developing your website,” says Greg Bozigian, founder and chief media officer of new media marketing company Visionary View.

SEO is about attracting quality leads and buyers ready to make a purchase. Here are six tips for getting the most out of an SEO initiative, according to SEO expert Steve Wiideman:

1. Start early. It can take up to six months for competitive search terms to see results through Google
2. Content really is king. Make a list of the top 20 search keywords relevant to your business and create content that’s thematically linked with those terms.
3. Don’t use the same keywords over and over. Search engines have gotten smart enough to weed that out.
4. Focus on Google. The magic formula is relevance and popularity. Having a well-written and well-structured website is a big part of the battle. Mentions and links from bloggers and other websites can be a big boost as well.
5. How do you measure SEO? Create a benchmark. A good SEO expert can actually measure the amount of traffic that results in a lead or in somebody making a purchase.
6. If you choose to work with an SEO consultant, find one that specializes in the needs of startups and growing businesses. If he or she tries to guarantee you an instant No. 1 ranking in Google, run the other way.

has has a list of rules to follow when coming up with domain names, check it out:

1. Brainstorm 5 Top Keywords
2. Make the Domain Unique
3. Only Choose Dot-Com Available Domains
4. Make it Easy to Type
5. Make it Easy to Remember
6. Keep the Name as Short as Possible
7. Create and Fulfill Expectations
8. Avoid Copyright Infringement
9. Set Yourself Apart with a Brand
10. Reject Hyphens and Numbers
11. Don’t Follow the Latest Trends
12. Use an Ajax Domain Selection Tool

Chances are you’ve heard about the amazing ROI that can be had with pay-per-click advertising on Google, Yahoo!, and Bing. A return of 300 percent or even higher is not at all unusual with this form of advertising. Still, these are hard times and cash is scarce, so here are seven tips you can use to trim the fat from your search advertising campaigns.

1. PPC Isn’t Right for Everyone
   When pay-per-click works, it works well. But what we don’t usually hear about are the stories of people who lost their entire ad spend. As with anything else in business, it’s best to be realistic from the outset about your chances of success. B2B companies generally have a tougher time making search advertising work. If you sell AC adapters in bundles of 50 or more, for example, you may want to consider other channels. People just aren’t searching for that sort of thing.

   After all, the best way to save money in PPC is to not spend any on it. At the very least, do your research before diving in and be sure to start small.

2. Install (And Use!) Website Analytics
   Pretend for a moment that instead of promoting your business over the web, you were to take a more traditional approach, such as television advertising. You might be prepared to spend upwards of a quarter-million dollars just for production, to be followed by potentially millions of dollars of national media buys.With so much at stake, it seems unlikely that you would simply write a check and forget about it. Not by a long shot. I bet you’d be watching the sales figures like a hawk to see if your campaign was bringing customers in. And if it didn’t perform, you’d cut your losses quickly (and probably fire your marketing manager).

   For some reason, however, many business owners decide to jump into search advertising without having the same mind-set. They blindly set their bids to a number that “sounds right” and hope for the best. Invariably, these campaigns perform poorly.

   It’s an absolute necessity to know how effective each of your keywords and ads are at driving traffic to your site. You should be prepared to cut costs aggressively for non-performing keywords and, conversely, pay more for your best placements.

   To do this, you need an analytics package that will give you some kind of feedback about the effectiveness of your campaigns. Google Analytics (free) and Omniture (commercial) are both good products that can do this for you.

3. Optimize Your Website First
   If you have tracking installed on your website but haven’t optimized your website’s ability to convert visitors into buyers, you probably won’t be able to compete for the best possible placement for your ads. As a result, your ads will appear infrequently, buried deep within the search results pages. And more importantly, you’ll only be capturing a small percentage of the sales you would have captured by identifying and eliminating sales bottlenecks.Conversely, if you can improve your sales by 50 percent through the practice of conversion optimization (a very modest goal for most websites), you can easily double the return on your ad spend! This gives you the option of either cutting your spend while maintaining the same revenue or, alternatively, increasing your spend to drive more traffic The choice is yours.
4. Don’t Use Budget Caps
   Google AdWords offers its users the ability to set a maximum daily budget. For instance, even if there is $100 of traffic available, you can tell Google to serve your ads in a way that only generates $50 of clicks. On the surface, this appears to be an excellent way to ensure that you don’t inadvertently overspend on your campaign.Don’t use it. If you set a budget cap, you force AdWordsto make decisions on your behalf about where your ads will appear. For some reason, they usually end up “optimizing” your campaign so that your ads appear for those placements that nobody else seems to want. The result? You stay within your budget but your campaign performs poorly.

