In the world of SEM B2B lead generation, one word stands out above all others: communication.  While this might seem cliché, effective communication between lead qualification teams and the person (or persons) in charge of SEM is critical to driving sales.

Through CRM integration, click and call data can be leveraged as parts of a tight feedback loop – telling lead qualification what their leads care about and SEMs who to target.  This cannot happen if the two groups are not speaking to one another.

The first step in all of this is capturing pertinent information.  This can be done through a variety of ways – customized URL parameters or even direct integration into AdWords (eg: SFDC’s AdWords  App).  SEM’s can select pertinent campaign information and pass it to lead qualification as additional fields in a lead’s profile.  This valuable information can be captured passively (no additional forms) and reveal important information about the lead.

 This could include:

-          Keyword

-          Query

-          Campaign

-          Adgroup

-          Creative info (ID or theme)

Typically, these values are used by SEMs to measure performance and optimize bids but, when used by lead teams during the qualification process, they can reveal useful insights into users which can then be translated into actionable information. 

The use of a specific query can help measure a user’s sophistication and, most importantly, intent. (eg: “CRM best practice” vs. “CRM reviews”).    A good lead qualification rep can use this data to change the tone of the conversation and adjust their approach to the lead.  In addition, this can help a lead qualification rep pick out the best leads and get after them quickly.

 If lead qualification is not aware of this and not instructed to use this data, all leads will be treated the same and, in all likelihood, the program will fail.

Similarly, knowing what message drove the user is valuable to the lead qualification team’s follow-up process.  Ideally, the product you are trying to sell has many benefits.  Ad testing should revolve around the product’s different value propositions; specifically, how these values compare to your competitors.

As is always the case with SEM, your message will run alongside your competitors.  Strong, direct, competitive messaging can open doors for your lead qualification team. Sharing space with competitors that are both up and down market can be very challenging (especially for broader, head terms). 

If, for example, a cheap alternative pushes price as a differentiator (and you cannot compete), embrace their message and tell users there is more to this software than price.  Shutting out people looking for a low price alternative will save you on clicks and save your lead qualification team valuable time!

Messaging becomes increasingly important as leads turn into full-fledged opportunities.  Certain messages might have tremendous appeal at the lead level but yield no sales.  This may work for some companies willing to gamble; however, SEM is better suited to drive users that are already in the consideration phase.  User searches are loaded with intent and your campaigns should capitalize on this. 

The impact of a new ad message should be measured each step of the way.  Lead qualification teams should relay recurring themes of conversations and, feedback on your current positioning, along with emerging trends in the user base.  As users look for different things, your message should evolve to fill their needs.

Ultimately, communication breakdowns between sales and marketing are an old problem.  However, with more lead qualification teams falling under the umbrella of marketing, having conversations around lead quality and messaging should be standard to your lead generation program.  Reps should be shown how to interpret the keyword and creative info attached to a lead in the same way they review the content used to drive that lead. 

While the quality of the content offered (demo or whitepaper) can make or break your reps the first time they connect with a lead, ad messaging (the key concept of which should be expanded on your landing page) will dictate whether a user becomes a lead in the first place.  Closing the loop and using lead info to refine your message will lead to higher quality leads, better conversations and, undoubtedly, more sales.

Sean Marshall has over four years of online marketing experience – specializing in SEM since 2008. In this time, has worked with leading B2B and B2C clients to maximize ROI on their SEM campaigns (ExactTarget, Microsoft Store, Dickies, Mass Mutual and many more). Prior to working in SEM, Sean was a Program Manager at Tippit (now Focus.com), driving high quality leads for leading VoIP and IT security companies including Ironport, Nortel, and Avaya. Sean is a proud California Golden Bear (UC Berkeley) and avid sports fan.

How much time have you lost on prospects who never converted? How much of your traffic is a waste of bandwidth? Would you improve your conversion rates if you could?

You need to invest some time in creating a customer profile. These are so powerful, I use one every time I create a piece of content or work on my marketing strategy.  It determines how I sell my services and how I approach clients.  Otherwise, I find myself serving someone I don’t know, and this rarely works.

Here’s what you need to know:

The “Who”

Who should you work with? Not a general description like ‘small businesses’, but actual names. Make a list of companies or individuals you would call your ‘ideal clients’. Go through your client list and pull out your favorites. If you’re an ecommerce store, pull out a list of the most loyal and profitable customers, and don’t forget your analytics.

• How educated are they?
• How much of an income do they have to dedicate to the things you provide or could provide?
• What are their goals and how do they do business?
• When their clients, competitors, and complementary businesses/industries describe them, what kinds of words do they use?
• Who makes the buying decisions
• How many employees do they have?

• What they like to do, what they dream of, and what are their biggest fears?

