Things just keep on developing in the trenches of the SEO, PPC, and Social Media skirmishes, which means Content Marketers and MarCom pros need to pay close attention to integration and convergence happening in different areas of inbound marketing. We’ll look at three Inbound Marketing Trends here, discuss what they mean, and look at some emerging tactics to help you take advantage and ride the wave.

“The average outbound lead costs $373. The average inbound lead costs $143.”

Click the graphic above for a good overview of "Inbound Marketing" by Voltier Digital

Note I used two marketing focus labels in the introduction — “Inbound Marketing”, and “Content Marketing”. The first looks at methods to get people to your website, while the second has at its core creating relevant and compelling posts, media and other forms of content. These two disciplines overlap in a number of ways, so in the interests of integration, I’ll add the umbrella term, “Connection Cycle Marketing“, wherein the authentic connections leading to sales are king. I mention this, because as we discuss emerging trends it is useful to think of first, ways to get prospects to your website, then how content engages them when they arrive, and finally how this process persuades these site visitors to become customers. Then you do it all again — that’s the “cycle” part.  With that in mind, let’s look at the three “Inbound Marketing” trends now.

Inbound Marketing Trends 1 – Inbound Marketing offers better results than Outbound Marketing

• HubSpot, the internet marketing company that offers both marketing analysis and software tools, reports that “The average outbound lead costs $373. The average inbound lead costs $143.”  For “outbound,” think old-school with collaterals like brochures and direct mail being produced by MarCom professionals and being sent out of your company to engage prospects.  “Inbound Marketing” involves all of the strategies and tactics for engaging prospects online and pulling them to your site — including SEO, SEM (Search Engine Marketing which often involves PPC), and Social Media Marketing — SMM.  Whew… there are all those TLA’s again (Three Letter Acronyms).  Once you get visitors to your site, you need to have engaging and compelling content, then use testing and engagement tactics including CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) and VBO (Visitor Behavior Optimization) — sorry… more TLA’s.
• What this Means: MarCom professionals now need to think about ways to pull in prospects instead of focusing on pushing out messages to them.  This applies not only to old-school printed marketing materials, but also in new social venues, where a lot of marketers are perpetuating a similar mistake and simply pushing messages out there too.
• Tactics: I’ve mentioned a number of tactics above, but I would sum them all up as using these tactics in your continual “Connection Cycle Marketing” practice, which of course is another TLA… CCM.   Bind all of these together with solid business outcome goals for your key performance indicators in your Analytics program, and make each tactic prove itself for ROI.  Used well together you will have a very powerful synergy for your Marketing efforts.

Avoid the “content bot” approach — auto posting just links to your content in social venues –  where possible.  Business social is about creating relationships — the emotional handshake that leads to sales, and for these you must be “authentically present”.

Inbound Marketing Trends 2 – PPC becomes more important for both SEO and Testing

• PPC — Pay Per Click ads — are becoming much more important for your connection cycle marketing work, in part because it is so easy to test value propositions, and also because Google has recently announced that it will no longer report the organic keywords used to reach your site — but it will continue to provide PPC related keyword reports.  Google said it is doing this for privacy concerns, but the net result will probably be more revenue via its PPC platform — Google Adwords.
• What this Means: You’ll turn to adwords keyword reporting when you are looking for keywords that are proven to engage your prospects.
• Tactics: Here are two tactics to use PPC in your overall Connection Cycle Marketing strategy:
  1. Test your value proposition (ie. My Service Saves Time, versus, My Service Costs Less) in headlines in PPC ads, then also in A/B tests on your landing pages (make sure your landing page messaging coordinates with the ads you place)
  2. Look for long-tail key phrases in PPC that are often more affordable (ie. if you are an HVAC contractor, a “longer tail” phrase would be “Air Conditioning Cost Reduction, Houston”, versus just “Air Conditioning Repair”).  When you find them, write compelling blog posts focusing on those key phrases.

Inbound Marketing Trends 3- SEO and Social Media Marketing (SMM) are merging

• Google has announced it is factoring “Social Signals” into its famous, never published, always updating ranking algorithm.  Of course Google+ will play a prominent role (hint:  get a Google+ account now — there are already thousands of prospects on the serve totalling over 60 million users).
• Rand Fishkin, CEO of the respected SEOmoz, commented on Google+ recently that, ” Content, search, social and conversion are all connected, and I don’t think any web marketer can be successful without combining these practices.”  He said that, “For many years, I thought I could just be an SEO.”  Not anymore.
• What this Means:  The concept of “SEO” — Search Engine Optimization — changes as Google, and other search engines add new elements to the formula, and as each element becomes more important.  In this case, Google can count what posts and other content people are liking, G-plusing, and social bookmarking.
• Tactics:  Set up goals and track specific referrals from social media venues, then how they track through to desired outcome goals (ie. download a whitepaper, fill out a lead form, etc.) at your site.  Avoid the “content bot” approach — auto posting just links to your content in social venues –  where possible.  Business social is about creating relationships — the emotional handshake that leads to sales, and for these you must be “authentically present”.  Since you can’t be in several places at the same time, you need an efficient tactic for your Social Media presence — WebFadds has an overview of one for you here.

