Marketing Logic

The importance of words
Mao Tse-Tung understood the power of words when he wrote that “words are like little dynamite sticks in people’s minds . . . .” He was talking about communism, but the same holds true for marketing. Words are much more than labels, they are potential explosions that will connect and create an emotional response. Don’t let your website languish with wimpy, neutered copy. Create explosions with the power of words.

I Love Tractors!
I’ve been watching a few websites over the past few years. Watching the evolution of design and content on certain websites has always been a game, and a nice way to keep the pulse on the evolution of marketing on the internet.

The interest in the first was one spawned by Nick Usborne, after listening to his presentation on Writing for the Web in 2004. He showed the John Deere website that had promotional copy for the 4000 series tractor that was some of the softest, spineless, non-committal and vague content one could ever find. Don’t take my word for it, Nick’s caption for this example was “What has the reader learned?

The content reads:

Underneath their familiar green and yellow exterior isn’t just a redesign of the compact tractor, but a transformation. Where power is no longer measured by horsepower. Where implements practically attach themselves. And comfort is no longer at odds with productivity. One hundred and twenty improvements. Zero gimmicks. And countless firsts. These tractors are ready. 120 Improvements. Countless Firsts. Zero Gimmicks.

Neutered content
This content has no flavor, no meat. It’s boring and borderline ridiculous. They aren’t selling luxury cars here; they are selling tractors to people who have very specific needs. The funny thing is that I was in the market for a tractor, and this hit home. I was looking for something that I can get dirty tilling, mowing, digging and landscaping. Not something that looks nice on a glossy brochure. Plus the fact that NO attachments attach themselves – that’s just an out and out dirty lie. Power is no longer measured by horsepower? Please – that’s just insulting. Can it drag fallen Oak trees? Because that’s what I NEED.

Get More Done
Fortunately, things change and most times they get better. The new page for the 4000 series tractor makes so much more sense – as if they realized that people have needs, and this page speaks to it!

Content:

GET MORE DONE
With 133 attachments available you can:
Mow up to 20 acres
Till up to 5.5 acres
Lift up to 2728 lbs
Dig with a 36-inch bucket up to 8.5 feet deep.

Now that’s action – those factors speak to my needs for a tractor! This makes me excited, this allows me to envision the possibilities of what I can do, and creates the need for me to own this tractor.
On the down side, this amazingly explosive content is tied up inside of an image, rather than allowed to live on and propagate in an HTML format. Placing this content inside of a graphic keeps it contained to those who see the graphic. Allowing it to be HTML text allows it to be searchable and published in search results, copied, sent, and highlighted by those people who, like me, love this tractor stuff.

Words
The other site that I found a while ago was petsafe.net.
The homepage just struck me as soon as I found it, as it was very generic and totally image-focused. The main problem is that it was focused entirely on one image. Unfortunately, the navigation did not help this site, as the first navigational choice was “product information”. Now think about this for a second. The word product does not carry any power at all, it’s a generic word. The second problem is that the word is singular. There is no visual or contextual indication that there is an entire catalog of pet supplies. The large image dedicated to one product and the non-contextual navigation stop any user that does not have a need for that particular product. Nothing draws the viewer into the website.

Fast-forward a few years, and the new PetSmart website is miles beyond the prior installment. This homepage provides a clear explanation of the website:

Safe Pets. Happy Owners.
Awesome tagline! You know what they sell and what they are about in only a split second of looking at the page. The links and groupings allow people to instantly get into the deep content of the website, either through the pet product finder (relational links) or specific product links (utility links).

Thankfully, the navigation was changed to “Products” which is still generic, but plural, implying many more products are available through that link. The new page has much more emphasis on content, the customer testimonial is a nice bonus, and the content directs people to the importance of loving your pet. This connects on a different level, as you will buy products to protect and benefit your pet because you love them, not so much because you need to be sold into it.

I am assuming that the change in this site to this new homepage has made a significant impact of increased traffic and search engine rankings. By implementing more html-based content, it gives the search engines a little more ammunition for contextually classifying your website. But the best result of creating content that connects with readers is that it works. It provides benefits, ideas, answers. And that’s what people are looking for.

Creating Explosions

I love seeing companies get the content right on their websites. I don’t mean explode from the bulk of content, but exploding in relevance and power. Too many companies rely on spineless, filler content in the place of real words that have actual meaning. Customers aren’t looking for filler, they are looking for explosions that will motivate and inspire them to action.

Related Posts:
Search Engine Optimization Basics
Marketers Need to Learn Romance
Content v Creative: Where does the Customer Count?