By the time you’re done with the ‘who’ section, you should know them much like you do an old friend.

The “What”

Take time to discover what your target audience is looking for, what they need, and what they like and dislike. Here are some questions to ask:

• What kinds of worries, concerns, and problems do my ideal clients have?
• What do my ideal clients look for? *Hint* This likely won’t be a product or service, but rather a solution to a problem.
• What does my ideal client do well?
• What are their weaknesses?
• What do they get from my competitors?
• What issues do they have with my competitors? How could that product or service be improved?
• What does my ideal client need or have issues with that aren’t being met in a convenient, easy, and satisfying way?

The “Where”
This is where you look at your ideal client’s habits and methods. This tells you what strategies they use, defines their targets audience, reveals effective marketing. Again, this is going to take some research, but it’s worth it.

• Where do your ideal customers go?
• What sorts of events do ideal clients attend?
• Where do they market their products/services and what do they avoid?
• Where do conversations about your ideal client’s products or services happen?
• Where do these clients get information?
• Where do they meet other suppliers?

The “Why”

This can be the most difficult, but it can make a huge difference in the choices you make, what you offer, and how you offer it.

• Why do potential clients buy from your competitors?
• Why does your client buy the things you offer in the first place?
• What complaints do they have about your competitors?
• What sort of compliments have potential clients given your competitors?
• What features do they place emphasis one?
• Why do current services or products fail to meet their needs?

The “When”

This is something to keep in mind, rather than include in your research: Client profiles need to be constantly updated to reflect the growth of your company, new insights you’ve gained, and changes in technology and industry views. You might even take this one step further by creating a client profile on your competitors to gather some great ideas.

When should you make use of your client profile? Any time you create or do something for clients! This includes social media, keyword research, pricing, content, and choosing your marketing and networking opportunities.

If you provide services or products in a business-to-business situation, have clients do client profiles for you. You’ll find your offerings will greatly improve and so with the results you are able generate.

Angie Nikoleychuk is the Senior Copywriter, Strategist, and Consultant for Angie’s Copywriting Service. She’s passionate about SEO, marketing, and behaviour. She loves a good marketing mystery, a great cup of coffee, and is an avid Twitter user.

This article is about hitting the right balance in content marketing, between providing practical, objective information, and delivering a blatant sales pitch. Get the balance right and content will win customers; get it wrong and your content creation efforts won’t pay-off.

photo by Todd Anderson

 So who am I to dish out advice about content marketing? I didn’t invent content marketing, but I did engineer an early content marketing success. Back in 1999 my three partners and I sold our boutique information security consulting firm to a NASDAQ company for a premium price. We achieved that price because we had a premium client list (including AT&T, American Express, Edward Jones, and Sprint). 

How did we build that client list? We attracted a lot of our clients through website content, notably a library of “free information security articles” which was one of the first things I created when I set up the company website. These articles were originally written by myself and my partners for publication in magazines and that meant they were written to professional editorial standards, one of which is objectivity.

Objectivity means the articles did not talk about our company and the services we offered, they talked about specific problems and solutions. The result? Anyone reading those articles was likely to think the authors knew what they were talking about and were happy to share their knowledge. If you needed to deal with these specific problems and solutions it didn’t require a big red call to action button to realize “these guys would be a valuable resource.”

Skip forward a decade or so and we find content marketing applied to any type of “useful” information employed to advance the marketing effort without making overt product claims, such as “custom magazines, print or online newsletters, digital content, websites or microsites, white papers, webcasts/webinars, podcasts, video portals or series, in-person roadshows, roundtables, interactive online, email, and events.”

That list is from the ‘content marketing’ entry in Wikipedia, which goes on to state quite clearly, and in my opinion correctly, that the purpose of this information: “is not to spout the virtues of the marketer’s own products or services, but to inform target customers and prospects about key industry issues, sometimes involving the marketer’s products.”

Unfortunately, the resources available to Marketing are always limited. Whenever sales slow down it’s possible Sales will question the use of resources for content marketing. Depending on factors such as workflow and company dynamics, you might experience “spout-creep.” That’s when open declaration of product virtues creeps into content marketing pieces. Unfortunately, because none of the forms used for content marketing dictate function, it can be difficult prevent spout-creep. So what should you do? Here are some suggestions.

1. If Sales has a good case for more direct product marketing materials then oblige Sales and switch resources from your content marketing. Better to scale back content marketing than risk polluting it with blatant product pitches. If Sales needs competitor kill sheets, generate them, just don’t pass them off as content marketing.

2. Adjust your content marketing to the different levels of awareness people have of your product and the problem it solves. Develop different nurturing paths for different levels of awareness. For people just becoming aware of the problem, go lightly on product pitching (they will appreciate you educating them and at this point they’re not ready to buy from you or your competitors). However, there’s still value in content targeted to people familiar with the problem, your solution, and your competitors’ solutions. Good content, freely shared, will always win the day with some buyers.