Stay on top of these three Inbound Marketing Trends as you go about your work — note that HubSpot offers a good “Inbound Marketing” certification program (I went through the course, myself).  In this time of great change, ongoing education is crucial.  We have some more articles on Connection Cycle Marketing to help you.

Summary: As the beat quickens in the world of B2B SEO Tactics, we find new technologies like Apple’s SIRI voice search (“Find Local Plumber”, etc.), and PPC and Social Media become more important to SEO, knowing where to focus your SEO efforts is becoming essential.  I’ll cover some new trends, and give you some practical tips and tactics.  We include two SEO strategy videos, a WordPress how-to video covering SEO and other Content Marketing Tactics.

1) Apple’s SIRI Search Requires More Than a Website for SEO

Apple’s new voice activated SIRI search on iPhone (and soon the iPad) doesn’t much care if you have a website.  It counts, but you also have to have a lot of local citations in place for google reviews, at yelp, the BBB, and the local chamber — just about any relevant local business review site, so that SIRI thinks you are worthy (relevant).  This is mostly for B2B (“Find local plumber”, etc.), but for some B2B professionals too (“Find CPA”, “Find Law Firm”, etc.).

SEO Tactics for Content Marketers (local B2C):  Make sure you have a well presented Google “places for business“, and you are actively soliciting positive reviews (have a netbook or tablet on place for customers to write reviews).  Also… get on Yelp, and FourSquare when appropriate.

2) Smart PPC advertising with SEO equals a strong synergy for success…

PPC — Pay Per Click ads are becoming more essential alongside your SEO efforts.  Here are three reasons why:

1. You can learn some key insights for phrases that not only engage people… but for which they then visit your site and complete a desired business goal, like filling out a lead
2. Google recently reported that because of privacy concerns, it is going to stop showing key word referral data for visitors to your sites from logged in users for organic search, but not for PPC campaigns
3. When you are running an A/B test at your site to increase results, say you are checking which of two headlines on a contact page causes more visitors to send the firm, you can use PPC to send enough visitors quickly to that page to complete the test, and also make sure they are qualified visitors, more likely to be interested in your specific services and projects than random visitors.

Reference article: Integrating SEO & PPC: 3 Areas to Explore

3) What’s the true value of SEO work? (ranking #1 isn’t it)…

Is a first page organic search return valuable?  Yes.  But less so now that Google places maps on top of local search results (placing well on maps is more important in that case), and with other changes afoot.  So, how do you determine the true value of your SEO work?  Well, “long-tail” searching is more in play these days than ever, since other search modifications are causing prospects to type three to five words in their searches.  Look at the graph below:

You can get as far with less popular phrases (right side of graph) that convert well because visitors are qualified.

If you are chasing after the top single keywords for your business, you are in the green part of the chart at left, and spending a lot of green cold cash.  That’s where all the competition is, and that’s why it can take months to make an impact.  But look at the yellow area, and note it represents about the same about of area.  SEO translation:  when you go after a number of longer phrases by focusing on them in your business blog posts, you can do as well (and sometimes better) than becoming anal about popular terms.  Why?  You will spend less time and effort on them, but will still attract an equal amount of perhaps even more qualified traffic over time (keep on publishing). Read this article on “long tail links”.

SEO Tactics for Content Marketers – Tip:  You should also set up a custom Analytics reports that shows how well each blog post you write focused on a long-tail phrase persuades visitors to complete a desired outcome goal, like downloading a white paper.

4) FOCUS:  Let Yoast Coach You for WordPress SEO Tactics…

So how do you get ranked for those “long tail” key phrases?  Does SEO copywriting make your eyes cross, your head hurt, and frazzle both hemispheres of your brain?  No worries.  I just taught a “WordPress 201″ workshop at the Center for New Media in Langley, WA (lovely place on Whidbey Island — be sure to check into the excellent 2nd Annual Content Marketing Retreat coming up in January).  As I recommended to the students, you should take advantage of the excellent WordPress plugin for SEO by Yoast:

Above (click to enlarge), the Yoast plugin makes recommendations and coaches me on the "focus keyword" for this article — showing green for good practice items, and red where improvement is needed. Note the "Page Analysis" and "Advanced" tabs too. I have used several WordPress SEO plugins and this is by far the best.

