Researching Your Competitors

On a very basic level, you can see where the priorities are for your competitors based on the topics and outline of the pages on their website. For instance, if their products or services are similar to what you offer, but they incorporate many more pages dedicated to specific uses of those products, or have services listed by the type of customer that would use them, then they are likely capturing more specific, focused, and relevant search traffic than you may be.

You can also do a quick review of their page names and titles (the descriptive URL of those topic-based pages and the title that appears in the top of your browser window on each page) to determine which keyword phrases they consider to be the most important and relevant.

By having a better feel for what your competitors are structuring their websites around, you can make better decisions on the topics and tactics of highest priority for your own.

Surveying Your Customers

Want to know what your customers and prospects are looking for when they search online? The easiest way to find out is simply to ask them.

Tools such as email marketing surveys and Facebook application surveys allow you to easily send out a quick request to your target audience in order to get a better feel for what they are looking for.  Beyond helping you start to build a topic-focused strategy for your website, you may also be surprised to learn about new uses for your products, or services that your clients are hoping you'll add to the mix.

Researching Your Vendors & Suppliers

There is so much you can learn from how your vendors, suppliers, and business partners position similar products and services for their own sales strategies. Do they have a unique way of pitching, or a great tagline that tells your story well? Can you package together products or services in a unique way that you haven't thought of before?

Staying On Top of Industry Trends

Lastly, one of the top priorities for any website content marketer is to make sure that your site is always up to date with the products, services, and features that your potential customers may be looking for. Be sure to stay on top of industry news, deliver your opinions and reactions to current industry trends by writing topic-specific blog posts, and be sure to comment regularly on those 3rd party news websites.

By keeping your eyes open and always being aware of how others are talking about your products, services, customers, and industry, you will be sure to stay on top and capture a bigger share of the search market.

How often have you had the same conversation with clients about your competitive advantages and success stories? Wouldn't it be great if they already knew WHY your company was a perfect fit for them before they ever met with you?

Sounds like an impossible dream, right? Well, if you're actively sharing your success stories, you may start to find that the sales process will become much easier if your company has already pre-sold itself through toot-your-horn marketing.

Before you run from this post, I want to be clear that by 'tooting your horn', I'm not suggesting you run around posting on social media sites, in blogs, emails, and conversations that you're the best. You very well may be, but nobody wants to hear it, and it makes you sound fake and cheesy. What you SHOULD be promoting are the examples of your success stories, while carefully walking the modesty line. You don't need to say "we're the best, we're number 1" to show potential clients that you're successful. All you need to do is make sure that examples of successful projects and initiatives are well-publicized in the markets you work in.

For example, the next time you achieve great results for a client, or discover a new use for your product or service, be sure to promote this achievement outside of your immediate circle. Write a press release, include a story or case study in a blog post, share it on your Facebook wall, LinkedIn company page, and Twitter feed, post a video example to YouTube, etc. You should accurately brand the story with your logo and web address, but you don't need to go on and on about how amazing your company is. Just show the example, and people will get it.

But if you don't have the proper channels in place, it's time to get on board with social media and blogging. You'll find that once you have the proper channels in place, sharing your story will be as simple as sending an email. Except the rewards you reap will multiply, and they'll continue long after you hit 'send'.

Here are some ideas to combat even the worst case of writer's block, and help you on your way to a developing the content that you can build your online marketing strategy around.

3 Ways to Cure Writer's Block:

1) Keywords as topics

If you've already done your 'keyword' homework, then you likely have a long list of phrases and questions that people use to search for your products or services. This list is often the best, and most-overlooked place, to find ideas for great blog topics that answer your clients' questions.

By focusing on the actual search phrases and questions that your potential customers are searching for, you will multiply the likelihood of those prospects reaching your page in answer to their search. By using the actual question or keyword phrase as the title, and page URL, of the post, you will greatly increase those chances and improve the overall search engine effectiveness of the post.