3. Think twice before placing content behind a click-wall that requires the completion of a lengthy form. Sales might be screaming for leads but requiring loads of details may be a mistake unless you’re talking premium content without a hint of pitch. Content that educates at the early stages of a market may travel further, to greater effect, if accessible without providing extensive contact data.

4. Consider just email registration. Concerns about spam are declining and people are more willing to supply an email address than a few years ago. But don’t abuse their trust. If you plan to send them more content, make that clear.

5. Have faith in your content but track access. Google Analytics tracks page access, not file access. Make sure you have server logs handy to see how often files themselves are downloaded.

6. Set expectations honestly, otherwise content marketing can hurt your reputation. Today there’s little tolerance for product pitches misrepresented as pure content. Be honest up front and you will avoid “blowback” from people offended at being pitched when they were expecting to get educated.

A prolific blogger and content marketing pioneer, Stephen Cobb has helped a series of hi-tech startups to achieve successful outcomes by educating the market for their products. Currently Marketing Evangelist for Monetate, the Philadelphia-based marketing optimization company, Stephen resides in Upstate New York.

These days, any conversation about online marketing is required by law (OK, not really) to include extensive discussion of Facebook and Twitter. Social media is heralded as the way to generate buzz and virality, interact with existing customers, create demand among potential customers, and build your brand. Anecdotal evidence is plentiful – consider Orabrush’s 14 million video views on YouTube, Converse’s 15 million fans on Facebook, or Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh’s 1.8 million followers on Twitter.

These examples show the massive potential reach of social media, but large numbers alone do not a successful marketing campaign make. Indeed, in the world of SEM, success is not measured by clicks or impressions, but by conversions and revenue. A campaign with 15 million clicks in AdWords might be a rousing success – if it drives ROI for your business – but could equally be an utter disaster if these clicks don’t produce revenue.
Because social media marketing frequently does not result in direct revenue for an advertiser, it’s very difficult to determine just how much a fan, follower, or video subscriber is actually worth. Various studies have tried to place numbers around these different social actions, but trying to come up with an “average” value is really an impossible task. Again, think about paid search – if someone asked you how much a click was worth on Google, your answer would have to be “it depends.” We know that some clicks are probably only worth a few pennies and others – a famous example would be “mesothelioma attorney” – can exceed $50 a click.

So while it is impossible to state in absolute terms that one form of media is more valuable than another, I would strongly argue that the pecking order of value for most businesses is as follows:
1. Email newsletter subscriber
2. Facebook fan
3. Twitter follower

Think of your own online behavior. How many email newsletters do you subscribe to? According to a study by ExactTarget, the average American gets 12 commercial emails a day. MailChimp reported the average open rate for ecommerce emails is almost 15%. Translation: consumers don’t subscribe to many email newsletters and those that they do subscribe to they tend to read.

Now consider a Facebook fan page. Facebook makes it really easy to sign up for a fan page – I suspect that sometimes people sign up without really knowing they are doing so. If you are active on Facebook, you might have hundreds of friends and pages posting onto your wall. Of course, no one has time to really read every post to their wall, and if you only log-in once or twice a day, you are likely to miss many posts. Add to this Facebook’s “EdgeRank”, which will actually hide posts that you would likely not click on anyways, and there’s a good chance that many so-called fans will rarely if ever really see a message from a company. A recent study suggested that Justin Beiber’s fan page had the highest percentage of “active fans” – i.e. fans that do anything beyond simply becoming a fan – at a whopping 2.8%.

Has Converse sold 15 million additional pairs of shoes to their 15 million fans? Have they even sold 10,000 shoes to these fans? I tend to doubt it. Assuming that Converse is “best of breed” and has a 2.8% active fan number, their 15 million fanbase is really only around 450,000 (and likely much lower). Turns out it’s easy to sign up for a fan page and even easier to ignore subsequent messages from that fan page.

And then we come to Twitter. I allegedly have 671 people following me (@rodnitzky) on Twitter. And yet, whenever I tweet an update, only 4-5 people respond to my tweet or re-tweet it. It’s likely that of my 671 followers, a good 600 of them are followers in name-only – they have a 3rd party Twitter app that only displays a small percentage of their followed tweets, and they have really followed me to get me to follow them back. Indeed, the sheer volume of tweets makes such a 3rd party tool mandatory. As a result, the number of followers you have is actually somewhat irrelevant – what’s more relevant is the number of people who actually read your tweet and the “clout” of your retweeters. Again, like Facebook, it’s very easy to follow someone on Twitter but to never actually engage with them, which makes this a meaningless metric.