And here’s a tutorial video that explains more about using the Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin:

5) How do you know where to focus your SEO efforts?

Still not sure where to focus?  Google makes some very helpful videos… here’s a short one that explains their concept of “relevance” and “importance” when it comes to ranking your posts and pages:

6) Learn to identify “Actionable” Analytics

One of the reasons we do custom Analytics reports for clients is because there is so much data, charts and reports in your Analytics that you can literally lose several hours and not have a clue about what it means and what to do. The key is to identify metrics which give you clues for direct actions you can take right now. Some excellent examples are bounce rate, number of pages viewed (engagement), top content, keywords/phrases used to reach your site, referring sites… and a key performance indicator (KPI) for your ROI is what content persuaded visitors to perform a desired business goal, like filling out a lead form. Want to dive even deeper? Watch this excellent video by Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz — another great NorthWest guru:

Contact us for a quote when you need focused SEO for Content Marketing and custom Actionable Analytics reports.

Neither a Committee, nor the "Boss" should design a website

When it comes to decisions on how to design a website, we usually work in a team involving one or two MarCom people from our client staff, a designer, a content marketing strategist, and programmer developers.  But who makes the final design calls?  From experience, I will tell you about two disasters when it comes to design decisions, and then who should design your website.

The Wrong Way to Design Your Website

1. By Committee –  we once had a a law firm client insist on making all design decisions during a round table discussion of people trained… in the Law.  As you can imagine, they made very poor decisions this way based on what they thought might work.  We did finish the job, but you can imagine if we hired the same law firm to represent us in court, then insisted that all legal decisions come from a committee of designers and developers, what probably would happen.
2. Your Company “Boss” Decides -  rarely does any boss have the skills and experience needed to make good decisions for both design, and user interface optimization, two related but separate disciplines.   Odd then, how often they think they do.  Even odder — they hire a team that designs and develops 15-30 websites a year, plus brings career design, usability, advertising and marketing experience to the table, then wish to over-rule the experts they hired at every step.  Luckily this does not happen often, but it does make you wonder why they hired professionals in the first place.

How to Design a Website — for Best ROI Success

I’ll give you two simple rules here that will pay off in business goal results (like leads), assuming you’ve set trackable business outcome goals for your sites.

1. Respect Design/Usability experts — These professionals know how to direct eye flow on a page, set the tone for corporate identity, develop clear and easy navigation, and produce persuasive content that will increase your desired business outcome goals on your site.  Period.
2. Your Customers/Prospects themselves trump the experts, the professionals, the committee, and gasp… the boss.  If the prospects are shown to download a white paper more often in an A/B test because the button was green, but everyone on the internal team likes the blue button… which are you going to choose?  It’s that simple.

Customer feedback on what works and doesn’t, through a number of different testing methods, must trump the “faith based” (I believe this will work) HIPPO (Highest Paid Person in the Organization) every time.

And since we’re on the web, there are lots of efficient and cost-effective ways to get key feedback from real users — in one word, always be testing. You can even do this before the coders start to build your site with both heatmap results and written answers to your UI questions (check out FiveSecondTest.com). Then, during launch a carefully designed A/B, or Multivariate test almost always pays off to increase ROI (see: WhichTestWon.com)

These test results should trump your Boss, your Designer, your Web Developer… and even your own opinion (I am consistently surprised at results, even after a long career in advertising, marketing and publishing).

Three Final Website Design Tips:

• Always tie your design into trackable business outcome goals at your site (contact us to help you develop some custom analytics reports to help you do this)
• There is no “best practice” to be derived by reviewing other tests because your mix of goals, offers, value propositions, and prospect personae’s are different
• The “design” is not finished when you reach first implementation… in fact, it is never finished. Via testing both B2B and B2C companies continually improve their results by testing color, type, placment, image, and message variables on a regular basis.

And in case you’re still wondering what to do when the boss or the committee asks for an unreasonable change at your website, tell them you will test their idea, and let the customers decide.

Live in Cleveland at the excellent Content Marketing World 2011 Conference one of the most important questions you can ask is how fascinating is your Content? This is another way of asking does your blog engage visitors, or are they bouncing?

The "GodFather of Conent Marketing," Joe Pulizzi takes the stage at Content Marketing World 2011 in Cleveland

Ok. You don’t want your Content to suck. How do you make sure of it? Keynote speaker, Sally Hogshead, author of Fascinate: Your 7 Triggers to Persuasion and Captivation, has some great ideas for that. She related the story of a ride at Disneyland which offered an Orange ticket for the dangerous version, and a Green ticket for the other version. If you choose the Orange ticket, you get a sickness bag and other cautions. People tweeted, messaged, and sent pics for that version. After Hogshead rode that dangerous Orange version of the ride, she went back and rode the Green version. It was the same exact ride. Same content.

