So you can imagine the implications of this email linking to a new site with great featured products, excellent pricing, a beautiful website, and broken links to their shopping cart! Yikes!

After clicking through a few different product links on the site, I ended up at the same error multiple times and finally gave up, as I’m sure the other potential customers did as well.

Which led me to wonder – do all companies recognize the lost opportunities of poor design, broken links, and an overall “eye off the ball” approach to their websites?

Yes, we get busy in our daily lives, but it is amazingly important to walk through the same doors, so to speak, that your customers do. So I put together this simple checklist of those “doors” you should walk through each day, to make sure you don’t end up in this embarrassing and costly situation.

1. Visit your website every morning.

Links break. Pages change. Embedded images and videos fail. These are facts of life for most sites. It is crucially important to spend 5-10 minutes each morning navigating through your site to make sure everything works properly.

2. Subscribe to your own email list, and ask everyone at your company to subscribe as well.

Before sending out an email, send a test to your internal list. Ask everyone to open it and provide their feedback. Ask them to open it on their mobile phones as well, and be sure it is user-friendly. Would this be an email you would click through as a customer? Why or why not?

3. Call your customer service line. Use the automated system like a brand new customer would.

I am amazed at the problems on automated service lines. For instance, many lines only offer the option to dial a name using the letters on your keypad numbers. Well this is perfectly fine, unless of course you are using a standard Blackberry, which doesn’t show the letters that correspond to each number. Some services only offer directories by last name, but what if your customers don’t know the person’s last name? Oops.

4. Walk through your front door from the street.

Is the front reception area clean, inviting, and professional? Are the signs and literature updated and restocked? I have seen restaurants with signs out front promoting events that happened weeks before and were never updated, because the owners and employees all used the rear entrance and never noticed them.

5. Email yourself at home.

Did your email get through to your Comcast/Verizon/AOL address? Huge red flag here if it did not. Now, how does your signature line appear? Is your contact information available and well-designed? How does your name appear? Font size and spacing?

At this point, you’ve probably been involved in more than one meeting with an “SEO expert”. Perhaps you’ve reworked your website to include some new keyword phrases, or you’ve had a developer add keywords and targeted descriptions into your site, or start a link-building campaign for you. How can you be sure that they are actually helping you achieve results?

I’m not trying to knock reputable search engine optimization and marketing companies. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of successful organizations playing by the rules, developing strategic long-term campaigns, and achieving real, and many times amazing, results.

The key is to make sure the company you have hired is one of those firms, and not some low-rank know-it-all with a background in sales and a lot of inflated guarantees. So how do you know?

Ask yourself these questions:

Does their strategy make sense to you?

– This is where the conversation should stop. If a company is guaranteeing you that they will position your site on the first page of Google for a particular keyword; RUN, don’t walk, out the door.

– This doesn’t mean that a good SEO provider won’t get you to the first page for several keywords, you can rest assured they probably will. It means that a good provider will not guarantee this – they can’t control the search engines any more than you or I can tell CNN to run a story on us.

– Any marketer with limited knowledge of SEO could get your site to the first page; but it will be for a keyword phrase so ridiculous you would never see real traffic or business resulting from it.

Are their rates low, mid-range, or higher than others you’ve consulted?

– Everyone knows the horror stories that occur when they hire the lowest-bidder or (yikes!) their brother-in-law to build their new kitchen or fix a leak. Many times, the lowest-bidder sets their rates that way because they are providing poor-quality services. They can’t compete on quality, or timeliness, or added-value, so they compete on price. And the loser in this situation is always the client who ends up having to pay someone else a lot more to fix what they broke. The same goes for SEO.

– As for the above, sometimes a company is the lowest-bidder because they are offering you a promotional deal or trying to accomplish other goals of their own. Maybe your brother-in-law really DOES develop great SEO programs and wants to impress the family by helping you out. The point is, don’t automatically jump for the cheapest solution. It could cost you a fortune in the long run.

Are their clients happy? Have they achieved real (in cash, not clicks) value?