If you’re not already convinced that email is far more powerful than Facebook or Twitter, just look at how financial markets are valuing emails, fans, and followers. Groupon – which really is just a giant email newsletter – has a value is somewhere around $25B and has around 40 million subscribers – that puts the value of a subscriber at about $625. Facebook has 600 million users and a value of around $70 billion – that translates to $116.7 per user. Finally, Twitter has 175 million accounts (the number of actual users may be less) and has a value of around $4 billion – that’s about $22.8 per user.

All of this is not to say that you shouldn’t pursue a Facebook or Twitter strategy as part of your online marketing investment. Social media will continue to grow in importance, it will evolve, and marketing best practices will gradually be established. In the meantime, however, invest wisely and try to understand what marketing channels really drive ROI for your business. My guess: ‘old school’ online marketing channels like SEM and email marketing may not be as sexy as a cool Facebook fan page, but for most businesses, they are still the best way to grow revenue and profit. Fans and followers are hip, but hipness won’t pay your electricity bill.

David Rodnitzky is CEO of PPC Associates, an SEM agency in San Mateo, California. If you are currently spending $25,000 or more a month on SEM, contact David at david@ppcassociates.com to learn how his agency can optimize your SEM campaigns.

Late last year, Dave Chaffey (of Smart Insights) interviewed Ben Jesson and Karl Blanks of Conversion Rate Experts on the processes, tools and skills needed to improve conversion rates. Their interview is reprinted with their permission here:

What is Conversion rate optimisation?

Q1. We’re seeing a lot more companies working now on CRO. What is it? Is it more than landing page optimisation?

Yes, it should be. Landing page optimisation focuses on one page. We coined the term Conversion Rate Optimisation (“CRO”) in 2007 to describe the process of optimizing the business itself. It’s really commercial optimization

A proper job of CRO includes the review of the entire process from the initial lead-generation ad, all the way through to the post-sale follow-up. The real goal is to identify which parts of the sales funnel will yield the greatest wins with the least work.

That means it’s necessary to bring a lot of disciplines to the party, including understanding traffic sources, visitor psychology, and the company’s position in the marketplace, including its core strengths and weaknesses. On top of that there’s usability testing, copywriting, and web design factors to look at.

All these elements go into creating hypotheses for testing. We’re maniacal about testing, because we’ve seen too many businesses merely throw a series of “best practices” against the wall to see if anything sticks. Best practices should not be the answer to optimizing a website, but merely one starting point for formulating a test strategy.

Once we determine what truly works for a particular website, then we examine how our findings might be used in other media channels. For instance a better series of benefit statements might be transferrable to direct mail or email autoresponder campaigns—subject to testing in those media, of course.

The business case

Q2. How do you help companies persuade colleagues of the returns from CRO, the business case?

It’s easy; we explain that CRO allows companies to generate more revenue without spending more on advertising. It’s about getting a higher return from the existing ad spend.

Unlike certain industries like public relations, the entire foundation of CRO is based on data, measurement, and testing. You don’t need to present arguments when the data can do the talking for you. Once you measure the value of visitors, conversions, and sales, then it’s simple arithmetic to show how, say, a 10% boost in conversions would help the bottom line.

Here’s another powerful side-benefit: When you optimise your funnel and bring in more revenues, you then have earned a luxury: You get to decide whether to pocket those profits or plough them back into even more advertising, thus distancing yourself even further from your competitors. It’s a nice problem to have.

Identifying the biggest opportunities

Q3. What approaches do you use to decide which part of a site needs most urgent attention?

FORTUNE magazine called what we do “a combination of multivariate statistical analysis and good old-fashioned detective work” and that pretty well describes our approach.

It’s often very useful to map out your entire sales/conversion funnel and make sure it’s being comprehensively measured in whatever web analytics package you prefer.

Then you should look for the biggest drop-offs from one step to the next. We like to say that we look for the “blocked arteries” (that is, pages—or page elements—that get loads of visitors but are underperforming). How do you know if something is underperforming? Clues come from a range of feedback mechanisms: the analytics data, usability tests, surveys, customer support feedback … and, of course, gut feel. Of course, we have the advantage of having been engaged by companies on several continents and in many industries, so we have a good knowledgebase of what’s good and what’s bad. See our list of effective tactics and strategies.

What mistakes limit conversion?

Q4. Give some examples of the most common “conversion rate killers” you see.

Killer #1: Not split testing. Many people think they’re done if they take action to make changes to their site. In reality they’re only “done” when tests show that the changes in fact improved conversions. Installing a “best practice” magic button that another site swears by might actually lower conversions. Despite the popularity of video, Google once discovered through tests that video reduced conversions on one of its pages. You simply must test to find out.