I had a friend once who was quite good at sales and with people skills. If you asked him a question, he could have simply answered it by giving a couple of examples. But instead, my friend would clap his hands together and then separate them with both index fingers held straight up. “Two reason, Mr. Frangos,” he would say, perfectly timed with his fingers. Captivating.

Does your Content do that? The answer comes when you get to the bottom of what you are in business to do online. Publishing? Sure… but the point is you are also in… entertainment.

Here are five more key Content Marketing take-aways from the conference, which I look forward to attending next year:

1. To analyze how your content is performing (from a Keynote discussion with Brian Clark of CopyBlogger.com, and Michael Stelzner of SocialMediaExaminer.com): take a look at Page Views, Comments, and Retweets (in more than one venue, with emphasis on Google+ as an up and comer), then… follow your intuition — it’s a science and an art!
2. To drive results — work backwards from a desired action at your site(s), like getting leads, and set up your content to lead people in that direction.
3. Blog vs. White Paper?  Ardith Albee, author of eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale, (recommended) has this advice when you are considering what format for a release of important content:  “It’s not about the format… it’s about the content.”  I think she is spot on, though it does bear some consideration how a White Paper might be seen as more “portable” in terms of getting people to email it around in a viral fashion.
4. Deploy “Momentum Accelerators“:  Also from Ardith Albee, another gem — think about ways to build momentum with your content including follow on offers, and “conversational take-aways”, where you imagine a prospect in a corporation walking out of his/her office and going down the hall to another decision maker to share with some excitement an insight and solution tip they learned at your site.
5. Deliver the Truth:  Finally, one of my favorite lines from the show came from comedian, writer, director, actor and producer, Kevin Smith (recall his character, “Silent Bob” from the “Clerks” series of films).  Smith left us with this thought during the closing Keynote:  “If you want to really stand out in this world… you have to be honest.”  He said he has a little prayer before he goes on stage where he asks, “God, let me be honest.”  How honest is your content?

Bob Leonard of acSellerant is a WebFadds associate who I work with regularly. We work together on both WebFadds projects and on other “virtual marketing agency” teams. So I thought it would make sense to interview him… to get his thoughts on current client marketing needs and solutions. Bob is a career marketing services professional with significant experience in the B2B technology marketplace, and a deep skill set in content and online marketing including SEO copywriting and multi-media.

Scott: Bob – What’s your primary focus?

Bob Leonard – Content Marketing Strategist and WebFadds Associate

Bob: We work exclusively with mid-sized B2B technology companies. They typically don’t have the internal resources to consistently develop high quality content. Some have had bad experiences with ‘content farms’ that are low-priced, and deliver poor quality. As a result, many prospects come to us after they’ve suffered significant damage to their brands and reputations. Others have had bad experiences with advertising agencies that focused on branding and paid advertisements. The results there being large fees for the agency, but no increase in revenue for the B2B.

We fill the gap in between those two ends of the spectrum with high quality content that is relevant and useful to our clients’ prospects. Prospects consume the content because they want to, and in the process they learn how our clients’ solutions can help them. It’s a way to nurture leads without being intrusive. The quality reflects well on our clients… positioning them as trusted advisors.

What do you see as the current crucial requirement for B2B Marketers?

A blog post I wrote recently for the Content Marketing Institute titled ‘Crossing the Content Chasm’, struck a nerve. The basic premise, that there’s a significant gap between where most marketers are with their inventory of content and where they need to be, resonated with readers.

Along with the increasing demand for quality content, there’s also a shift away from traditional text-based content toward multi-media. Almost all business content is consumed online today. Busy executives won’t read, for example, a 12-page white paper explaining a complex technological solution. So we need to deliver that same information in a multi-media format that’s quick and easy to consume.

At acSellerant we’ve developed a process that helps us to do that. We call it: Strategy, Story, Storyboard, Sequence, Socialize. You’ll have to interview me some other time so I can go into the details around the process.

What are your thoughts about the new Google+ Social Network?

You know a lot more about it than I do. From my perspective, it looks like a Content Delivery platform. For the B2B marketplace, once Google extends the business aspects of the platform, it should be an effective tool for delivering the right content in the right format to the right people at the right time.

That’s a mouthful! We’ve come to the end of the interview, Bob. Want to leave us with a few B2B marketing tips?

