Posted by JT Long on Tue, Jun 29, 2010
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Myth #1: Keywords = Jail
Myth #2: Software can Write Great SEO Content
Myth #3: All Traffic is Equal
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Get ready for the B2B marketing version of Myth Busters. In this episode, we dispel the rumor that SEO stands for Stupid, Erratic and Odd
B2B search engine optimization doesn’t mean that you go out of your way to pack headlines and paragraphs with keywords at the expense of clarity, impact or grammar.
In fact, the opposite is true. The more you write to meet your reader’s needs, the more naturally you will attract the search engine attention that will bring you the most qualified leads.
Myth #1: Keywords = Jail
Busted: Well-defined keywords are not handcuffs that tether you to a constrained list of approved phrases. Instead, they are guides to keep you on track. Multiple entries with similar tags show search engines that you have lots of content on a certain subject. It also shows visitors that you have depth of knowledge that could be the answer to their needs. True SEO is a win-win for you and the reader.
Myth #2: SEO Content can be Written by a Computer
Busted: SEO copywriting is an art as much as it is a science. That is why anyone who says they have a computer program that can churn out content based on keywords is missing the mark. Only real people - creative copywriting experts - can bring that creative spark to a subject to explain it in a new way. Only a strategic marketer armed with sound competitive analysis and monster business writing skills will be able to deliver content that meets complex online content and conversion optimization rules.
Myth #3: All Traffic is Equal
Busted: Being found is a long way from being successful. Success means attracting qualified inbound leads. The latter is an order of magnitude harder than the former. It requires a true understanding of your customer’s needs. Only then can you provide the information they need in the format they need it.
How can you tell if you are posting the right content? Ask yourself:
- Does this content help our prospects?
- Does this content help search engines?
The best SEO content does both. So you don’t have to choose between educational, compelling copy and lists of words that will attract Google bots. That is just a myth. The truth is that a well-rounded SEO pro will consistently do both, naturally.
JT Long is Content Marketing Manager for Business Communications Group, a veteran storyteller for local and national publications and a longtime blogger. You can tweet with her @b2bjt.
Posted by Robert Celaschi on Thu, May 27, 2010
Before you cut and paste, at least verify that the information is trueA year ago, Bernie Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in prison for several kinds of fraud and money laundering. People trusted him with billions of dollars, and he bilked them instead of investing it. What’s especially astonishing is how he managed to string them along for decades. Ever wonder how he got away with his scheme for so long?
One reason is that when a new investor came along, he saw the prestigious client list and figured Madoff must be all right. Surely those earlier clients had checked everything out, right? The problem is, some of those clients had relied on the famous names of even earlier clients. They never checked out anything, they just wrote out checks.
Recyling dangers
Here’s how this applies to b2b company marketing materials: A lot of people make the same mistake when they start gathering material for a blog or a web page. They see a great item elsewhere on the Internet, and with a few clicks of the mouse they copy and paste it into their own file. Surely the other guy knew what he was talking about, right?
Nope. Very likely the other guy stole it from an even earlier appearance on the Internet. Even if the other guy said where the information originated, you still can’t trust it. He might have stolen the attribution, or he may have garbled things in an attempt to put it into his own words, in the course of internet marketing.
Oooo, shiny!
In some ways, we’re like little kids who see something nifty on the sidewalk and want to play with it. As Mom always said, “Don’t pick that up; you don’t know where it’s been.”
Earlier this year I spent the better part of an afternoon chasing down a statement that supposedly appeared in a “recent” issue of a national magazine. I thought it was a great item. So did about 20 different bloggers and companies who posted the same statement, word for word. Not one of them cited a specific publication date, or even the name of the article. Finally I tracked it down in the footnote of a book. The “recent” article had appeared in 1989. Even with that, I couldn’t find out who the author was, or if he was quoting someone else.
Stats sleuthing
Here’s a great bit of sleuthing that illustrates my point. Mel Gosling and Andrew Hiles tried to track down the origin of some oft-repeated stats, such as the claim that "over 70 percent of businesses involved in a major fire fail within 3 years, if they ever re-open at all."
In many cases, the folks presenting the stats online couldn’t say exactly where they came from. They saw it, they copied it, they repeated it. Who bothers checking out whether it’s true?
R.e.s.p.e.c.t. yourself
Now, maybe you don’t care about putting junk in your blogs or your web site. Maybe you are just looking for something that sounds good. Maybe you are so anxious to make a point that you’ll grab anything that seems to support it, even though you have no idea where it came from.
More likely, however, you want to be seen as a real authority. In that case, take the extra time to find out where your information originally came from, and whether it’s true. Yes, that means extra work during blogging, SEO copywriting, etc. It’s worth it.