   A much better practice is to set your bids conservatively

5. Let Someone Else Have the Top Spot
   Business owners and CMOs tend to be very aggressive about bidding for certain terms, such as their brand names or well-recognized buzzwords. As a result, they bid aggressively to ensure their ads appear near the top of the search results.

   This is a very bad practice. Advertisers appearing at the top of the side search results pay an additional 49 percent cost-per-click, which results in far higher campaign spends for what amounts (in most cases) to a small amount of incremental traffic.

   Let your competitors have this spot. By bidding just a little lower, you’ll drive nearly the same amount of traffic as they do, but at a far lower cost.

6. Optimize Your Quality Score, Then Optimize It Again
   On Google AdWords, each ad is assigned a “quality score” from one to 10. Ads with high quality scores appear more frequently and are charged a lower CPC relative to competitors. Conversely, low quality score ads tend to be more expensive and show far less frequently.You can improve your quality scores through a combination of keyword matching, ad copy split testing and landing page optimization. These practices, though complicated, are well worth it. Those few advertisers who make them an integral part of their campaigns easily edge out their competitors on the search engines.
7. Turn Your Competitors’ Successes Against Them
   In most advertising mediums, it’s the original and innovative marketers who break through the noise. However, search advertising combines highly motivated searchers (prospects) with highly targeted ads. This killer combination means that originality rarely pays off. Innovative ads often confuse visitors and result in low quality scores.The standard advice given to new search marketers is to split test ad copy repeatedly to improve your click-through rates. While this is reasonable in theory, there are two big drawbacks. The first is that it can take a long time–six months or more–to develop strong ads. The second is that you can never really be sure when your ads are “good enough.”

   Google AdWords is designed as a massive evolutionary experiment. Good ads breed. Poor ads die. Why not use that to your advantage? Survey the ads that are appearing most frequently for your keywords and use those to seed your split tests. Instead of starting from the bottom, you’ll start near the top and cut your workload massively.

After all the rumors and last-minute botched deals over the years, it’s finally happened: Microsoft and Yahoo have reached an agreement to merge their search services in hopes of finally being able to compete with the grand search overlord, Google.

Under the new 10-year, $275 million agreement, Microsoft’s new Bing search engine will power Yahoo Search

, while Yahoo Search Marketing will be powered by Microsoft AdCenter.

So what does this mean for small-business owners? Well, keep an eye on your Yahoo rankings because they are going to change once the Yahoo search engine is replaced by Bing.

As for your Yahoo Search Marketing campaigns, the good news is that your ads will now be seen across a greater number of websites. If you’ve been running campaigns through Microsoft AdCenter and Yahoo Search Marketing, once the change takes effect you will only have one campaign to manage, which will free up your time to work on other search marketing strategies.

If you’ve never bothered with Microsoft’s search offerings, the best way to get ready for the coming changes is to learn how to optimize your site for Bing and become familiar with the rules and regulations of Microsoft AdCenter.

Since its launch, Bing has proven itself to be very amenable to webmasters’ optimization efforts. That means that with a little tweaking you can get your site listed at the top of Bing’s search results

quickly. And if your site is brand-new, you can probably get it indexed faster on Bing than on Google, so you might want to focus your optimization on Bing first. Then, once you’re ranked well in Bing’s listings, you can tweak your optimization efforts to meet Google’s more stringent requirements.

Here are five easy ways to get Bing to notice you:

1. The older, the better. Bing places a lot of emphasis on the age of a domain, so if you’re just starting out, you might consider buying an older domain in order to get your site a higher ranking.

2. Titles are important. Bing seems to place a lot more emphasis on title tags than Google does, so make sure you use your best keywords in the title tags of every page on your site.