Sure. Getting back to content… what’s relevant and useful to one person is irrelevant and useless to the next. So you need to know exactly who you’re target audience is. You should rework your content to make it appeal to different targets who may influence a buy decision. In other words, if both the VP of Sales and the CFO will have a say regarding whether to buy your solution, make sure you talk about how it will help generate leads (or close deals) when addressing the VP of Sales, and make sure your focus is on the payback and ROI of the solution when focusing on the CFO.

Also keep in mind that prospects will have different questions and objections at different stages in the buy cycle. For example, in the beginning they’ll want to know about your company’s reputation and experience with their industry. Towards the end of the buy cycle, they’ll be more interested in integration issues and terms of the contract.

There are a lot of conferences, books, and blogs focusing on how to succeed in an ever  quickening online mashup of websites, social media venues, and smartphone and tablet apps.  At WebFadds, we focus on having a smart Content Strategy, then follow it with proven methods to review and revise your tactics.  Here’s an overview for you.

What is your Content Marketing Strategy?

CMS Wire has a great post in which a succinct formula for content strategy is presented.  Here’s how I would boil it down:

Specific Content, for a Specific Target Group = a desired Business Outcome Goal, because of a Specific Method of Motivation.

Let’s examine each.

• Since the goal of content is to engage with prospects and customers, you need to understand who your typical site visitor and end customer are. In B2B, this may be specifically defined something like this: “a mid-career purchasing professional in XYZ industry.”
• Next — you need Specific Content for those specific target group(s). Yes, I know I am showing it second here, and that’s because you have to understand your target well before you produce content. In fact, you have to also understand what motivates them (final formula item) too. In our example here, for a mid-career purchasing professional, you know that looking good (ie. for promotions) motivates them, so you need to develop content that speaks to how you solve both their industry need, and imply how that makes them look good.
• Next — what are your B.O.Gs? I have written about that in a series at Content Marketing Institute (see: this post ), so I’ll summarize here: a  B.O.G (Business Outcome Goal) are what you would like visitors to your website to do that moves them closer to becoming a customer. Examples include getting newsletter signups, white paper downloads or leads from a contact form.
• Finally, what is your M.O.M.? When we are young, often it is our Mom that inspires (try out for that group, etc.), and motivates (time to clean up your room, or else, etc.). So, ask yourself what is the M.O.M. — Method Of Motivation — to get your prospects to act and complete a desired business outcome goal? Hint: all successful advertising professionals know that people act on emotion — not simple logical facts and bullet lists. Cultivate the desired emotions in your content that compel people to act. I will write more about this as we go.

Outcome Improvement: Review and Revise your Content Strategy

How do you test and improve your strategy and tactics? Two methods: Actionable Analytics, and optimization tactics (not only SEO — add VBO, LPO, and CRO — see my article on it here: Three Tests to Optimize Your Website: VBO, LPO and CRO ).  I’ll write more about that here, and I think you will find a number of practical ideas in my article series at Content Marketing Institute.

Eweek has an interesting post about what is driving Data Analytics. In it they covered the following ten factors that go directly to why you need a smart and routine method of reviewing and tweaking site performance via Analytics review. Here are what I believe to be the top 5 — restated for clarity:

• Explosion of Devices: There are more than 1.8 billion people on the Internet with 4.6 billion mobile phones and millions of tablets.
• Movement away from SQL databses = new ways to review data
• Rise of Real time analysis of analytics data
• “Adaptive web” observes engagement patterns among like-minded individuals to understand user intent, then automatically adapts the online experience to the individual
• Social marketing is letting companies run campaigns that include social sites.

There you have it.  Focus on Content Marketing strategy.  Focus on tactics with smart review methods.  Get going.

One of the best things you can do to wring more ROI out of your website is to optimize for desired business results like sales leads.  Few clients are doing this yet.  Why?  Not in their habit path, no one understands it, or sometimes even worse — they are making faith based assumptions (“I think this is going to work”) and gambling their web results on guesswork.  WebFadds provides testing services, and to help you understand more about them and how to be successful with them — here are some strategies and tactics with visuals to help:

• Measurable Desired Business Outcome(s):  What is the desired, and measurable result that your MarCom team  wants?  For B2B, this is often leads generated via a lead form, and to track conversion rates, we need a unique “thank you” page that a prospect sees only after filling out the form.  Sometimes it’s “engagement.” Sometimes a download of an important White Paper.  We can’t improve results unless they are well defined and trackable.
• General Factors that Improve Results:
  • The clarity and strength of your value proposition:  Often, clients are unclear on the question of why choose this company and its product or service.  Another mistake is to believe that visitors will choose to surf the site and figure out their value –not true and dangerous for two reasons:  they may not take the time to do this, and even if they do they may take the time, they may form a very different concept of value about your company,  its services and products.   State the value clearly on the testing page.  You have the opportunity to help them visualize and “feel” good about your company — take it.
  • Reduce “friction”:  Anything that feels too hard or takes too long = friction.  Longer forms do not convert as well as shorter forms.
  • Reduce “anxiety”:  People worry about the credibility of a company, and what they will do with email and other personal information.
  • Increase motivation:  Promise them something like a free white paper, etc.