Sleuthing assignment
Here’s a homework assignment: The next time you come across a statement that you’ve always accepted without question, see if you can find out where it originally came from. You may find out that it doesn’t have the pedigree you thought it did.
Posted by Rebekah Donaldson on Tue, May 18, 2010
After you resolve to do more effective marketing, there are a few decisions ahead. Among them:
1. Do we need professional help? Or could we do it ourselves?
There are lots of good reasons to self-serve:
- Saves cash
- Keeps all marketing communications efforts centralized
- Builds skills internally
- Leverage free resources available
DIY resources
There are great resources available for DIYs. I recommend just about any MarketingSherpa benchmark report or how-to guide you can get your hands on. Even if it's an old outdated version it could be an eye opener. Vendors like Google Adwords include campaign set-up and support, so why not take their free advice?
Or, if you already do mailers and telemarketing, you could always increase the volume of each. All that requires is bigger lists and a bit more cash outlay. It could be low-hassle, in the sense that the path to increased exposure is nice and short. No fussing with messaging. No fiddling with design. Just feed more bills in and get more leads out.
Machine out of order?
If that will work, do it. And instead of messing with marketing, do something more fulfilling.
It’s a question only you can answer. You have the 30,000-foot perspective on how you’re doing relative to your business goals.
But as you weigh your decision, let me offer a couple points:
- First, unfortunately, bad marketing is worse than no marketing at all. The reason is that it takes more time and money to repair the damage from a bad impression, than to make a good first impression.
- Second, if you're a b2b company, it's probably not enough to just do more of what you’re used to doing already – if what you’re doing is conventional marketing like advertising, call outs, mailers and Yellow Page ads. I could go on about why; in a nutshell, it's because savvy business decision prevent and resent interruptions.
Inbound marketing involves helping your target market find you easily when they are searching for help. It includes such tools as
search-engine optimization, which is a way of making sure your website contains the same keywords that people are most likely to use when they are looking for your kind of product or service. But it has to be done in a way that impresses both search engines and high-potential prospects. And SEO is only one of many tools used in
inbound marketing.
As Laura Ramos, formerly of Forrester Research, wrote in How To Avoid Becoming Obsolete,
“Focusing simply on new campaigns, clever advertising, and delving into social media will only paper over problems. Turning up the heat on conventional marketing activities won't spur the profound changes required.”
Decision point
If you don’t need professional marketing, stop here.
And if you need help shifting to a new, more productive, inbound marketing approach, it’s still not time to hire. It's time for your next decision. Look for our next Dealbreakers article due out next week!
Posted by JT Long on Fri, Apr 16, 2010
Or, "11 Ways to Give the People What They Want"
What can a 1980s English rock band teach you about writing B2B blogs that click with the social media reality of 2010? A lot. Just listen:
The Kinks’ hit song Give the People What They Want includes the lyrics:
“Give the people what they want
You gotta give the people what they want
The more they get, the more they need
And every time they get harder and harder to please.”
What do they want?
The goods new is that in the age of Google searches, it is easier than ever to figure out what people want. They type it into the World Wide Web for all to see. Your job is to make it easy for people looking for your products and services to find you by using the same words they use.
Don't say llamas and give me ponies
In other words, if you offer llama grooming, you need to focus on washing, trimming and brushing llamas in the words your customers use. Lots of blog headlines that include these keywords will indicate to Google spiders that people who type in “llama, makeover” might be happy if they were sent to your site.
Lose/lose
If, however, they find stories on horse care and feeding, the search engines will not bother to send llama enthusiasts your way. Which is a good thing. Because if they did, the owners of dirty camelids would not be satisfied or buy your services. Lose/lose.
Focusing on relevant topics is not always enough, however. Remember, in this age of information overload, visitors are getting harder and harder to please. So what else do people want?
Headlines that kill
A Captivating (and relevant) Headline: Check out The Seven Deadly Sins of Blogging, or any of Copyblogger’s entries. They know what makes people – and search engines – click. Lists (five ways to, 12 tips for, etc), references to pop culture (even if it is a stretch like our headline above) and controversial statements can draw traffic like a sticky cotton candy to white pants.
- Mind-warping stats: Social media expert Seth Godin knows how to get your attention. In the first sentence of this blog, he catches your attention with a mind-warping stat and then intimates that you, too, could have similar success. It hooked me.
- A great story: Good Magazine bloggers know that a compelling story with interesting characters, a problem and a concluding solution will keep readers going to the end.
