Social Media Forum Review

Rick Burnes of HubSpot on Inbound Marketing using Social Media

A forum hosted by BTV Social Media Breakfast Club

Twitter account: @rickburnes

Here are my notes (and some elaboration, corrections, and expansions on my part; very little editing or checking was done)

1. Interruption marketing is the old media model
2. Inbound marketing takes time but eventually saves money for a business (Inbound marketing being defined as providing great content, surrounding the content with on and off page search engine optimization, and letting your customers and prospects find you)
   Invite people into your website instead of “interrupting their lives”
3. Rick made a big mistake by declaring unabashedly that ALL traditional media is dead. He got hammered b/c he suggested that all traditional marketing is bad and online is the only way to go
4. Including direct mail and Pay Per click that don't work effectively
5. While I think Rick goes too far to suggest that internet marketing is the only way to go, I wish all my clients had been there to hear how effective and inevitable a content rich web presence is for all businesses if they want to compete in the long term.
6. I suggested to Rick and in my opinion it is more accurate to suggest that it is the effectiveness and ultimately the return on investment of traditional marketing that is diminishing. That on the rise is online marketing which includes providing lots of free content about your industry and business and your specific business approach.
7. I went on to tell him not to trash traditional marketing but talk about the trends in marketing. Traditional marketing still works but the trends all point to a diminishing return on investment. Starting now with online marketing means you'll be a player down the road when the trend lines get more severe.
8. There was a lot of conern in the audience about the quality of writing (the “I can’t write” problem) Writing content for the web does not have to be elegant. Just use the same language you use to sell your services, promote your products, and talk to your customers. Start a conversation about what you know. It does not have to be complicated.
9. As you live your life and business, put yourself into the content mindset.
10. Repurpose every interaction in your business into a content opportunity.
11. Probably the strongest analogy that Rick made was the Lottery Ticket. It's all about content. Each page or article of content from your website that appears in the search engines is a lottery ticket. Would you rather have the same 8 static pages as lottery tickets or a 100 new lottery tickets per year as you write 2 blog posts per week about your business?
12. Every business is different in terms of measuring success of your online presence. What are the metrics for your business? Customers? Subscribers? Diners? Do you make large one time sales? Do you have recurring revenue clients? Set your metrics and then measure them (and he wants you to use HubSpot).
13. Rick finished by giving a relatively subdued pitch for the $250 per month HubSpot online marketing software. $3000 per year might seem steep but if you were able to prove positive ROI (return on investment) on the $3000, it would be worth it.
    
    Questions from the audience:

Question: I use direct mail. It works. Why should I stop?

Rick: Online is better. Which was not a great answer. What he should have said…keep doing direct mail. But put effort into online marketing and continue to measure the return on investment for both channels. Over time, you will probably learn that the online marketing approach will provide much higher rates of return.

And in fact, use direct mail to build your list of email addresses so that you can continue to follow up with your direct mail prospects for almost nothing with email marketing.

Question: Must a business have your own blog on your own domain?

Yes. And I agree with Rick. Absolutely. That doesn’t mean that you might not put the same blog entries (or a shortend version pointing back to your main website) on a blog hosted at blogspot or wordpress. But you want all that wonderful blog content to be credited to your main Domain (aka, website address or URL or URI).

Question: Do I need a website and a blog?

Rick didn't answer this as we ran out of time. However, a blog can in fact act as a website. They can be one and the same. However, the blog format does not always lend itself to providing some of the basic information about your business nor advanced functionality that a full website can offer. Having just a blog is always better than nothing and some blogs are hard to differentiate from full websites! And a blog is always better to have than to have a web site that never gets new content or updates.

That’s all for now. I will surely touch on these topics more in the future. Content is king!

Please contact me if you have any specific questions about these issues.

Santa Night Black Tie Event

The Vermont Agency Foundation is holding a Black Tie Event to support the Santa Night mission in St Albans, VT, Burlington VT, and Plattsburgh, NY along with the Common Ground center.

Not only is Vermont Agency a client of Vermont Design Works, they have been strong supporters of the Santa Night mission to help children and families during the holiday season.

This is our 12th year of running Santa Night in Burlington. The Burlington event is on Friday December 18th while St Albans and Plattsburgh are set up for Friday December 11th. 14 other cities around the country are also running their events on the 11th with the exception of our newest Santa Night City, Montclair NJ. Welcome!