– Ask for a few client references, and follow up on them. Have their clients seen real value from their SEO/SEM campaigns? Do they know their actual return on investment, or do they only refer back to some click-through and keyword ranking statistics.

– This may be a red flag. If an SEO/SEM provider is doing their job, after a few months their clients will see actual value in on-site conversions and revenue from their efforts.

If you’re wondering whether your SEO or SEM strategy is really working for you, or have questions on how to achieve search engine marketing success, give us a call for a free consultation and review of your website/campaign. We guarantee you’ll be left with the knowledge and strategy to achieve your goals.

Have you been there? Did you ever hire that vendor for another project after your experience? If you’re like most buyers, you probably ran away and never looked back.

So how do you make sure that your customers aren’t going through this same pain when hiring your company? Here are some ways to make sure your sales and marketing teams are speaking the same language, so you don’t end up watching the backs of your customers as they run away from your company.

1. Take a good look at your structure.
   1. Step outside of your organization for a minute and look at the structure. Are the people who sell products and services involved in implementing them, or dealing with customer service issues? Once the sale is done, is it passed off to “someone else” to manage the job?
   2. How closely do your sales and marketing teams work? Do they know each other? Are they able to ask questions, provide feedback, and offer their insight?
   3. If you see a trend of separation between sales, marketing, and customer service, now would be a great time to start planning a big meeting between those groups. You may be amazed at the insight, critiques, and new ideas that will come out of that meeting to propel your business forward.
2. Get everyone involved.
   1. In any new customer meeting, specifically in a B2B or high-ticket environment, it is crucial to offer prospective and ideas from all sides. If you are selling a complex product or service, especially one that will be used by the client to generate business, you must have all parties involved at those initial stages. They will answer questions, help you sell, and determine customer needs from the onset. They will also reduce or eliminate the problems that come up later from lack of information.
3. Be your own customer.
   1. This idea is presented in thousands of business guides, courses, and books, yet is often overlooked. Do you want to know how your customers are being treated? Don’t just ask them; experience it for yourself.
   2. Call into your company from a different phone number, go through the painful automated process, reach a sales representative, and start asking the type of questions that keep your customers up at night. Then continue through the entire process, from proposal to execution, and make notes along the way.
   3. Forget everything you know about your profit margins, the internal structure of your company, and the cost of operations for a minute, and just focus on the customer experience. Enlightening, isn’t it?
4. Reward based on your customer’s success and referral business (for B2B companies).
   1. Now that you have discovered what is broken, it’s time to start repairing. Work on a new structure that involves all teams and start developing a better approach to conducting business.
   2. Develop an incentive system that rewards overall performance and success. For instance, if a customer has such a great experience with sales, marketing, and customer service that they refer 3 new clients to you, then all of those representatives should be rewarded, not just the new sales rep. who answers the phone to close those 3 referral clients.
   3. Once everyone knows they are accountable for overall performance and referrals, I guarantee it will change the “sales promises, customer service delivers” attitude.

1. Work Your Blog

Summer is a great time to work on your blog and start developing an audience. If you haven’t started yet, we suggest importing a WordPress blog theme into your site. You can either have a designer custom-design the theme or use one of hundreds of great templates available on the site. From there, start importing their plugins to add options for readers to share posts, subscribe, comment, complete forms, request information, and for yourself to incorporate the elements of SEO that will help you get found in organic searches. If you already have a blog, congratulations! Now is the time to review your subscribers, the quality of comments received from posts, the contributions you are making on other blogs your audience is reading, and the competition. Where can you improve? What is working and should be built upon? What is not working and may need to be changed or eliminated?

2. What’s In It for Them?

Ask a few people you trust to review your website. Is it clear to them what benefits they would receive by working with or buying from you? Do they have plenty of opportunities to register for something of value? To contact you or request a demo or consultation? If you can’t answer these questions, it may be time to add some customer-focused value to your website.