- Access, access, access: This ongoing Inc. blog series called the Successful Soloist lets readers in on a conversation in the classic Q&A style with Personal Branding Expert Dan Schawbel. Who are the superstars in your industry and how difficult would it be for you to get them to answer a few questions for your readers?
Wrap up your offering with a great conclusion, an identifying line at the end that links to your bio, an eye-catching graphic and links to similar stories on your site and elsewhere, and you have a blog that would make the Kinks proud.
More importantly, when you give people what they want, they come back, they comment, they share your link and buy your products. What more could you want?
JT Long is Content Marketing Manager for Business Communications Group, a veteran storyteller for local and national publications and a longtime blogger. You can tweet with her @b2bjt.
Posted by Rebekah Donaldson on Mon, Apr 12, 2010
"If you have more brains than money, you should focus on inbound marketing..." - @
We've been ranked #8 in a list of 100 HubSpot All Stars - yahoo!
Hubspot is software & advice that helps your business get found online by more qualified visitors, convert more visitors into leads, and more efficiently close leads. But their inbound marketing community has 10,000+ marketers doing amazing things every day. How did we rank at #8?
According to Hubspot, All Star status reflects,
“the long-term viability and awesomeness of a customer's marketing programs. The higher the CHI score, the more traffic and leads are likely to be generated by that customer in the future. (Traffic and leads make customers happy, hence the name.)”
What is "awesome" when it comes to inbound marketing programs? Here's what worked for us:
- First principles: give reliable, ethical advice aimed at helping you move the needle. Have humility. Own mistakes. Learn daily.
- Awesome content is king: We strive to publish content you might actually want to read. But success with our published content didn’t happen over night. Our first ebook was on the dry side, for example. And I've written some lame blog articles (no, I won't entertain you by linking to them here!). With the help of my awesome team, we've published moderately successful stuff. Our ebook "Six Marketing Gotchas CEOs Can Avoid" has been the most popular.
- Close the loop! Using Hubspot's awesome analytics, over time we've learned more about which keywords are best to focus on, what content you like best, and how you are finding us. Take the Six Gotchas ebook as the example again. You commented and linked the most to articles that called out common marketing mistakes. We wrote an ebook in that vein, gave it a catchy headline, jammed in as much concrete advice and examples as we could muster, and showed on the cover an executive slipping on a banana peel - doh! (Hankering to see what's behind the cover page? Awesome...)
- Brains over cash: Pick cost-effective ways to promote content - like social media marketing and PR. We invest time just about daily in LinkedIn, and just about weekly in Twitter (@b2bcommunicate and @b2bjt). We follow and comment on relevant websites, blogs, LinkedIn questions, and tweets too. Hubspot's awesome Social Media Module makes it possible for mere mortals to stay on top of myriad social media accounts.
- Be clear about the next step. If you get our Gotchas ebook, for example, you'll also get a link to access a menu of services. It's our job to be clear about how to move along. You choose whether or not to take the next step.
High threshold for follow up
Because this whole system results in daily leads, we keep a very high threshold for follow up. For example, almost daily folks download our stuff, and/or click through from the follow up email to get more stuff like the 2010 Information Kit.
There is no way we can call all these folks, so we focus on keeping up with requests for services.
More resources
See all the great resources available in the Hubspot Service Marketplace.
Posted by Robert Celaschi on Wed, Mar 10, 2010
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Can you get reporters at top-tier business publications to take you seriously?
Of course you can.
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Take a hint from the classic Five W’s that a reporter or blogger needs to put in a story
Not every B2B marketer has worked previously as a news reporter. Few news reporters have ever worked in a marketing consulting company.
Is it any wonder that sometimes the two don’t get along very well?
That’s only the half of it. Say you are an account assistant in your mid-20s, pitching ideas to the top-tier business publications with reporters who have been covering your client’s industry since you were in junior high school. Can you get them to take you seriously?
Of course you can.
One key is to pitch with authority rather than bravado. Take a hint from the classic Five W’s that a reporter or blogger needs to put in a story, then gather some information yourself.
Who
Within the publications or blogs, who writes about your industry? Names are important, so get them right. I’ve known several co-workers who would save the most outrageous misspellings of their own names and tape them to their computer monitors. You can bet they remembered who sent the worst howlers.
What
Now you know who covers your industry. But what aspects does each person cover? Some may look only at the stocks of public companies in your industry. Others may look only at new products. In this age of layoffs, one person may have to do it all. Know before you pitch.
When
Even with the Internet available 24/7 to showcase their prose, writers and bloggers have deadlines. Find out what they are. They may have special reports of publications scheduled throughout the year. See if they’ve posted that editorial calendar online. If you are trying to get them to interview the CEO of your client company, first make sure the CEO will be there to pick up the phone or see any incoming email.