Not long ago, multivariate testing software cost more than £5,000 per month. Now you can use Google Website Optimizer and other software packages for free, so there’s really no excuse. We created a tool, called Which Multivariate, which helps you to select the best software for multivariate testing.

Killer #2 is “meek tweaking”—in other words, making changes that are never likely to have a significant effect.

Killer #3 is asking for the sale on the first visit. It’s often a good idea to test the creation of a multi-step conversion funnel, in which you provide great value before you ask for the order. Comparison charts, forums, special reports, and email marketing are examples of elements that allow you to provide good information, ask for names, cultivate a relationship and thereby improve the chances of a sale.

We recently gave a talk on 15 Common Causes of Conversion Death

What are the latest approaches?

Q5. Are you seeing any innovative design techniques that are helping conversions?

Excellent design is a prerequisite for conversion, but the biggest breakthroughs tend to be the new tools and techniques for gathering insights into the visitor’s mindset.

For determining how visitors interact with a site we often use both Clicktale and CrazyEgg.

KISSInsights and Ethnio are both good for asking your visitors to give you immediate feedback on your site. GazeHawk enables you to conduct an eye-tracking study on your site for a tiny fraction of the traditional cost.

Many of your readers will already know about how wireframing is important in order to get agreement on functional aspects before you take the time to make a site look good. We like Balsamiq for that purpose. [Editor - I use that too - a great simple wireframing tool for consultants and agencies]

Finally, your readers may want to get our free newsletter to see what a million-dollar landing page looks like, along with a graphical analysis. We call it that because it generated over a million dollars for one of our clients.

If you want even more examples of what’s possible with conversion improvement, watch the video in the header of our website.

When creating a pay per click campaign, marketers commonly focus on things like keywords, match types, cost per click bids, organizing the campaign into ad groups, target cost per acquisition, and other mechanics of PPC campaigns. But in concentrating on the setup and execution of their pay per click campaigns, too many marketers don’t spend enough time thinking about their PPC landing pages – some don’t even setup customized landing pages at all!

So here are the top landing page mistakes to avoid when creating pages for your pay per click campaigns:

1) Not having a landing page. I know I already mentioned this, but this is the single biggest mistake you can make. Many marketers who are first getting into PPC advertising think it’s adequate to drive traffic to their website. Get people to your home page, and they’ll know what to do, right?

Wrong. When people are typing a search into Google, Bing, or another search engine, they are looking for an immediate answer to a specific query. If they click on your ad, they’re expecting a question to the answer they asked – now. They’re not going to dig through your website to find what they’re looking for. Customized landing pages answer the question the searcher was asking quickly and directly.

2) Not having CUSTOMIZED landing pages. If you’re running a large pay per click campaign or multiple PPC campaigns, chances are you are covering a multitude of keywords and have numerous ads. If possible and appropriate, you should be setting up customized landing pages with different offers that are aligned with the ads and keywords used in individual ad groups and campaigns.

This can help improve your quality scores for Google AdWords, which, in turn, can help bring down your cost per click. By ensuring your landing page offer and wording are closely aligned with your ads, you should also improve your conversion rate.

3) Not having a conversion goal. Too many marketers do setup landing pages, but fail to setup a conversion goal. What is a conversion? Simply put, a conversion is when a visitor to your landing page takes the action you want them to take.

This could be downloading an ebook or white paper, signing up for a newsletter, registering for a webinar, and so on. If there isn’t an action you’re trying to get visitors to take, why are you paying to get them to your website? Tracking conversions lets you know how effective your PPC campaigns are. Make sure you define what your conversion is and setup conversion code on your landing pages to track when visitors complete your defined goal.

4) Not tracking return on investment. While establishing a dollar value for conversions can sometimes seem arbitrary, doing so can help you manage your PPC campaigns and determine whether or not they are cost effective. While the dollar value of some conversions might be easy to calculate (buying a product, registering for a paid webinar), others can be more difficult (signing up for a newsletter or downloading a free white paper).

Do your best to realistically calculate the value of your conversions and use this to compute ROI on pay per click campaigns.

5) Not testing, testing, testing. Another major mistake many online marketers make is failing to constantly test and improve the effectiveness of their PPC campaigns. There are many landing page optimization tools out there to help you do this.

If you’re not continually testing and optimizing your landing pages, you’re letting potential customers get away and leaving money on the table. Testing different offers, landing page designs, copy, and images can help you improve the conversion rate on your pay per click campaigns.

Everybody has been new to Internet marketing at some point, but that doesn’t mean you have to repeat the same mistakes as everyone else. Instead, learn from the common pay per click landing page mistakes explained here.

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Jason Mikula works as a freelance search engine marketing and social media marketing consultant.  Jason has experience working with pay per click, search engine optimization, and email and web marketing.