Types of Tests

• VBO – Visitor Behavior Optimization: In VBO, we are interested in the “Why” of visitor behavior, beyond the “What” we get from Analytics. Sometimes “Where” too. One popular method here is to get a heat map of where people click on particular pages, then ask they questions that get to the “why” for the behavior.  This is good to test a design before you even implement it, because the visitors are just reacting to a JPG of the page.  Another type of VBO test you can take is an exit survey to help you answer the “Why” of visitor behavior.  Analytics answers “what” your site visitors do and don’t do, but not why — so the best thing to do is simply ask visitors questions that help you understand more about their behavior relating to your desired business outcomes.
  
  Above are some results of one kind of VBO test we did for Content Marketing Institute , and  for International Performance Group (Click to Enlarge).  It provided feedback on where people tend to click on the page (heatmap at left), and also what they remembered and believed the site to be about.
  
• LPO Landing Page Optimization:  This is probably what I will recommend for this client based on your comments.  Here we focus on improving desired business results on only one page.
  • We work with either Google Website Optimizer, or another good option Visual Website Optimizer.  Each offer certain strengths — VWO offers a WordPress CMS plugin, for example.
  • A/B Test: Here you are testing two separate page designs.  This requires a complete separate design for each page, and approximately 1000 unique visitors for a valid test (see next point).  Google has a short video example:
    
    
  • Multivariate Test: Here you only need one page, but you test different combination of persuasive elements on that page to optimize for desired business outcomes.  One popular set to test is:  Two Headlines, Two Persuasive Images, and Two Calls to action.  You would then be showing six different page element combinations to visitors, so you would need 3000 unique visitors for a valid test (see next point).  Google has a short video example:
    
    

• CRO – Conversion Rate Optimization: This one is similar to the nature of LPO in that you are interested in increasing the number of desired business outcomes, called “conversions” in analytics (when a visitor completes a lead form they “convert” from a visitor to a prospect). The main difference here is that you usually will take a series of pages into consideration — the sales “funnel” leading from your home page to a secondary page to an actual desired outcome page, for example.
  Above (click to enlarge) is a “funnel visualization” (series of pages leading to a goal) for a client that would like to have more visitors download their whitepaper.  CRO often involves looking at which pages are not functioning well to get visitors to complete a desired business outcome, and here one problem is the homepage.  They have no call to action on their home page to funnel visitors to this goal.
• Number of Visitors to get a Valid LPO Test: Think 1000 for an A/B test (500 interact with each page), and 3000 for a 3 element Multivariate Test (500 visitors interact with each of six page element combinations).  Google adwords is an excellent way to gather visitors for a test (figure .50 cents average per click, or $500 for 1000 visitors plus management fee).  CRO tests may require move visitors.  We can give you a quote on managing your PPC ad campaign.

Two Final Pieces of Optimization Test Advice:

• Always be testing — drive this tactic into your marketing culture, and you will definitely see an increase in ROI.
• Avoid the HIPPO (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion), because at best when a C-Level Manager says “I think this will work”, you are gambling on faith instead of asking your prospects and customers directly via VBO, LPO, and CRO testing.

Read more here:  WebFadds VBO-Max Services |  Contact us today for a quote.

Last week I wrote about how Content is the Kings’ Gold… but not the King. In that post, I promised I’d write a bit more about “Authentic Connections”, and different kinds of Optimizations that the King can use  as he or she pays out the gold.  We’ll get a big picture feel for how this works here.

Connection Cycle Marketing:  Online marketing continues to rapidly evolve and so do the related TLA (Three Letter Acronym) disciplines of SEO, SEM, CRO, LPO, VBO, etc. All are part of the marketing mix you need for success, but there must be a simpler way to think about going about it?  Yes… and no — we’ll look at the bigger picture here — the “Yes” part because it’s simpler. 

I like to include them all together under an umbrella term I call Connection Cycle Marketing — CCM.  The important point about this focus is that Connection, between you and your prospects, is the real King you are after.  You are King of your business, but your prospective customers are King of your livelihood, so while Content is very important (your Gold) it is a kind of currency you pay out to get to that final goal — the authentic Connection with site visitors.