Where
Some organizations cover the world, others cover only the United States, still others stick to a region. If you want to get a Boston company noticed, don’t waste the time of a writer who only covers Northern California -- unless the Boston company is opening a San Francisco office, or just landed venture capital from a firm in Silicon Valley.
Why
Readers turn to business publications for a reason. Usually, they are looking for a way to make money. How is your pitch going to help the readers do that? Nail this one and you can get a writer’s attention fast. Remember, a story doesn’t have to be a profile of the client company. If the client CEO can speak as an industry expert about current trends, that’s gold.
Proceed with caution
Those are some Do’s. Here are a few Don’ts:
- Don’t rush things. Research takes time, but it’s a good investment. You may discover that you don’t have anything right now that’s likely to interest your target writers. It’s better to wait until you do, instead of annoying them with an idea that’s off the mark. Likewise, good relationships take time to build. The salty reporter has to learn to trust you. And you have to learn to trust Old Salty. It won’t happen on the first phone call or email.
- Don’t ask, “Will the story be positive?” For one thing, what’s positive to you might be negative to someone else. Suppose office space is getting cheaper to rent. That’s negative if you own a building, but positive if you are looking for space. A good reporter will write an honest story and let readers love or hate the facts as they wish. But even if a reporter knows what kind of reaction to expect, that might change during the reporting as new facts come to light. So don’t expect the writer to know how your client will be perceived.
- Don’t be a control freak. Guide, yes. Control, no. Let’s say the reporter asks you about something the company would rather keep quiet for right now. You might be tempted to say, “If you hold off, we’ll give you an exclusive.” The problem is, you can’t really control that. Think about it: The reporter already heard about it. So the story already is floating out there. How are you supposed to control whether somebody else gets wind of it? Reporters want to report news, not the CEO’s second-day reaction to a story that somebody else ran with while the first reporter was waiting for you to give the green light.
Now get out there and win one
Follow these simple tips ... and you still won’t bat a thousand. Nobody does. Even Old Salty strikes out sometimes when he’s pitching an idea to his editors.
Your thoughts?
Posted by Rebekah Donaldson on Wed, Feb 17, 2010
Blogging for SEO = mind numbing boredom
In my experience, one of the biggest hurdles any blog, newsletter, website has to overcome is sheer boredom. So much content that's pushed out -- especially stuff written with SEO in mind -- is mind numbingly boring.
Blog content is for blog readers. Readers like new and different. Readers are easily bored.
It's tempting to keep churning out "top ten ways to blah blah blah" stuff, packing it with keywords -- or to keep churning out announcements, packing it with marketing messages.
I do some of that, somewhat guiltily, knowing it's more boring than the other stuff. It's a continuing battle for me when it comes to the content balance at this blog.
Being controversial = being rude?
One thing that's not boring is being controversial. But does that mean being rude? No!
I think this is the breakdown:
Bad idea:
- Ad hominems
- Offensive jokes
- Mocking/ sarcasm
- Posting/commenting with the intent of embarrassing someone or winning an argument
Good idea:
- Frank
- Edgy
- Direct
- Transparent
- Admitting one's own weaknesses/ uncertainty when appropriate
- Posting/commenting with the intent of helping
I have a friend who's really good at walking this line in his blog posts.
What's not boring?
What else isn't mind numbingly boring? Perhaps doing more on this blog regarding...
- Screw ups
- Disasters
- Flops
- Failures
- Blunders
- Mistakes
- Backfires
I think that may be our theme here on this blog, in 2010.
Posted by Rebekah Donaldson on Thu, Nov 19, 2009
Zap weak email content for higher ROI
By
Rebekah DonaldsonEmail newsletters don’t cost much to create, they give people something to look forward to,
and they keep your name top of mind. That’s especially important if you have a
long sales cycle.
Like every other aspect
of B2B marketing, there are right ways and wrong ways to creating an email
newsletter. Keep these tips in mind, and you’ll consistently produce a winner:
Flip It
Traditionally, corporate newsletters are like mini press releases squished together. As in, "here's what we did/ are doing/ will do."
But unless you do really interesting things or you're super cool like Steve Jobs, that's not a great hook for a conversation with clients.
It's better to keep the focus on
the client, not on your company. Give them valuable and relevant information
that helps them work smarter, stay abreast of latest trends, or justify that
they’ve made the right choice by working with you.
What Isn't Boring?