Think about the hot-button keywords for online businesses. Many will say “need traffic”. Others say “more leads”, “improve rankings” or “need new website.” I say conversions, i.e. the result that is recorded after the visitor performs an event and actions preceding that. This is what smart marketers work on.

Recently, I spoke to the owner of an online health-care business. He needed to ‘improve’ his website with a new look. After a brief discussion, he shifted his thinking. He didn’t need a prettier site, but rather – to focus on tracking, measuring and tuning the traffic, conversion and funnel experience that the visitor had with his website.

Your website – a performance machine.

To build a better performing website – you must build trust, authority – both in the users and search engines’ eyes. And, it helps if you create compelling, actionable pages that convert.

However, this article is not about detailed conversion strategies, per se. It’s about building website content with which users engage. And, it is about creating an experience for the visitor that compels action, referrals and admiration (fans) for your business.

I have used these strategies to more than triple traffic in a short period of time using content marketing and SEO friendly copy. The bounce rate moved from approx. 90% to about 22% in the same period, as well as doubling the lead count, and increasing time on site to an average of 9 minutes.

Quality content – how to create it.

What is the word that you hear most often at SEO conferences? Answer: Links. It makes sense, since that’s at the heart of search engine’s ranking algorithm, and in specific, Google. It is the power of “votes” for your website (pages, actually) from others across the Internet. You get the benefit (depending on the link attribution) of ‘link juice’, overall visibility and, if done right – more web traffic.

To develop quality content, several criterions exist. One important aspect is about matching your content to your audience.

You can do this by collecting information for topics from:

• Keyword research (Google Keyword Tool, Wordtracker.com, Keyworddiscovery.com)
• Competitive research (Search engines, spyfu.com, semrush.com)
• Links research (OpensiteExplorer.org)
• Popularity research (Google trends, digg.com, amazon.com, shopping.com, search.twitter.com)

Once you have data from this research, you’ll be able to build the articles and a content calendar for your website. You’ll have a never ending stream of ideas from which to build. You can even outsource this research if you don’t have time. Check http://www.elance.com/ to start. (Footnote: I recommend using a blog – WordPress – to facilitate the organization and output of this new, steady content. Soon, I’m launching a new search-engine friendly WordPress system with built in content marketing solutions. Feel free to check http://www.simplewebsitepress.com/ for more information).

Visitors and links attraction.

Now that you have your content factory constructed, users should find you as you deploy and get a few links. However, you must expand your strategy to capture a broader net. These next steps will help your content get wings, and will provide much needed links for the authority building.

While some would say, start with a PPC campaign, find out what works first – and then apply wider strategies later, I say you can expand using social media with very little effort and cost too. Reaching out to other bloggers in your space will be important, don’t forget that. Here’s what to do:

Step 1: Convert your text into video format. Upload to Youtube. Use Tubemogul for wider syndication. Use keywords in Titles, URLs early in descriptions, add full text there also.

Step 2: Build an audio version. Audacity.com is free to record if you do it yourself. Or, use transcription services (also elance.com). I hear good things about castingwords.com. Distribute to podcasting / voice directories. Try itunes.com.

Step 3: Create a list of places to “tweet” and distribute the (links) multiple formats of content into the social media sphere – start with Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin. (Footnote: don’t spam, join the social communities, and become a listener first). Include rich media into press releases. Try a social media release with prweb.com.

These tactics work, and Google loves multi-media and video. It’s easier to get listed in organic (universal search) results with video.

Develop a process for yourself, and keep doing it consistently. I spend most of my time in research and RSS feeds, and content is built in 10-20 minutes on average.

Provide something of immediate value, offer downloads and give products (when you can) away for free. Don’t forget to build out a great relationship via your follow-up email marketing (did you get their name & email?). Learn their behaviors from that list over time. Send information they care about, and drive them back to your money site.

Let us know how you are creating an experience to compel visitor actions, referrals and admiration (fans) for your business. Feel free to comment!

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Jon Rognerud is the SEO columnist, blogger at Entrepreneur Magazine, author of the “Ultimate Guide to Search Engine Optimization” (Entrepreneur Press/McGraw-Hill) and writes on his own blog at http://www.jonrognerud.com. Visit now to get more cool information on internet marketing, SEO, PPC, Social Media, content, traffic, lead strategies – and learning more about the human challenges of being an Entrepreneur. You are not alone.

Finding new customers is a critical objective for any business. No matter what kind of marketing a business uses to meet that objective, from business cards to web sites, success requires understanding a couple of marketing fundamentals for building an effective Search Marketing strategy.

Where are your customers?

Where do your customers look for information to help them make a purchase? If it’s a simple purchase, one with no big perceived risk, a phone book might be the only place a customer looks. If those are your customers, then your business needs a phone and a listed number. If you focus your marketing attention on giving your customers the best possible service by phone, you are on your way to successfully meeting their needs and winning their business.