3. Text is terrific. For Google, the amount of text you have on a web page doesn’t play a huge role. Not so with Bing, which seems to place a higher value on pages that have at least 300 words.

4. Outbound links are OK. Google has always seemed to frown on the number of outbound links you have on a page. But Bing actually seems to like them–at least for now.

5. Backlinks are even better. If you’re frustrated because all of your efforts to get links pointing to your site haven’t gotten you anywhere with Google, then good news! When it comes to backlinks, Bing’s attitude seems to “the more, the merrier”–as long as the links are coming from relevant sites.

So there you have it–five easy optimization tips to help you score a good ranking with Bing.Bear in mind that this is a huge change, and will take months to fully take effect. But the sooner you align yourself with Microsoft’s search policies, the better positioned you will be to ride the wave of change to the top of Bing’s–and Yahoo’s–search results.

Think branding only falls in the B2C court? Think again.

In fact, three of the top 10 brands in 2009, as ranked by Interbrand, generate a sizable amount of revenue from their B2B customers: IBM, Microsoft and GE.

As a B2B marketer your brand is your most valuable asset.

B2B branding is less about cool, hip monikers (the Apples and Starbucks of the world) – and more about thought leadership.

Particularly in down economies, B2B prospects and customers conduct significant research leading up to purchases. That means you as a marketer have to educate them early on, and establish your brand as a trusted resource that gets their problems and has the solution.

To help your organization be seen as the thought leader it is, we’ve identified five B2B branding tips:

1. Consistently produce useful, innovative content

These days, every company is essentially a media company. So it’s easier than ever to provide relevant, informative content for customers and prospects.

From a company blog to Twitter to YouTube, there is no end to the content channels available. Provide the latest industry news and insight on trends through:

• Offering a white paper through an email marketing campaign
• Creating videos and promoting through YouTube and on your web site
• Conducting interviews with industry influentials and turning into blog posts

Whatever channels you choose to promote, and whatever types of content you create, these consistent signals prove to customers and prospects that you are a thought leader.

2. Network digitally and in person

Nothing communicates a brand more than direct involvement with customers and prospect. In that regard, online social networking has opened a new door. According to a recent eMarketer study, six in 10 B2B marketers planned to up spending on social in 2010.

Whether your organization integrates Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or another social network into its B2B branding efforts, the same rules apply:

• Social media is about engaging in conversations, not just pushing products
• It’s not about the masses; it’s about your target audience
• It’s listening and hearing before selling and talking

That’s not to say that in-person networking is irrelevant. On the contrary, perfect B2B branding combination. Take advantage of opportunities to give keynote speeches, participate in panel discussions or lead breakout sessions at industry events.

3. Get personal and be real

B2C marketers seem to have this concept nailed. But humanizing your company for customers and prospects is just as important in B2B branding.

For one TopRank® Online Marketing client, an industrial part distributor for the bulk powder processing industry, humanizing its image was a top concern.

The TopRank team created the Powder Doctor, a unique character, to relate to customers and prospects through email marketing campaigns. This humorous cartoon character offers advice – Dear Abby style – for common industry problems. Powder Doctor campaigns have increased sales for Powder-Solutions by 83%.

4. Position yourself differently than others in the space

No doubt about it, it’s tough to build personal B2B brand if you’re just like everyone else. You simply can’t be known for what everyone else is.

Standing out from the crowd is easy when your products or services are truly one-of-a-kind. When products or services are similar to those offered by the competition, it’s more of a challenge to uniquely position yourself.

For one TopRank client – a staffing software company – that challenge was known all too well. To help the client stand from a large pool of competitors, TopRank developed a copywriting strategy where website copy was written in first person, from the viewpoint of the staffing software (i.e., “why you should hire me to fill your staffing software needs”).

This strategy has not only helped the company develop a truly distinct B2B brand; the strategy has also achieved increased search traffic, high rankings for terms such as “staffing software” and a trend up in inquiries.

5. Leverage proof points

It’s perfectly appropriate – and necessary – to toot your own horn from time to time as part of your B2B branding efforts. Whether it’s an impressive media placement or a web traffic milestone, implement proof points illustrating why your organization is a thought leader into marketing communications.