Examples of items that often play well:
- Comparisons of products or services in your space
- Customer stories ("they faced x... they did y... they achieved z")
- Previews or reviews ("X is a useful book/ workshop/ guide because...")
- Human interest stories (especially about executives at the companies you serve)
- Advance notice ("next month this new executive brief will go public; here is a sneak peek...")
- Online resources they
can access (on your site and elsewhere)
- Reader
responses to surveys or previous newsletter content ("some readers disagreed with our article on blah... they have a point there")
Don't Worry About Filling Up Your Newsletter
If it seems like a lot of
work to fill a newsletter, here’s the good news: You don’t have to fill it! Details coming in my next post about email marketing...
Posted by Rebekah Donaldson on Wed, Nov 11, 2009
Using 2010 best practices to engage prospects
and speed up sales
By Rebekah Donaldson
Hats off to
Meg Arnold,
Laura Good, and other members of the Sarta team for producing yesterday's seminar
2010 Trends in Marketing and PR.
2010 email trends we discussed
- Prospects have control - adapt to succeed
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Email is competing with social media for attention
- Is email obsolete because of social media? (no)
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Far and away email is most popular for sharing
- Email marketing budgets are up
Top 4 tips to improve email results
2010 PR trends we discussed
-
Adapt to succeed
- Microphone vs interactive PR
- Is PR obsolete because of social media? (no)
- PR is social
- "
Someone always pays"
- "'Solution’ is not the solution"
Top 4 tips for improving PR results
- Steadily
produce good content
- Know
your top 10 keywords
- Write
optimized press releases
- Point
to helpful landing pages
Get my slide deck.
(I also posted it using LinkedIn's presentation sharing app, here.)
Audience questions
My co-presenters Donna Chabrier and Ryan McCann were great. Authentic, insightful, and quick on their feet.
Being
quick on one's feet was important because the audience was not taking
our advice lying down! There were great questions during the session,
and lots of post-seminar dialogue. I hope we can continue the Q&A
in the comments section.
Special thanks
Laura Good did a great job pulling the event together. She has created a Twitter list of tweeters who came. Thanks Donna and Josh Morgan for recommending me as a speaker. Thanks to my colleague Robert Celaschi - though thousands of miles away yesterday, he was very helpful. And thanks Todd Lebo for access to the MarketingSherpa 2010 Email
Benchmark Report.
Posted by Rebekah Donaldson on Mon, Oct 12, 2009
National Business Group On Health publishes "Choosing the Right Hospital" toolkit with our help
By Molla Donaldson, DrPH, MS and Rebekah Donaldson
With all the talk of health reform, one issue that keeps coming up is that people should have access to affordable quality care. But how can we know what quality of care is when it is so complex? Part of the answer is to make quality of care information publicly available. Another part is to take the language of quality ("mortality" "risk" "variation" etc.) and translate it to plain English.
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See the Toolkit and Employer's Guide we helped write. What do you think? Please comment in the Comments area below. |
The National Business Group on Health has published “Choosing the Right Hospital,” an online toolkit developed to help people choose the hospital where they are likely to receive the best care. Molla Donaldson and I helped prepare it, under the leadership of National Business Group on Health President Helen Darling, and Director of Benchmarking & Analysis Karen Marlo.
We also developed a guide for Human Resources officers to help employees use the guide.
“We are grateful that Molla and Rebekah were able to lend their expertise to the development of these valuable tools for employers and employees alike,” said Darling. “Helping employees understand the importance of using quality hospitals and providing them with tools to do just that is imperative to improving the safety of care in our hospitals and helping to control health care costs.”
The National Business Group on Health is an association of many of the country’s largest self-insured businesses. Their website and publications provide a large employers’ perspective on national health policy issues and practical solutions to its members’ most important health care problems.
Through this project, I (Rebekah) learned how frequently medication errors, surgical mishaps, and other patient safety issues occur. The Institute of Medicine (with Molla’s help in 2000) alerted the public to medical errors almost 10 years ago in a widely publicized report. There was great hope that safety would improve. But in a follow up study, the federal government’s 2008 National Healthcare Quality Report found that hospital patient safety measures have worsened by nearly 1 percent each year for the past six years.
When people can choose a hospital, it is most likely based on their insurance, where their doctor practices, and advice from family and friends – but this information may not be accurate. There are good web sites now, and our work tried to make it easier to understand the quality and safety information–and what patients themselves report — at the federal government’s site, Hospital Compare.
We’ve written in the past about how organizations do well by doing good. The National Business Group on Health has merged doing well with doing good. Choosing the Right Hospital helps everyone compare quality and safety. We believe that the more people know about and insist on safe care, the more likely it is that health care will improve.
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