Thank you to everyone for your ongoing support of Santa Night and its mission to become the largest 1 day fundraiser in the world!!

Advanced Landing Page Strategies for Higher Pay Per Click Conversions Webinar Summary

Not a bad little webinar. Ion Interactive is promoting a tool to make it easy to create and test Landing Pages. Briefly, a Landing Page is the page that a web visitor sees after clicking on a Pay Per Click ad.

The essential premise of the webinar is that most PPC campaigns are flawed because more often than not, the landing page of a PPC ad is the home page of the web site. This is a horrible idea (except for a specific search for a company's brand, ie Joe's Plumbing Service Burlington Vermont - they are specifically looking for this company.)

The question is why is the home page most likely a bad landing page. When running any PPC campaign, there are 3 elements: the keyword that was used to search, the Advertisement that is displayed, and the Landing Page where the visitor ends up. Creating a cohesive strategy to guide the web visitor to what they want is how PPC advertising works.

The unique angle of this webinar is using their analogy of the Ad as the "promise" and rehashing an old Seth Godin gorilla/banana analogy. Once your ad is displayed, the copy is the promise you are making to a web visitor. The landing page must match the promise made by the ad. Make your landing page as specific and easy as possible to take action from.

If a gorilla is searching for bananas, the keyword, ad copy, and landing page should all offer bananas and nothing else. If someone is looking for an air conditioning unit, your ad copy and landing page should promote air conditioning units (not your home page selling your overall HVAC service, or air conditioning repair, or solar panels...but only air conditioning units).

Ideally, the "promise" of the ad is associated with a call to action that delivers on that promise. "The 6 critical decisions to make when considering a new air conditioner" with an offer for a free estimate for example.

Overall process for a solid PPC campaign:

• write ad copy that creates a solid "promise" that will appeal to whatever keyword was searched
• create a landing page that delivers on that promise
• offer very targeted and few click paths (hence, never use the home page where all of your standard navigation just gets in the way)
• make sure that the promise is connected to a very specific call to action
• test different keyword, ad copy, and landing pages to maximize conversions
• measure the results and test again

Good advice for any small or medium sized business that is involved in a Pay Per Click marketing campaign. If you are outsourcing your PPC work, use this list to ensure that your current firm is maximizing the return on your investment.

Advanced Landing Page Strategies for Higher Pay Per Click Conversions Webinar

I am about to start a Webinar entitled "Advanced Landing Page Strategies for Higher Pay Per Click Conversions." Landing pages are customized pages promoting a specific call to action based on the keyword, PPC ad combination that generated the click. More to come on what they are recommending. So far, they have an example of an HVAC contractor so I am hopeful that this will be focused on true small businesses.

Bing a success...so far

Bing, the much hyped new search engine developed by MSN has so far lived up to its tremendous and expansive marketing campaigns. Microsoft might have finally learned that when web site users think of online search, MSN is not top of mind. It is still a distant third in the search engine battle (Google, Yahoo, and then MSN, now Bing).

However, some of the new search features of Bing are quite fun to use. The importance for my online marketing is that Bing is becoming a much effective online marketing tool. We are seeing steady and profitable increases in conversion rates and click through rates for Pay Per Click campaigns from MSN since it morphed into Bing. Accounts with Pay Per Click budgets on MSN that were never reached are now maxing out at the mid month point. Conversions are up as well but only time will tell the overall conversion rates and ROI for our campaigns.

While it is too early to tell about how effective Bing will be against Google's dominant market share, we are seeing very nice returns from the new launch. Once the honeymoon effect of their marketing expenditures tails off, we will keep an eye out on this new/not new search engine.

New Terrys Tips Weekly Newsletter - The Difficulties of Making Money at Expiration

The Difficulties of Making Money at Expiration

A nice piece of how making money with stock options trading can be so tricky.

This is the kind of regular updating that we want all of our website customers to be making even if it can only be quarterly.

Content is king!

Ben and Jerry's April Fools Website Revealed

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Local Firm Vermont Design Works Partners with Ben and Jerry’s on Cloned Milk “April Fools” Website

Burlington, VT, April 1, 2009 - For the past week, a website for “Cyclone Dairy” (www.CycloneDairy.com), a company that allegedly produces milk from cloned cows, has been the subject of intense speculation in the blogosphere: are the company and the website real? Are consumers really drinking milk from cloned cows?

