Online Marketing for Local Business
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Content Is King – Part II
15 years
by admin
in Uncategorized
When talking about content, the first premise to consider is that for most companies, competing online via “new technology” has become more and more difficult. The truth is, regardless of company size, there can only be a select few winners in the contest to be the best “technology-driven” business online.
True, the technological lead sometimes changes hands, like it did away from AOL and MySpace to the current leaders in their respective fields. But those occurrences are becoming rare. Companies such as Google have gained so much mass, brand equity and momentum that it may be years before they are supplanted in any meaningful way. They won’t be handing off their lead in many categories anytime soon.
No, the way to compete today is by becoming a purveyor of content. Drive traffic to your website, platform or service by creating and sharing valuable information to your target audiences. Fill a niche market. Find a group or segment with unmet needs, and fulfill them.
And this is exactly what AOL and MySpace have done. AOL bought the blog network Weblogs, home to many popular blogs, such as Engadget and Joystiq; and they now employ over 3,000 freelance writers and more than 150 full-time journalists. And the AOL portal is still popular, and drives traffic to their many in-house publications.
MySpace decided to become a home for music and celebrity content. The platform is no longer about networking with friends, passing that baton to Facebook some time ago. They simply couldn’t keep up with the technological lead and overall user experience offered by Facebook.
So, MySpace is now focused on a wide variety of entertainment channels, and features a huge supply of new music and music videos. Their plans to offer Facebook Connect functionality clearly show how re-focused their business plan has become. They couldn’t beat Facebook in social networking technology, so they shifted to becoming a content provider.
So becoming a “destination” is the key to competing online, for almost every small and mid-sized business, and even for most large corporations. It should also be noted that we’re obviously talking about a continual and ongoing process for creating content, not a singular campaign or event.
And when analyzing the examples above, it’s easy to understand why content must also be “fresh.” Ask yourself the question: Would you read the exact same newspaper two or more days in a row? Probably not. You need to view your web content in the same manner.
Without ongoing content being added to your website, readers have no incentive to return. And though your website may be highly-ranked today, without fresh content being added the search engines will (eventually) simply move on to sites with newer information.
Ideally, this means you’ll have new content every time the search engine crawler (for SEO newbies, an automated program used to review websites) visits. You need to show the engines that your site is being actively monitored and managed, obviously a good thing in their eyes. This ensures the crawler always has fresh content to index, and new links to explore. It won’t ever see your site as “stale”, and decide to drop it in the rankings.
Your web content should accomplish 2 important goals:
1. The first is to provide clear, compelling information about your brand, products and services, to influence the buying behavior of visitors.
2. The second goal is to attract (and keep) the attention of the search engines, to build your potential audience and prospective business going forward.
Knowing exactly what keywords to focus on within your content is a conversation for another day, but SEO pros can analyze your business and let you know which words are the ones you should include in your content. But, once these keywords have been established, where can you find source material that can assist you in writing your web copy?
There are a number of effective strategies that you can use to generate your content. First, look around your desk or office, and you’ll probably see some marketing materials or sales tools that you have used to educate and solicit new business. This is an excellent place to start. If you send an email newsletter, or print and distribute a traditional version, that information should be shared on your website as well. Writing and distributing press releases online is another good strategy.
After you have found source materials, how do you share your content? Creating standard web pages is obviously one possibility. Starting your own blog and either writing it yourself, or hiring a freelance writer to assist you, is another winning strategy. A well-written blog can establish you as an expert within your business category; a “trusted advisor” that readers will consult with before making purchasing decisions. And having your own blog provides you with an open forum to share new developments and news items, sales, discounts and special promotions with your readership.
A blog also allows you to receive comments from your readership, which creates a more collaborative and interactive environment. This type of feedback is vital to understanding the changing wants and needs of your customer base, and responding appropriately.
Of course, we cannot ignore the massive amounts of new content generated on social media, including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. These networks also allow for a back and forth conversation with your most loyal customers and biggest brand champions, as well as your prospects. Your content communicates directly with your network, providing the opportunity for feedback, and also the opportunity for current customers to spread the message about your business with their other connections.
Hopefully this post helps to explain the vital importance of your web content now, and going forward. In future posts, we will explore some winning tactics that you can use to successfully create and share what you have created.
Open Rates
15 years
by admin
in Uncategorized
There different ways to measure the success of your email marketing or E-newsletter, but the most common and easiest understood metric is the Open Rate. Makes sense. If folks don’t open your message, they can’t be influenced by it!
But what about the simple brand awareness/recognition that you achieve by recipients simply seeing your piece in their inbox? (see, it’s complicated…)
So your open rate is obviously of supreme importance over the long term. It’s the first step towards “conversion”, whatever that may mean to you, and marketing success.
It is also fairly clear that you’ll never achieve a 100% rate, or anything close. Everyone’s time is too short and inbox too full for that to happen. But you shouldn’t spend much time worrying about the specific open rate, anyway. (What?? I thought you said it was vitally important a second ago? Bear with me for a moment.)
The reason the actual number is of limited significance is this: What constitutes a “good” rate? In comparison to what?
There are many different types of communications, both business-to-consumer and business-to-business. Business-oriented lists tend to have higher rates, partly because emails seen in the preview pane of Outlook (a common business email service) count as “opened”. Everyone has a different list profile, too.
If you send to a rented list of 100,000 people, and 10% (or 10,000) view your piece, that could be a smashing success. If however you send to your own personal house list of 50 addresses, and only 10 view your email (20%), you might consider this a failure!
What matters most is when or how your open rate changes from campaign to campaign. An increasing rate says you’re hitting the mark, a decreasing open rate points to a problem.
That said, there are certainly some tricks and tips that our writers have learned to improve open rates over time. We’ll share some of these in future posts to help you improve your rates, too!
Get The Balance Right
15 years
by admin
in Uncategorized
Which is more important for content, the ability to communicate directly with visitors… or the search engine rankings it creates?
On the one extreme, imagine a website (or blog post, etc.) that is complete nonsense gibberish. Maybe envision something written in Chinese characters, assuming that’s a language you don’t understand. Now let’s say these random bits of code or symbols somehow rank quite well with the search engines, the very first organic result in fact.
What have you accomplished as a business or organization in this case?
Sure, loads of people may stumble upon your website, but once they get there what do you think will happen? Do you think they will “convert” to customers?
On the other end of the spectrum, imagine a block of written text that is so eloquent, so persuasive… that once a visitor reads it, they instantly want to become a customer, or donor, volunteer, etc.
However, because of the way it is written, it actually has zero SEO value. As such, it is invisible to the search engines, and no one who doesn’t already know your website exists will ever find it.
What has your business accomplished here? This example is marginally better than the first one; at least you could tell folks about your site!
Now yes, both scenarios are on the extremes, and unlikely. But they illustrate an important point. A typical business should NEVER just design or write solely for SEO, because the whole purpose of (most) sites is NOT to simply get visitors, but to have them DO something once they are there.
And the reverse is also true, you should never completely forget about SEO, either. This means following some basic guidelines in your web design and structure, and making sure to include the right keywords within your content, among other things.
Get the balance between SEO and readability/functionality correct, and you have a website that can help you accomplish your organization’s goals now, and in the future.