2) Real-life examples

Oftentimes, the best way to explain your service or product's value is to share your clients' stories (with their permission of course). Some of the best blog posts come from telling the stories of clients, and sharing real-world examples. Have you encountered an industry trend? Resolved a common consumer issue? Learned of a situation that other's may not be aware of? These would all lead to excellent blog posts.

3) Answering questions posted by clients.

The 3rd tip for curing writer's block in your blogging efforts is to enlist the help of others. Have an active social media community? Simply request that your fans post their questions and concerns about the industry or a particular topic. Allow them to submit their stories, questions, or comments; or post a quick survey on your company's Facebook page that they can quickly respond to. You may be surprised at how many topics you'll discover that will not only be great resources for all prospective clients, they will also help you to show your network of friends and followers that you are actively listening, and responding to, their concerns.

Good luck and happy writing!

It is in these discussions that we've uncovered a scary trend: not only are the Quality Scores falling throughout their campaigns, many were unaware that there was such a scoring system in place.

For that reason, we created this post to help our readers understand their Quality Score, and why it is so crucially important to maintaining, and increasing, the performance of online advertising campaigns.

What is a Quality Score?

Quality Score for advertisers is similar to your Credit Score. Based on factors related to your ad performance history, your Quality Score determines how and if your ad will appear for online searches, what position it will appear in, and how much you will pay for that position in relation to others. A strong score will yield high results and low cost-per-click; while a low score could not only cost you far more for lower positioning, it may keep your ads from being seen altogether.

Quality Score is Google's way of determining the ads that are most relevant to a user's search. They use a complex system to determine whether an ad is relevant, targeted, and credible; and whether the location it sends a user to meets those criteria as well. For a complete understanding, click here for Google's explanation of Quality Score.

How Do I Get My Quality Score?

It's not readily available on your Adwords dashboard, but your Quality Score can be found in a few simple steps. If you have a consultant managing your Adwords campaign(s), they should be able to provide it for you, and should be managing the score of all of your keywords regularly, making revisions where necessary to improve performance. If you are managing Adwords on your own, here are the instructions on finding your score.

"My Quality Score is Terrible! What Can I do?"

First off, if you have hired a consultant to manage your campaigns, they should be able to provide insight into improving performance. If they can't do so, or you have been managing your campaigns in-house, now may be the time to hire a professional. But if you'd prefer to improve performance on your own, there are several areas you'll want to optimize, starting with these high-priority elements:

The key to remember is that your Quality Score is very much like your Credit Score. By managing it well, staying on top of updates, and focusing on your priorities, you can achieve your goals at a lower cost. But lose sight of the details or employ a poor manager or consultant to monitor progress, and you could end up paying a lot more for a whole lot less.

They are an amazing time for small and online businesses to capitalize on the millions of advertising dollars being spent by corporations for their own gains. Today marks the end of the hyper-promoted 'first weekend of holiday shopping', but if you haven't yet jumped on the wagon, you still have time to learn from the pros and leverage these national promotions for your own business.

If your company is able to provide a Cyber Monday deal today, for any product or service, consider the impact of a small percentage of this traffic heading your way:

1. 1. The #2 most-searched term on Google today is 'cyber monday deals 2011'
2. 2. The #9 most-searched term is 'cybermonday deals'
3. 3. The highest-trending topic on Twitter today is '#CyberMonday

If you can work these phrases into your online marketing efforts at the same time that corporations and the media are pushing shoppers to search for them, you will be in great shape. But if you haven't yet incorporated them into the copy on your website or blog, you are probably too late to catch that site traffic for this season, since your copy would need to be indexed by the search engines in order for it to appear, and that takes time. You can, however, still take advantage of the #CyberMonday topics on Twitter, as well as with timely Facebook and Google+ posts and/or an email blast to your customers this afternoon.

Even if you missed the boat completely on Cyber Monday deals for 2011, you still have time to capitalize on the holiday marketing efforts of the major players and the media. The key is to jump onto the trends that advertisers are pushing consumers to search for. Pay close attention to the buzz words used in holiday ads, and the timing of special sales and events. Buzz phrases like 'daily deals', 'one day offers', and 'doorbusters' could bring a substantial amount of traffic to your site and build your sales base.