Creating a Customer Experience

I attended the Small Business Marketing Unleashed conference at the beginning of this week fully expecting to learn a whole lot of good internet marketing information from a great group of speakers. And I did. However, I wasn’t expecting to become part of a warm, welcoming, and helpful community that extends beyond the two-day conference. But I did.

The Unleashed conference was all about community both in the sessions and the networking.

1. I was able to network with almost all of the other attendees and build lasting relationships with many of them.
2. The speakers emphasized building and marketing websites focused on the visitor, rather than the search engines.

Real-live handshakes, face-to-face conversations, and more than a few tweets
One of the pros of the internet is that we can easily connect with people all over the world. On the flip side, the con is that we spend more and more time online with virtual friends—and less time face to face. Working in the internet marketing industry naturally allows for a widely distributed client and colleague base, many of whom we never see. So I loved Unleashed because I finally got to meet many virtual friends and colleagues in person.

The crew behind Small Business Marketing Unleashed—Jennifer Laycock, Robert Clough, Rachel Phillips, and Vickie Evans of Search Engine Guide and Small Business Brief—were brilliant in starting off the conference with a speed networking and charity event. (Think speed dating with three minutes and business cards and no evaluations.) By “forcing” all of us to talk to each other, any speaker/attendee cliques that could have potentially formed were broken up from the start. Pushing us out of our comfort zones to meet new people on that first night made it a whole lot easier to do so throughout the rest of the conference.

• Internet marketers shared knowledge with business owners.
• Speakers befriended attendees.
• Neighbors asked and answered each other’s questions during sessions.
• Previously total strangers hung out talking about the industry and life in general until the wee hours of the morning.
• My Twitter tweet rate quadrupled at least as we are continuing the conversations now that we’ve returned to our homes all over the country.

As a result, I came away from the conference with a head full of knowledge and a contact list full of friends and resources willing to share ideas and input. And a whole lot of new friends.

Information-packed sessions with a focus on people
I was looking forward to Unleashed because it was a smaller conference (purposely) yet offered some of the best professionals in the industry as speakers. I knew the sessions would go into each topic in-depth and send me home armed with practical applications. And I wasn’t disappointed.

Sessions that stood out included:

Intro: SEO Success Pyramid by Matt McGee
During the overview session, Jennifer Laycock, Wendy Piersall, Matt Bailey, and Matt McGee set the tone for the rest of the conference. Jennifer made the excellent point that “search engines are like Pinocchio. They just want to be a real boy.” She meant that search engines continually try to think more and more like real people. Build and market websites geared focused on your visitors, and you will be successful in the search engines. This theme was carried on throughout the conference.

Matt McGee shared his SEO Success Pyramid, a great concept he recently developed to guide the SEO process. The pyramid has five levels:

1. The foundation: has nothing do with your website. The foundation is about preparing yourself for success by ensuring that you have a unique product, good customer service, etc.
2. The first steps: preparing your website for success. This includes design, usability, analytics, etc.
3. Nuts and Bolts: improving on your website with content, crawlability, and contextual links.
4. Reaching out: getting involved on other sites.
5. What its all about: gaining trust.

I loved this concept because it’s the same thing we preach at SiteLogic: SEO is about so much more than putting keywords in appropriate places. It’s about selling something people want, building a website that is easy to use, focusing your visitor on your goal, and building a good reputation that will have longevity. Download Matt McGee’s SEO Success Pyramid for free.

Website Architecture with Stoney deGeyter
Stoney broke his presentation into three main topics:

1. Domain and URL structure
2. Page and document structure
3. Link structure.

Stoney emphasized that the most important thing to keep in mind when building or maintaining a website is “Don’t make them think.” Make navigating and using your site as obvious and as easy as possible. If visitors can’t figure it out, they’ll just leave.

The session was filled with good technical information without being confusing to those who come from a marketing background. This laundry list of items of which to be aware is essential for any marketer or business owner who wants their website to be effective for visitors and search engines.

Building a Community with Wendy Piersall
Wendy shared methods for successfully building a community around your website. She said the most important thing to remember is WIIFM, or “What’s In It For Me?” This is the question visitors will ask themselves when they come to your website. If you answer that question well, they’ll stick around. Always remember to focus first on your visitor, and last on your own ideas.