3. Rethink The Strategy

You may be receiving renewal notices for advertising campaigns, sponsorships, Yellow Page ads, and similar programs you’ve run in the past. Before you sign that renewal check though, have you determined what value you are getting from these campaigns? What is your actual return-on-investment, in dollars and percent of budget? Many times it is easier to continue running the same campaign year after year without ever sitting down to figure out if it is the best avenue to promote your business. Think creatively – if those dollars aren’t bringing you great sales any longer, it may be time to cut your losses and move on to new opportunities.

“Online video is better!”

“Let’s take our TV commercial from last year, put it on YouTube, and watch it go viral!!”

Have you had this conversation recently with colleagues, a marketing committee, or worse yet, your Agency? Does any of this sound familiar to you? Then here are a few reasons to put the brakes on, before you spend any more time or money editing your TV commercials to upload them to YouTube. Because, no, even in your industry, it won’t work.

1) Video IS great, but there’s a difference between “commercial” and “viral”

We’ve all seen the YouTube videos that went viral. From “wedding dance mashup” to “Charlie bit my finger” to “Evolution of Dance”, and we’ve passed them along to friends. They are funny, unique, or witty in some way, and can fill 2.5 minutes of entertainment. Notice what’s missing though? They are not selling anything. There are no companies involved, no large production budgets. Just people with a camera and a few minutes to spare. While you may be able to create an online video that combines humor, interesting facts, or a witty situation, by making it promotional you immediately lose the experience that makes it worthy of being passed around.

2) Interrupting vs. Inbound

There is a common theme behind advertisements of any type. They are meant to interrupt us while we are doing something else. Commercials during a radio program, ads in between sections of our favorite tv shows, billboards in our sight while driving, print ads in between the articles we are reading. While I’m not knocking traditional advertising, in fact it can be a very effective method of driving awareness, there is a major difference between the marketing methods that interrupt you while doing other things, and the ones you will actively seek out. From there, it is easy to see why crossing those lines and using an “interrupting” media in a forum where you are looking for people to seek you out, it is easy to see how that would fail.

3) How you CAN Succeed

We’re not trying to be all “Debbie Downer” here, really. There are many ways that video can help you achieve your goals, but it is important to use the right media in the right place, at the right time. Here are a few suggestions to get you started:

We look forward to seeing your Videos!! Please comment and share them here, we’ll help you promote them.

Image courtesy of: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cloudzilla/50257242/

If you’re not sure or could use a refresher, here are a few simple ways to get your site copy where it needs to be for top performance:

• Conduct a simple Keyword search on Google
  • Visit Google and perform a few searches for words or phrases your customers may be using to find your product or service. Is your company in the first 20 results? Great! If not, check out the competitors at the top to see what keywords they are using, and determine whether you should build those into your site.
  • Next, read through a few of the most important pages on your site. Do your most important pages contain strong use of the keywords you searched for, or do they focus on the product/service/company? If you are lacking in keywords, now would be a good time to consider rewriting those pages.
• Scope out the Competition
  • Beyond the top-ranked sites in the above example, also check out the websites of your closest competitors. Are they written from the customer’s point of view? Do they address needs or benefits that you do not? This is a great way to determine whether you can build onto or revise your site to better meet your market’s needs.
• Ask a trusted friend (in a different industry)
  • Friends and colleagues who are willing to be bluntly honest with you can be a great source of advice when considering how to make your website or marketing materials more customer-focused. Ask for open feedback from those around you, or post your site to a forum where others can voice their opinions and recommendations.
• Take the First Step
  • If you find that your website needs some work in the customer-benefits area, that doesn’t necessarily mean you need to completely scrap and rebuild the site. Most likely, it will be a matter of rewriting some page copy. The easiest and quickest way to develop customer-focused content is through blogging. You can add a simple blog to your site, and write once or twice a week on a topic that is interesting to your customers. Use the keywords you found important to determine what topics to focus on, and just start writing. You’ll be amazed at the traction you can start seeing by taking this simple step.

If you’re not sure how to get started, contact us at Grapevine Consulting for a Complimentary Search Engine Optimization Analysis.

