Marketing Joy

More Enterprise Internet Marketing Nuggets

Aside from being found, creating reliability, credibility and expertise is ultimately what will drive customers in the enterprise space to connect with your brand and ultimately to do business with you. How do you build such things?

Creating and maintaining a blog: 2-3 blog entries per week. This strategy has tremendous SEO benefit as well as building trust and credibility with the target audience. It carries little or no costs except blog set-up. If the blog is connected to your website (and dynamically displayed on various pages you wish to optimize, you now have an amazing SEO advantage because of the content updates happening a few times per week.)

Content generation: writing at least one article per month, adding new, fresh web content at least once per week. Again, great SEO benefit as well as user experience benefit by creating landing pages/keyword rich content within the website. Submitting rich content white papers/case studies can also be incorporated in this strategy.

Press releases (also known lately as SEO PR if you're focusing the effort on gaining online visibility versus traditional ink): put out at least one release per month. The exposure is valuable for visibility and credibility, and the SEO benefit is tremendous as well. You will need to budget for out of pocket expenses including draft, edits, and outlet submission costs, which vary depending on where you want to release.

These are tactics every business should consider to gain that all-important exposure to your customers who are searching online. Not sure how to get your online lead generation going? Ask us how.

The Case for Internet Marketing

The justification for prioritizing online marketing is simple: over 80% of enterprise customers looking for a product or service start their search on a search engine. Nearly ALL of those customers use Google to conduct their search. So why not throw your entire budget into search engine optimization (focusing on Google) and into Pay-per-click (focusing primarily on AdWords)?

Winning the online prospects isn’t as simple as what we call “findability”. While that’s highly important, there are some critical aspects of being findable:
1.    WHERE you’re found (your site, blog, article sites, etc.)
2.    WHAT is found (trends/insights, articles, press releases)
3.    WHEN you’re found (curiosity, research, purchase intent)
4.    WHO finds you (decision-maker, user, admin)
5.    HOW you’re perceived once you are found

Because findability is so important, the two main strategies in this arena plus some suggested quantifiable deliverables include

Search Engine Optimization (SEO): developing backlinks, 100 per month minimum, as well as improving the quality of those links is one key component of SEO. The other part of successful SEO is dynamic content generation. You should expect to constantly improve your current movement in Alexa Ranking (though this is NOT the be all, end all sign of success or failure in SEO). Most importantly, it is wise to focus efforts on best-performing key phrases from a CONVERSION stand point. Are the customers who find you in the natural results buying/contacting from the current key phrase initiatives? That's what we want to see.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) also known as Pay-per-click: Quite possibly your best strategy, pound-for-pound in your entire online marketing strategy. Through PPC, you have the most control, the most agility and the most data to work with. Metrics here are simple: increase conversions by increasing qualified impressions and click-through-rates; decrease cost per conversion incrementally month over month; introduce cross promotional targeting with other marketing initiatives and specific location targeting with relevant landing pages to create the right information and feel for your customers, depending on their needs and segmentation.

Lots more to come - but findability through search engines is an important place to start.

It's the New Year... Do you know where your ranking is?

With everyone clamoring to create New Year's resolutions about eliminating vices or getting organized, why not set a New Year's resolution for your business? THIS YEAR I WILL GAIN VISIBILITY to my customers in ways they can appreciate and recognize.

How can your customers find you? Are your customers looking for you in the Yellow Pages (probably not unless they are in one of a few specific demographics) or through word of mouth referrals? Most likely, someone, somewhere is searching for what you do on the Internet - and chances are, there's more than one! Can they find you when they search?

If not, perhaps it's time to make a list and check it twice to be sure that "findability" is a top priority for 2007.

Back to SCREAM

Marketing is being reinvented by the Internet. And while I don't recommend throwing out your old college marketing textbook, pay attention to how you can apply classic wisdom in a new era to get amazing results.

I suggest you operate by a set of princples I call SCREAM Marketing: Segment your markets, Create specific messages, Represent your brand, Execute your strategy, Analyze data and Measure everything online and offline. I'm a big fan of using a tool to its fullest - you see me constantly preaching about learning Adwords so you don't waste money on it. I believe the same thing is true of the web as a whole. Learn how to get every bit of usefullness out of it so you can make more for your business with less wasted advertising dollars.

So back to SCREAMing...

Segmenting. The days of a having a five-page website should be OVER. No longer should you be using a web formula that includes only Home, About, Services, News and Contact. One size does NOT fit all.

In this day and age, when we can so easily and affordably (often for free) add more pages and , it is incumbent upon you to treat your your prospective customers as individuals as much as possible. Recognize that you can speak specifically to your various client segments with different pages, different visual look and feel and even a different value proposition if need be.

I've worked with a company that determined that it has three distinct target audiences: Seniors, businesspeople (mostly men) and stay-at-home moms. They were using the same website to appeal to all three - even though the groups are drastically different. The first thing I suggested that they do is build three different sites so they can appeal to each to each group differently.

Your segmenting journey starts like theirs did: by figuring out WHO your target audience is. Identify the demographic, psychographic and geographic characteristics of your clients. When you start to know and understand your clients, you can better connect with them, build their trust, gain their confidence and count on their loyalty.

So once you start to understand your segments, you create customized marketing just for them. What does that entail? Pages within a website - or better yet - "microsites" (or what some would consider full-blown sites) that speak to each market. Now I'll admit, this can get very involved depending on your level of commitment! If you believe what I'm telling you about the effectiveness of this strategy, (which you should!!) and are very committed to the concept of segmenting, you can go through a process for each segment which includes creating the following:

• Branding
• Messaging
• Case Studies
• Testimonials
• Calls to Action
• Newsletters

When you do this, you've just taken your first step into larger world. You've taken the time and effort to communicate more individually with the people who PAY YOUR BILLS. And when you do this, you have just increased the chance that they will act (a/k/a BUY) because you "get" them and you "speak their language".

How do you implement this strategy without going crazy? You look at your the most profitable segment and build out that section, then move to the next most profitable, and so on. By segmenting and then acting on the information with targeted imaging and messaging, you'll be actively speaking "one-on-one" with your customers instead of passively communicating with a broad billboard.