Blogging For Business with Mack Collier
Mack, a regular contributor to Search Engine Guide and blogging expert, provided some great information in his speaking debut. As did many of the other speakers, he emphasized the importance of focusing on your visitors above all else. Mack’s elements of a great blog include:

1. content
2. posting schedule
3. comments
4. sidebar elements

Mack strongly recommends including a picture of you and a brief bio of you on your blog. Allowing visitors to really know who you are adds to your credibility and personality and encourages them to stick around.

He also noted that blogs are great for targeting long-tail keywords.

Keywords and Content with Heather Lloyd-Martin
Seeing as Heather practically invented the concept and has a witty, energetic speaking style, she was a no-brainer to lead this session and workshop. I appreciated her focus on writing copy that focuses on the visitor and helps them to understand and navigate your site. Heather strongly emphasized that people’s decision to purchase stems from an emotional connection. She also explained that shoppers are willing to pay more if they relate to your company. Building that relationship and trust is where small businesses can really shine. Thus, it’s essential to create that emotion through your website’s copy.

Heather’s power placements for primary keywords are:

• Headlines
• Subheads
• Benefits statement based on keyphrases
• Links and anchor text

Link Building with Debra Mastaler
Debra is the queen of link building, and I was really looking forward to the opportunity to learn the secrets of the trade from her. Between the day one session and day two workshop, she blew through a ton of great information. While my brain felt a little fried at the end, I walked away with a solid understanding of how to run a link building campaign and knew exactly how to get started. At the workshop, Debra provided a “blueprint” for link building with the best methods for getting started. They include:

• searching for authority sites
• directory submissions
• article directories and content sites
• press and media links
• utility linking
• social buzz

Viral Marketing with Jennifer Laycock
I attended the viral marketing and link building workshops back to back, and came away completely inundated with great information. If you needed to know what viral marketing is, how to plan and run a campaign, and how to choose the tactics that are best for your organization, you would have been completely prepared after Jennifer’s workshop. She talked about:

• the benefits and pitfalls of viral marketing
• creating the idea
• tips for creating and running a campaign
• types of campaigns with pros, cons, and examples
• identifying influencers
• and pitching bloggers

She so well prepared us in her presentation, no one even had to ask questions!

Off and running across the internet
We are all now back home and off and running with new and improved internet marketing campaigns and tactics. Needless to say, if you weren’t at Small Business Marketing Unleashed this week, you will not want to miss out on it next year! You can expect to come away with a plan for how to best market your website online and greatly improve your organization.

• Small Business Marketing Unleashed conference website
• SBMUnleashed photos on Flickr
• Live blogging recaps of conference sessions and workshops on Search Engine Guide

The New Speed of Mass Communication
The past few conferences and events that I have attended witnessed the party-crashing technology of Twitter. If you are new to Twitter and not sure what it is, or haven’t even heard about it, here is the best way to describe it: imagine seeing all of your friend’s Instant Message conversations with each other and you – and being displayed to the world. It’s a new way of communication that is transforming communications and the speed at which news, articles, happenings and events are passed.

What’s Twitter?
If you donlt know what twitter is, then I strongly suggest that you go through these resources. There are some very practical advice for using Twitter for Journalism, Marketing, PR, and Word-of-Mouth. This article is going to focus on the observations of twitter from a speaker’s perspective.
Jennifer Laycock’s Series on Twitter – One of the best for understanding the technology and the applications for “the rest of us”. From Twits to Tweeple, Why I Embraced Twitter and You Should Too

Ultimate Guide to Twitter Tools and Resources for Journalists

Lee Odden’s Guide to Twitter as a Tool for Marketing and PR

Twittering: A Speaker’s ViewPoint
As a conference speaker, I use the non-verbal communication of the crowd to determine if people are with me or not. Good amounts of my presentations are ad-lib and can go in vastly different directions depending upon how responsive the classroom or crowd is to me. Using that feedback is very valuable. In the past few presentations, people have been using Twitter via their laptop, cell phone, or iPhone. What is happening is that people are responding real-time to a speaker or presenter as a session is happening.

The Twitterbyte
My personal response is divided. While I enjoy the feedback and can go and review the “tweets” that happened during the session, it was very eye-opening to see what information gets twittered by session attendees. This made my realized that no longer can I focus simply on providing sound-bites for bloggers; I have to review my presentation to find the “twitterable” content.

Interestingly, the twitters by attendees fell into a few different categories. By order of my observation:
1. Off-handed and ad-libbed comments
2. Answers to questions posed during the session
3. Bullet points from the slides
4. Things that happened – (my Madden-style drawing stylus burned up in a session)

Speaker/Presenter Concerns
Interestingly many quotes from my presentation were put out on Twitter, but what was concerning is that the attribution I made to another author or blogger did not get published. The quote was published on twitter because I said it, but I was quoting someone else.