“… you think in terms of optimizing visitor behavior at your site — a subtle but very important strategy.  You want to optimize for what visitors will think, instead of just what you want them to do.”

Understand Using the Rule of Fours…

Let’s consider high level strategic thinking by grouping tactics four ways.  People seem to like grouping things in fours, going back thousands of years.  We have the Greek concept of four primary elements, four Apostles, the four noble Truths in Buddhism, and the four Horsemen of the Apocolypse.  We will look at three interesting “fours” for Connection Cycle Marketing.

1 – Optimize. 2 – Connect. 3 – Convert.  4 – Repeat. That’s the first “four” approach — the WebFadds rule of Four.  Optimize includes not only SEO, but also Landing Page Optimization, and Conversion Rate Optimization.  Plus you need an optimized CMS — another TLA standing for Content Management System. SEO gets people to your site, and the others make sure they complete desired business outcomes.  Then you Connect with visitors so that you may Convert them to customers.  What did I leave out?  Well, it’s implied that if you’re optimizing something at a website, it must be Content.  Let’s look at that closer in the next grouping of fours…

1 – Social Media Marketing.  2 – Content Marketing.  3 – Optimizations.  4 – CRM for Lead Nurturing. Now we start with Social Media and seek to connect there with real people, gaining an “authentic connection” instead of simply auto-blasting links to posts and content on your site.  We use good Content marketing tactics to further “romance” prospects “authority, liking and reciprocity”, as Scott Brinker writes about it – in Four Principles of Conversion Content Marketing. Then we convert, often with a lead form, and while they are prospects we use a CRM (this TLA stands for Customer Relationship Manaager) for lead nurturing.

One More Group of Four…

Brinker's Post-Click Marketing Heuristic (click to see larger), is a good way to work through a Marketing attack keyed to audience types.

1 – Audience Type Awareness.  2 – Content to Persuade each Audience Type.  3 – Visitor Behavior Optimization (VBO).  4 – Transform Leads to Customers. A couple of key differences in this fourfold approach:  you begin by understanding different types of visitors with different learning styles, needs, and thought processes will visit your site, then instead of thinking about optimizing a site… you think in terms of optimizing visitor behavior at your site — a subtle but very important strategy.

You want to optimize for what visitors will think, instead of just what you want them to do.  This requires some different testing methods, and design tactics.  Scott Brinker, again, has some very interesting related insights and has developed a detailed chart in a post on “A Post-Click Marketing Heuristic.”  He identifies three major focus areas in his chart:  Context, Content, Conversions (I guess that would be CCC).  I like his work, but respectfully submit that he has left out the whole unification of the web team with the sales team via quality of lead captured and automatically entered into a good CRM. Finally you need feedback from Sales to MarCom-Web Team so they can adjust tactics based on sales results.

This should give you some good ways to approach CCM, and all the other TLA’s.  We’ll talk more about them here as we go, and I look forward to your thoughts and comments.

On the road back from a great “retreat” conference on “content marketing” and “the power of story”, I thought about how important good content is for everyone with a web presence. After a number of good discussions in the quaint island Inn, over lunch, and at dinner, I was also reminded that what really matters happens in the connections you make outside the conference presentation rooms.  So, right now, I want to tell you, how creating great content is your gold… but not your most important goal.

The conference  keynote, given by Joe Pulizzi (a client and colleague — check out his blog and post about 10 reasons your content stinks, and how to fix it) set the tone for an excellent focus on what it takes to create, deliver, and market great content. That’s essential. But as I have written for some time now (see “Why Content is King No More“), people do not buy from content — they buy from people that they feel they know.

“Content is not authentic connection, so recognize what is and optimize your sites for the behaviors that will result in authentic connections as an outcome goal.”

There were some excellent conference presenters who spoke of video content, and telling personal stories — excellent ways to help people to feel they know you. The point was made that journalists can and should have a role in creating compelling content. But it was conference organizer, Russell Sparkman’s presentation that brought two key concepts into focus for me. First, he used the analogy of content as Gold. It’s valuable, and also “conductive”. Second, he has suggested a great content creation calendar (see Sparkman’s post about the 1-7-30-4-2-1 strategy) that involves systematic creation of posts, tweets, newsletters, white papers and studies. Creating content requires discipline (so does making connections). If content is gold for you, and I believe good content always is, then you have to keep building it up in your storerooms.

But content does not equal authentic connection — that is, a real live “handshake” with another business person. And simply auto-sending links to content in social venues doesn’t make those connections either. Being social means connecting with other people, not connecting with content.