For a more complex sale, there can be many touch points along the way from early consideration to final sale. Not only that, but each individual marketing medium can offer several different touch points during the course of a sale, with messaging tailored for different stages of the buying process, as well as the different people within the buying audience.

Do your customers read newspapers? Do they watch TV? Do they spend time on social networking sites, and which ones? In other words, where do they congregate and how can you be there with them?

The important thing to remember as a marketer is that you need to get the right message in front of the right person at the right time. To do that, you have to understand who your customers are, where they go for information, and what they do next.

How do they decide to buy?

Buyers commonly do research online to learn more about solutions, products and vendors, as well as find information on pricing, reviews from customers, instructional videos and more. Business-to-business purchases also routinely involve several people. You might think of them as categorized into three main types: doers, buyers, and bosses.

The “doers” are the people on the frontline, and they are often where the need for a purchase is first recognized. They are the people who will likely be working with your product or service on a regular basis, and as such their influence can be keenly felt at the beginning of a purchase cycle.

The “buyers” typically enter the purchase cycle a little later on. They have different needs than the “doers” who will be using the product. The buyer wants to know about pricing, guarantees, support, and the vendor’s credibility. In other words, their job is to mitigate the risk associated with a purchase and protect the company from making a costly error.

The third type of person that can be involved in a complex sale is the “boss”. The Boss can enter the picture at any stage, and they will look at a transaction from a different perspective again.  Their considerations might include stockholders, company directors, and longer term information that other company members don’t have access to. Combine all three types of people into a purchase decision and it’s easy to see how complex a complex sale can really be.

Search is a common denominator

With all the different variable behaviors that your customers may engage in, one thing that’s clear is that online search has become a mainstream source of information for everyone. Need a part number for a piece of machinery? Google it. Want to see what people are saying about a product? Look at Twitter. Do you want to see a product demonstration? Look it up on YouTube. Need to see pictures of a product in use? Search images on Bing. The list goes on and on.

The key point for marketing is that when customers are searching online, they’ve got to be able to find you there. Depending on the nature of your business and clientele, here are three basic steps to consider in building your online search strategy:

1. Optimize your company web site to be search engine friendly.
2. Start (and maintain) a company blog. Search engines will reward your site, and new and existing customers can find a good blog a valuable source of information that will help establish your company’s reputation as a leader.
3. If your company web site is not showing up in the search engines for important search terms that are relevant to your business, consider a paid search campaign to increase your online visibility.

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Karl Hourigan is a Digital Marketing Strategist with Mediative. Mediative is one of North America’s largest integrated digital marketing companies. Their results-oriented marketing network is supported by industry thought leaders and a data-driven platform.

Internet marketers already familiar with search engine optimization and pay per click marketing know the importance of analytics, metrics, key performance indicators, and so on.  Analytics can (and should) play an important role in your social media marketing strategy.  If you’re not setting goals, tracking metrics, and analyzing performance, how can you tell if you’re succeeding?

 Setting Social Media Goals

I find it useful to break down social media goals into discrete components.  First, identify your bottom line goal, whether that is sales, cost savings, brand awareness, or some other goal.

Then, work backwards from your end goal to identify intermediate steps to achieving that goal, such as increasing web site traffic, newsletter sign ups, quote requests, or qualified leads.  Repeat as many steps as you find logical or necessary.  The step preceding increased traffic, sign ups, and leads could be achieving a certain level of social media engagement: views, posts, feedback, RTs, mentions, replies, and so on.

From Goals to Metrics

Once you’ve established your goals, you can identify corresponding metrics to track.  In the scenario explored above, your goal / metric pairings could look something like this:

Social Media Presence:  Number of Facebook “Likes”, Twitter Followers, LinkedIn group members, etc.

Social Media Engagement: Number of views, feedback, comments, posts, RTs, @ mentions, @ replies

Qualified Leads: Number of new leads from social media and web channels

Sales / Revenue: Dollar increase in sales, revenue, and profit

Analytics Tools for Social Media

While there are all sorts of tools for tracking your social media accounts, it can be difficult to get an overall picture of the effectiveness of your social media strategy without combining information from multiple tools and sources.  Remember, although your bottom line goal may be sales, revenue, or profit, there are many milestones along the path to that goal.

Following are some tools to help you track progress and trends as part of your social media strategy.

Klout

Klout is one of the top tools for measuring social media influence.  With the recent addition of analyzing Facebook as well as Twitter data, Klout lets you look at a variety of data about your social network presence in one spot, including trend data.  The free version allows you to refresh your information every six days.