This happened at the Small Business Unleashed Conference this week, when I quoted Avinash Kaushik’s blog post about Analytics being 90% the person and 10% the software. What was twittered was, “Matt says analytics is 90% the person and 10% the program.” That type of attribution makes me shudder, as I quote people often, and I always try to include attribution in my PowerPoint slides or verbally. Neither the verbal nor the PowerPoint attribution didn’t make it into Twitter – maybe because of the character limitation.

I attribute as much as possible, as many times someone has said it better and simpler than I ever could. As a speaker it bothers me that many quotes and information can now be taken out of context on twitter, when they were properly attributed in the session.

Planning Twitterbytes
Now I feel the need to “Twitter-fy” my presentations and prepare for the inevitable Twittering of my sessions by planning “Twitterbytes”, along with the ‘sound bites’ for bloggers and note-takers. That means keeping more control of my ad-lib comments, knowing they could easily be twittered. Also, questions asked during a presentation get people’s attention, which makes it twitterable; and many times the person who asks the question will Twitter the answer. You may be surprised at what people latch onto and tell others. Be ready to give an answer or potential explanation for what was twittered. However, when the session is over, so are the tweets - as a speakers, you only get to see the feedback afterwards.

Other observations
One of the first ways that I saw Twitter coming of age was from the SWSX conference. During an interview of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg, Twitter came alive with people criticizing the interviewer, who was becoming the focus of the interview. The crowd turned on the interviewer and I was able to view a live status report from hundreds of “tweeters” attending the interview at SWSX.

Mack Collier provided some additional observations from SWSX. One session moderator twittered during the session asking if there was content that was not being covered in the session that attendees would like to hear. She was able to take the twitter responses and shape the questions to the presenters in order to follow the request of the crowd.

Twitterbyte
It’s the dawning of a new age, where information is condensed into the 140 character Twitterbyte and transmitted to hundreds, maybe thousands of people in seconds. And the sound bite, which was known for its stunning lack of context and depth, which transformed the video age (most recognized in the realm of politics) is now looking surprisingly detailed.

What is Engagement?

At the recent eMetrics conference in Toronto, Canada, I heard a number of people talk about site engagement. They all seemed to have their own idea of what it was exactly, but for the most part, it all had to do with time on site and page views.

Time on Site/Page Views Engagement

I heard the Director of Customer Intelligence and Analytics for a certain major software manufacturer say that they have such a successful site because people spend so much time on it, and look at so many different pages. I have my own idea about what that is called, and it is not engagement.

I think people spend a lot of time on his website because they have purchased the new operating system, are having problems with it, so they go on the the site to find help. They look at so many pages because they can’t find what they need.

Is that engagement?

Are visitors really engaged with your website when they are unhappy?

As an analyst it is always very tempting, and easy, to tell a client, “Look at that, people who searched for this term spent 10 minutes on our site, and looked at 20 pages. They are really being engaged on SuchAndSuch.com.” But let’s break that down. 20 pages in 10 minutes. That is an average of 30 seconds on each page. That is a decent amount of time on a page, but it’s a lot of pages. Did they find what they were looking for? Are they being engaged?

If this an e-commerce site, did it result in a sale? If they didn’t buy, they didn’t find what they were looking for. Were they engaged?

Successful Visitor Engagement

Now let’s look at another scenario. The average visit to a site lasts 10 minutes, and has 2 page views. That is 5 minutes on a page. They are obviously either reading, or watching video.

Who is more engaged? 20 seconds on a page, or 5 minutes on a page.

Now for the big question. If a visitor to your site is unhappy, and leaves unhappy, were they engaged?

I believe that engagement is something more than page views and time on site. It is deeper than that. It comes down to whether or not a customer on your site is successful , and found what they came for.

If a visitor is successful, they have been engaged.

If they are happy when they leave, they have been engaged.

If they found information they needed, they were engaged.

If they bought something, they most likely were engaged.

Measuring Visitor Success

Now you’re asking “Well, how do I measure engagement now?” That’s a good question. There are many companies out there offering to tell you if visitors are happy and engaged. Usually by using annoying pop-up surveys which defeat the purpose of wanting people to be happy.

You need to figure out what the purpose of your site is, then find out how you can make people happy. After that, you can start to find out whether or not people are engaged.

Are you still measuring engagement as time on site and page views? Or are you doing something new, exciting and different?