Content is Gold, Authentic Connection is the End Goal

So, here are some key take-aways after a review of the conference:

• Content is gold, cultivate and manage it wisely (all presenters stressed this)
• Content is a “promise” (Pulizzi), so schedule it and have discipline in regular creation (ie Sparkman’s Calendar)
• Content is not authentic connection (Frangos), so recognize what is, and optimize your sites for the behaviors that will result in authentic connection as an outcome goal
• I encourage my colleagues and clients to add authentic connection tactics (real-time conversation at LinkedIN and Twitter, visitor behavior optimizations, and landing page optimization tests, for example) to their calendar and list of tactics for connection cycle marketing. Check some posts we already have about optimization, and  I’ll blog more about that here.

And now you see why I place Content as the King’s gold — not the King. But then who’s the King? It’s you. You yourself are the King, and content is your gold. That gold you create is a valuable commodity that people want — great if you’re selling content. But if you are using content to sell a product or service then the end result you want is Connection. Spend your gold wisely to cultivate Connection.

How many leads has your content produced for you on average over the past six months? Puzzle on that. Then, I encourage you to contact me direct, so we can connect and find some answers.

Web Engagement, Social Marketing Tip, and Visual Optimization

On today’s web, it’s all about Engagement and Connection.  In fact, Connection now trumps Content (see why in Why Content is King No More)  as the most important part of your marketing tactics.  Connection to who?  Prospects, leads, and customers.  One on one.  Think of this like what your sales people do at a tradeshow.  They engage booth visitors and get to know them.  People buy from those they know.  That’s the promise of Social Media, and many national brands have already proven this — two times in a row, SouthWest Air has had its highest ticket sales ever, from promotions that only happened on Twitter.  So… what is your “1:1″ marketing strategy?  In this post, I’ll give you some tips, tactics and techniques to help you. One big key — insights into your potential customers. Learn more about 1:1 marketing strategies and tactics from Marketing Experiments (highly recommended) – One To One Marketing.

Another new TLA — W.E.M., Web Engagement Management

Ok… so how do we engage and learn more about our prospects?  How about yet another TLA — Three Letter Acronym.  Tired as I am of TLAs, I like what this one is about… WEM — Web Engagement Management.  In a great post on the “5 Pillars of W.E.M.”, writing at CMSWire, Barb Mosher identifies them as:

1. Content Optimization
2. Multi-Channel Management
3. Conversational Engagement
4. Demand Generation
5. Sales & Relationship Automation

More on each point in future posts, but the key is that all five are required for an effective Web Engagement strategy.  Read the source article here:   5 Pillars of Web Engagement Management

Social Marketing Tip with HootSuite

So, let’s look at a tactic to address two WEM “pillars”:  Multi-Channel Management, and Conversational Engagement.  Time is a scarce commodity in most MarCom departments, and especially during this time of rapid social technology change.  That’s why I like HootSuite for its team workflow and cross platform engagement automation features.  So, my tip of the week is show below — use HootSuite’s “hidden” ability to profile tweeters:

Above (click for larger view), using Hootsuite to first monitor important business conversations, we can then learn more about a prospect by clicking on their photo/logo, then clicking on “view more tweets from…”.  Use this tactic to find out how influential the prospect is, and what their major interest focus might be.  Contact us to explore ways to use this engagement tool in your 1:1 marketing strategy.

Visual Media Optimization for Your WordPress CMS

With millions of smartphones, and now over 2 million iPads sold with more “tablets” on the way, now is the right time to consider your visual media methods of engagement and persuasion on your site.  We develop successful CMS solutions on the WordPress platform and are always looking for good ways to do this, so I’m pleased to recommend a versatile way to do that — with one note of caution.  Slideshows are great visual ways to explain B2B technical concepts in a persuasive and easy to understand way.  Consider the slides we did for a recent client, Lopez Research (click small image at right to see site).  This is a simple and effective way to present what you do in a way that engages emotions.  Remember — everyone makes a buy decision based on emotion.  What’s the caution?  Well, right now Apple has said they will not use Flash on their platforms, and most slideshows are done using Flash to drive them.  We look for new emerging standards in HTML 5.0 to break through this wall soon.

Above, a new plugin offers you the ability to show images that zoom and pan, while text explains the concept pictured and gives a link deeper into your site content.

Have a Web Engagement Management challenge you’d like us to review?  Great — contact us today and we’ll do a free review.

WebFadds is an Agency specializing in CMS Websites and Business Blogs, plus Marketing techniques optimized for Connection Cycle Marketing — CCM. We focus on delivering SEO savvy, Content Management System solutions on the market-leading WordPress platform, then provide Social Media Marketing (SMM) and Landing Page Optimization services to ensure you get maximum visitors converting to prospects, leads, and customers.