- Melissa Albano

Here are some great ideas you can take away from the editors whose job has been built on selling compelling images and headlines:

1. Know Your Audience
   • The headlines that work well for a consumer product company may completely tank when used for a B2B service, and vice versa. To understand your audience better, subscribe to the email newsletters and blogs that they are reading – chances are there are some general consistencies and themes you can pick up on to meet their needs.
2. Tease Them
   • The headlines on a couple of magazines I subscribe to include: “50 Ways to Charm Anyone, and Always Get What You Want”, “Ski & Ride Guide: The Best Resorts In New England”, and “7 Items Under $60 You’ll Wear All Season”.
   • Headlines & Titles like those above give you just enough information to get you interested, and make you want to know more. They almost make you feel like you’d be missing out by NOT reading them.
   • Include a compelling photo or video where applicable to increase conversion rates.
3. Make a List & Check It Twice
   • People love lists. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because they are simple. Or because they appeal to our feeling of completing a task and moving on. But for whatever reason, they generally perform better than standard headlines. So try making a couple lists that appeal to your audience and layer them in with your other blog and email content. They are easy to create, easy to read, and may surprise you by how well they perform.
4. Deliver On Your Promise
   • Don’t lie to your audience, try to trick them with a clever sales pitch disguised as a helpful resource, or use a great headline to pull people into a long, boring article. You may get them the first time, but the consequence could be that you’ll lose them forever. And that’s just not worth the trouble.
5. Keep It Simple, Stupid.
   • People scan email, web pages, and articles, they usually don’t read all of the content. For that reason, keep the content short and to the point, and use lists and subheadings where appropriate. This will break up the page for your reader and allow easier scanning.
6. Report, Test, Report, Test, Repeat.
   • You can buy a hundred books or read a thousand articles that will offer advice on increasing readership and results for your inbound marketing campaign. But at the end of the day, the only true measure of success is how your readers react to your content. And that can only be determined by testing and measuring the actual results of your campaigns. So for each of your upcoming email newsletters or blog posts, test one new feature and compare results. Keep everything else consistent (ie: delivery day/time, contact list, etc.) to get accurate results. You will learn very quickly what your audience responds to best by looking at the delivery reports and website analytics. Then simply repeat the positive and eliminate the negative.

For help in developing your blog or email content, contact us.

Do You Get It?

The brains behind these fantastic marketing machines understand how to tap into what their customers are already doing and use it to their advantage. They combine inside jokes (between millions), a feeling of “yeah, I’ve been there, done that”, and a desire to be included with an amusing spin that is both memorable and worthy of sharing.

Example 1: VW’s PunchDub campaign. How many times did you get out of the car with bruised arms as a kid from a vicious game of “punchbuggy”? Volkswagen had the vision to realize that their target audience could relate to this game, and capitalized on it with a brilliant ad campaign combining the reminiscent and amusing theme. Volkswagen PunchDub Spot

Example 2: Dunkin Donuts “American Runs on Dunkin” campaign. We’ve all experienced the mental argument with ourselves over “do I get there on time, or do I stop for the coffee and show up a few minutes late?” I won’t tell you how many times the coffee won those arguments with me. Dunkin Donuts understood their customers and launched a brilliant marketing campaign around them. And with over 1.2 million Facebook fans, they’ve proven that their core customers want to be a part of the campaign.  America Runs on Dunkin Ad

Example 3: ‘What Happens in Vegas, Stays in Vegas’ campaign. This is perhaps the best example of a brand that truly understands what their core customer relates to. Even if you do only travel to Vegas for the shows or an industry convention, this still taps into the underlying feeling of excitement and energy that surrounds the trip. The feeling of doing something unlike yourself and then returning to your daily life. The feeling is so common, that it has transcended the campaign and become part of everyday conversations. What Happens in Vegas Ad

So how does a business without the multi-million dollar advertising budgets of these companies tap into the same customer instincts?