Twitalyzer

A Twitter-specific tool, Twitalyzer analyzes your Twitter presence and network to present you with a wealth of information, including your impact, engagement, influence, retweet and mention ratios, and much more.  Twitalyzer also provides trend data, and comparisons and contexts, so you can see how you fit in in the Twitterverse.

Facebook Insights

Insights is Facebook’s basic analytics tool that accompanies pages.  Data includes information on monthly active users, activity, media consumption, and interaction.

Google URL Builder and Analytics

Hopefully, your website already has Google Analytics on it.  Analytics lets you track where your web visitors are coming from, how long they are staying on your site, and what they’re looking at.  Combining Analytics with the URL Builder tool (link: http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?answer=55578&hl=en) and referrer data, you can determine how many visitors to your site are coming from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social networks.  See how long these visitors stay on your site vs. other sources and how well they convert.

Constantly Monitor and Adapt Your Social Media Strategy

Social media is not a “set it and forget it” platform.  Your user base, their habits, and their preferences are constantly changing.  What works for you today may not work tomorrow.  That’s why you need to continuously monitor your social media profiles and the traffic they refer to your website.  If your current strategy isn’t effective or stops being effective, then it’s time to try new techniques.

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Jason Mikula works as a freelance search engine marketing and social media marketing consultant.  Jason has experience working with pay per click, search engine optimization, and email and web marketing.

Landing page optimization can potentially be far more powerful than an increase in traffic when it comes to generating more conversions.  In order to optimize your landing page successfully, the key is to use a scientific, data-driven approach.  While you may have gut instincts about what will and won’t work, the only way to tell for sure is by carefully collecting and analyzing the data.  Following are some of the most important tools to take a look at in order to optimize your landing pages and increase conversions.

Google Analytics: The Standard in Analytics

Google’s analytics software has become a de facto standard in the web world.  It is available for free and is relatively easy to install, although, some instances, like cross-domain tracking, are a bit more complicated.  Google Analytics gives you insights into where your visitors are coming from, what pages they’re looking at, how long they’re staying on your site, and so on.

Tip: Define Your Goals and Sales Funnel in Google Analytics

While Google Analytics is already a powerful platform, the real key to using it to optimize your landing pages and maximize conversions is by defining goals.  In your Analytics profile, you can define a goal based on a specific URL visited, the amount of time spent on site, or the number of pages in a visit.  For landing page optimization, you’ll probably be using a URL visit.  You can also define a goal value in dollars, which can be helpful in calculating ROI for your website conversions.

Another optional but important step is to define a sales funnel.  This allows you to list multiple pages leading up to a conversion – for example, if you have a multipage shopping cart check out process.  This can help you determine when visitors are leaving your site and highlight pages you may need to change or simplify.

Google Website Optimizer: Scientific Testing of Landing Pages

Another Google Tool on this list? Yes – Google’s Website Optimizer is that important.  A tool that exists outside of Analytics or AdWords (though accessible through the AdWords interface), many users overlook this valuable tool.  Website Optimizer allows you to perform A/B or multivariate tests on your landing pages to determine how different configurations of text, images, headlines, and so forth impact your conversion rate.

Relatively easy to install, you just need to prepare your different page versions or configurations and drop in snippets of Javascript code.  When it has collected enough data, Website Optimizer shows which page, statistically, is most effective at generating conversions.

Click & Scroll Heatmaps: Understanding User Behavior

The overall data provided by Analytics and Website Optimizer is great, however, it leaves you wondering what is actually happening when a visitor is looking at your page.  A service like ClickTale, which ranges from about $900 to nearly $9,000 a year, is capable of recording users mouse movements, clicks, keystrokes, and scrolling behavior.  You can even play back movies of an individual user’s browser session. Data is also aggregated to show mouse and click heatmaps based on a large number of users.

Similar services include Mouse Eye Tracking, Crazy Egg, clickdensity, and Codynamix (open source).  Most provided a no cost option with limited functionality and a professional or enterprise solution.

Form Analytics: Why Aren’t People Filling Out My Forms?

Have you ever started signing up for a product or download, but abandoned the site, because the form was too demanding or complicated?  Form analytics gives you insight into how users are interacting with your forms and can help you improve or streamline form questions to improve your conversion rate.  Form analytic software can help identify why users are abandoning forms, browser compatibility issues, and even reveal detailed information about form abandoners.  Examples of form analytics software include ClickTale (mentioned above), Revenue Expect, and Form Alive.

Get the Most Out of the Traffic You Already Have

Why focus only on increasing traffic with advertising or SEO, when you could be getting more conversions from your existing traffic?  Landing page and conversion optimization tools allow you to carefully and scientifically analyze what is happening on your landing pages and take steps to improve them to increase the number of visitors who convert.

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Jason Mikula works as a freelance search engine marketing and social media marketing consultant.  He has experience working with pay per click, search engine optimization, and email and web marketing.