Just be sure that when viewers arrive at your website, they are greeted with an amazing offer, a well-designed landing page, and an easy-to-navigation checkout process, or your efforts will have been wasted.

The problem is: prospective clients can't find you online because you're not speaking the same language.

The key to writing your website copy in such a way that you can easily be found by prospects searching for you is to think like a client. For example, an ear, nose and throat doctor would commonly define their practice by those terms (ear, nose, throat); while a person searching for them would commonly use words like 'allergy', 'sinus', or 'hearing'. A heating/cooling technician may refer to his services as HVAC repair, while his prospective clients are searching online for "air conditioning repair". Although two phrases may have exactly the same meaning, search engines will only return results that use the same words and phrases.

The next time you sit down to write a blog post or a page of copy for your website, ask yourself: "how would my client say this". You may find that you'll need to incorporate actual questions into your headlines, or reword entire sections of copy. But the closer your copy matches the exact phrases being typed into a Google, Yahoo, or Bing search, the stronger your performance will be, in search engine rankings as well as conversions from new site visitors.

So if you, like us, are one of the millions of businesses that could not afford to run a $3 million, 30 second commercial during the Big Game this year, we've found some lessons from the commercial we feel was the most successful. Whether you agree or disagree, please leave your comments at the end.

If you didn't see the Chrysler/Eminem commercial during Sunday's game, watch the clip below and then continue reading.

Lesson 1: Be Honest & Upfront

Let's face it: Chrysler and Detroit have both been down on their luck for a long time. We've all seen the numbers, we've heard the stories, and we've watched the newscasts. So rather than ignore the truth and try to sidestep around the problem, in this commercial they've decided to attack it head-on. And it is brilliant.

With lines like "what does a town that's been to Hell and back know about luxury?", and "it's the hottest fires that make the hardest steel", they are acknowledging the current situation, and providing legitimate arguments to some very difficult perceptions. It's not that you should buy a car because you solely want to support Detroit, it's that you should buy one because you believe that the grittiness and drive of the people in this city have created the best car you can buy. And that's where facing the hard truth, and turning it on it's head, will result in sales.

Lesson 2: Tell Your Story & Make An Impact

This is not the fist-pumping, world-ignoring, 'America-is-the-greatest-just-because-it-is' rant we've heard in the past (we're looking at you, Glenn Beck). And it's not a blanket statement, like 'the heartbeat of America', that sounds good but doesn't really tell you anything. By filming the spot like a movie, slowly telling the story without clutter or noise, and bringing the viewer into the scene, they have made an impact that no jingle, tagline, or flashy message could have made.

Action Step for Businesses: Once you've addressed the concerns, hire a great copywriter to tell your story. There is a certain skill to portraying a message that will move people forward, and a professional copywriter will be worth their weight in gold.

Lesson 3: Speak To Your Audience

This is where they really nailed it.

At the end of the day, a great story can make an impact, draw people in, and change the way they think. But how do you turn that into sales, especially when the audience you're trying to reach is not the one who may be the most interested in your story?

By bringing in Eminem to close the commercial, Chrysler hit a home run. To those that know him (ie: the younger demographic that Chrysler is hoping will become the customer base to move them forward), Eminem is Detroit. So the match couldn't be more perfect. He portrays the grittiness, brutal honesty, and comeback-making persona that defines this ad. And he makes the Chrysler seem cool just by association. They don't have to say it's cool. They show it. And that's where this story becomes a marketing success.

Action Step for Businesses: Once you've mastered the above two steps, find a compelling way to show your prospective market. If they're looking for something cool or high-tech, use a flashy, fast, high-tech medium to bring it to them. Don't place a static ad in print just because that's the easiest way you can think to reach your audience, it won't work. If you need ideas on how to relate to your audience and create the marketing tools that will appeal to them, contact us for more information.

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.