For every company the answer will be different, but the method is always the same. It’s about figuring out what your customers do, what they have in common, how they use your product or service, and what their opinion is of your company and/or industry. If you’re a local restaurant or retailer, you can use local slang in your campaigns, participate in a community event (don’t just sponsor it, actively participate), and treat the popular locals well. If you’re a plumber or contractor, try making fun of yourself. There are a few ideas that most people hold about these industries, so instead of avoiding or fighting these ideas, try a campaign where you meet them head-on and use them to your advantage.

You’ll stand out from the crowd, get a few laughs, and most of all attract attention. What more could you ask for?

- Melissa Albano

http://www.flickr.com/photos/curns/3248822572/

It’s funny how you can get into the habits of your daily routine, and quickly forget how you ended up there in the first place. Every once in a while it’s important to take a step back and read your business plan or an industry book to reflect back on the basics and keep yourself on the right path.

I am about halfway into Hubspot’s latest book, titled simply ‘Inbound Marketing‘, and was reminded this morning of how and why I ended up in social media marketing in the first place. Quite simply, I hate cold calling. Despise it, in fact. Picking up the phone hundreds of times  a day to be hung up on by people who don’t want to hear from you, don’t want your product or service, and don’t have any interested in receiving the information they’ve asked you to send just so they can get you off the phone? Nope, never understood why this torturous practice of “dialing for dollars” was always pushed on our tired sales teams.

The difference between Cold Calling and Inbound Marketing is so simple, it almost seems too good to be true. Cold Calling is a numbers game. Theoretically if you contact 1,000 people a month that don’t want to hear from you, you may stumble on a few that actually do. But Inbound Marketing is the exact opposite theory – it is about creating great content and resources that makes the people who actually want your products or services come to you. It’s the equivalent of a retail boutique having a gorgeous window display in a great location that attracts interested shoppers, vs. the ‘cold way’ of reaching out to millions of people over the telephone and hoping that a few of the masses will be swayed by your approach.

It’s time to put down the phone and start providing the content that will bring your next customer to your door. The market is there, and they are ready, all you need to do is meet them halfway before your competitors do.

- Melissa Albano

This year, many of the old standby companies, including Pepsi and Chevy/GM, were mysteriously missing, and there were a few internet companies that took great advantage of the dedicated audience. The marketing lessons from a couple of my favorite ads, from Google and E-Trade, can be applied to many businesses and promotions.  Below are some lessons we can borrow from the big guys. Enjoy and let us know your thoughts with a comment!

Google: Parisian Love

In this spot, Google displays the confident attitude we have come to know and love, by responding to the recent Microsoft Bing attack ads with a simple, straightforward view of a typical Google search, and the results seen by millions of daily users. Notice how they recreate the user’s experience, show results, and never once mention the competition. Brilliant!

The Lesson: Keep it Simple. If your product or service is easier to understand when shown visually, be sure you have a great web presence, online video (embedded on your site or linked from YouTube), photos, and a trial version if applicable. Then simply show viewers how easy your product or service is to use, or the difference it makes. I am always surprised by companies that have great results to show, yet don’t include actual photos and video on their sites.

E-Trade: Baby Girlfriend

This spot was my absolute favorite. It’s funny, interesting, and tied to a memorable theme from years past. The underlying message is that E-Trade is so simple, a baby could use it; but they don’t hammer the viewer over the head with that message. It leaves you wanting more, which conveniently, is available on their website.

The Lesson: Don’t take your business too seriously, and find an angle to get your prospects to take action. For the 13% of total Superbowl viewers that were estimated to be watching while connected to the internet, and the millions more who would view the commercials on YouTube today, this was a well-played gamble.

For businesses using social media marketing, this message should really drive home for you. Everything you do should have the underlying priorities around driving users to your website, developing a community that people WANT to connect to by offering resources, fun, value, and interesting topics, and enticing people to take immediate action. Whether that action is developing a longer-term relationship or making an immediate purchase depends on your strategy.

The writing is on the wall. Advertising and Marketing have shifted. You simply cannot create a 30-second spot, place it on the airwaves, and expect to start ringing up customers the next day. It is all about interacting with customers and prospects, listening to them, developing a conversation, and using that insight to build your business.

- Melissa Albano