This morning the website was revealed to be an “April Fools” joke by Ben and Jerry’s, intended toraise awarenss that food from clones could be in our food supply and consumer have the right to know. Milk from cloned cows is in fact approved for consumer consumption by the FDA and does not have to be labeled as such on food packaging.

The website was created by local web and graphic design firm Vermont Design Works (www.VermontDesignWorks.com).

“When Ben and Jerry’s came to us with this idea, our entire team was excited by it,” says Vermont Design Works owner Andrew Allen. “We have a long history of working with Ben and Jerry’s and with other socially responsible companies. This fit right in with our mission.”

The challenge in designing the site, says Vermont Design Works’ Director of Web Strategy Craig Chevrier, “was to make what looked almost like a perfectly legitimate corporate site, but hinted at activism. We had to strike just the right balance so that when the truth was revealed, it would all make sense.”

“Once bloggers found the site, it took off like wildfire,” says Allen. “We’ve had a great time following the online forums. People were speculating that it was animal rights groups, Food and Water Watch, etc.. But all the buzz has done exactly what it was intended to do – to create awareness and get people thinking seriously about an important issue affecting our food supply. We are proud to be a part of this project.”


For more information about Vermont Design Works’ involvement in the Cyclone Dairy project, please contact cyclone@vtdesignworks.com or call 802.383.7679. For more information about Ben and Jerry’s anti-cloning mission, visit www.cyclonedairy.com, where videos and activism links were posted this morning.

Vermont Design Works was founded in 1999 to help businesses and non-profit organizations build a presence in the marketplace and on the web by offering a full range of graphic design and website development services. The company jumped into the Vermont business community with a big splash by designing the 2000 summer marketing campaign for Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. Since then, Vermont Design Works has created hundreds of successful websites and graphic design projects for large and small businesses and nonprofits, including Nantucket Nectars, Equipe Sport, New England Naturals, GlobalZ Data Processing, and Gardeners Supply “Flower Power” Fundraising.

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Terrys Tips latest post...

We are offering a special, buy 1 of Terry's books and recieve his new book for free! Just $12.94 (when using Discount Code Tee) at www.Making36Percent.com and you get both books for the price of one.

To learn more about his books, review today's newseltter posting: Christmas Gift Ideas from the Conservative Options Strategy Website.

Terrys Tips Newsletter Posts

Adding content is critical! For Terry's Tips, we took their weekly newsletter which they were sending to their entire newsletter list every Monday and posted it to the website with an archive tool. We are now adding 1000 new words to the home page every week and adding articles to the archive. Within a week, this content is indexed by Google and appears in the search engines. And we are providing a great service for first time visitors. They get a tone of what Terry's Tips is all about and a snapshot into what the service being offered.

If you can, create a strategy that includes adding new content about your services, products or industry every week! Daily is best. Weekly is good. Monthly is a minimum.

And each of Terry's newsletters focuses on "trading stock options" which is one of their number one sought after keywords.

Google's 2009 Search Engine Results Page Change - Behavior search

This year at Pubcon by Webmaster World 2009 in Las Vegas (a trade show for everything happening in search and search engine optimization) there was a buzz about the changes in how Google is going to display search engine results pages (SERPs). Google's vision is that search will become more personalized by the user's location and previous searches.

In other words, your particular search results will be tailored to your pattern of search and your geographic location (called behavior based search). Google will begin to give personalized Organic search page results as well as more targeted Pay Per Click ads on a world wide basis.

This has been available now if you log into your Google account and perform your searches. A good example is the keyword "delta". For stock options trading website Terry's Tips, the keyword delta means "The ratio comparing the change in the price of the underlying asset to the corresponding change in the price of a derivative". Nonsense to most of us but easily understood by Terry. However, to someone in New Orleans, "delta" probably refers to "landforms where the mouth of a river flows into an ocean."

Google will now be changing the results to suit the particular user based upon their location and what other things they search for on a regular basis.

Since Terry of Terry's Tips performs most of his searches about the stock options market and trading, Google will deliver websites about options investing. While a searcher in New Orleans will get websites about rivers flowing into the ocean.

The problem for SEO folks such as us is that we can no longer do a search on Google and get the same results as when our clients do the same search. Reporting on where a site ranks in the search engines will now become subjective and very difficult to report progress to our customers.

For the customer, it will be very difficult to gauge the effectiveness of organic search engine optimization efforts performed by themselves or by their SEO firm.

Next time: What does this mean for your search engine optimization efforts today and in 2009?