Firstly social media nothing new. It’s no different from meeting someone for coffee and sharing your excitement about a great product or service you just experienced. Social media is really just word of mouth marketing, which has always been the most trusted form or outreach.

Twitter for example is like a cocktail party. All different kinds of people are at this party, friends, colleague’s and of course your competition, yes they are present as well.

There is so much you can accomplish at this cocktail party. You can get to know new people and your competition, ultimately you can sell things. Not at the party of course, that would be cheesy, but you can promote your services and really begin to build solid relationships. You can find out what people want, listen to them and then tell them about what you are offering. This all sounds great but the trick is….you have to be there.

The best part about this event is that while you may be thinking you don’t have time for another evening gathering after a long work day, you don’t have to worry as you can go anytime you want. I should also mention that you are able to leave at any time as well. Sure you might be thinking that you simply just don’t have time to be wasting. With digital media you control the time you want to spend and unlike a regular set party that starts and finishes on a set date, social media is always occurring at any time of the day and night.

Of course then there’s the networking. When you make a connection with someone you instantly gain access to their entire contact list. Since the goal is to make connections everyone is happy to share.

Success is becoming part of the Twitter party flow.

5 things you need to do:

1. Commit to time. Decide how much time you can spend at the party and then commit to it. If it is 20 minutes a day, great but if it is only 15 minutes a week, that’s fine as well. Become part of the flow and you will notice things grow. If you are still worried about it all just give it a try and find someone you find interesting and listen. It will likely surprise you how easy and successful it can be. The key is being consistent.
2. Make unique connections. Avoid the DM trap and desire to send out to the masses. Find someone interesting, follow them and send them a personal greeting. Avoid sending out a blast to everyone and anybody. It’s tempting to do this but it won’t build lasting relationships, the one’s that count for your business. Twitter isn’t an elevator pitch for your products or services. It’s a conversation. Build relationship that will make a difference.
3. Complete your Twitter profile. Would you go to work in your Pajamas? Don’t tweet without your Twitter profile complete with a good quality picture or company brand. Many people would not bother following you if you don’t cover the basics.
4. Don’t give up. It takes time to build your brand online. Most people give us after signing up because they don’t know what to do next. Observe, keep learning. Twitter is the best place to learn about Twitter. Watch other successful brands and see what they do.
5. Build a solid strategy. If you go in without a plan and wing it, you will likely have to step back at some point and reevaluate. Sit down and develop a 6 months to a year strategy and follow it.

Big tip that is always true. The way to getting what you want is to help others get what they want. Connecting with people and communities and building lasting relationships is key. Find them and make those connections.

Now get out there!

Social Media ROI & Socialnomics:

Produced by “Socialnomics” author Eric Qualman, this video highlights some of the big successes for Social Media Marketing in the past year across the B2B and B2C spectrum. If you’re looking to get your board excited about the potential of social media marketing.

Social Media Revolution:

This one will get everyone’s blood flowing. If you were awake during the last decade, we’ve all seen how quickly our marketing dollars have drifted away from traditional media. This video shows how much the pace of change should allow people to acknlowledge, that just like global warming there really is no ‘debate’ .. this stuff is real and it means business!

While they don’t make any concrete conclusions about why this is, we have certainly seen that SMM campaigns generate significant return on investment and return on effort for businesses of all sizes. Despite all the arguments of great ROI, customer loyalty and engagement, I have a simpler reason: everyone was taking the wait and see approach just like they did with the web, and then finally the CEO walked in and said;

“One of our board members just alerted me to the fact that we’re not even on Twitter yet. I think this stuff might be here to stay, let’s get on with it. Didn’t Obama win the election with this stuff??”

Wait and see quickly turned into “time to catch-up!”

Full Article: 2010 Social Marketing Budgets Defy Economic Concerns

Here is a quick keyword development strategy you can do yourself:

1. Know What Your Keywords Are! Brainstorm Your List:

Keywords are the words that internet users are using in order to find you on a search engine. It is important to get together with your team and brainstorm as large a list as possible for these.

Then vote on the top 20 or so. If there are 5 obvious ones, like your specific product category “industrial coatings” etc. You will want to identify these.

2. Use Tools to Expand Your List:

It sounds like an obvious place to start, but over half of the time we see an SEO strategy that is based on assumptions and after doing some research, we can find that the entire strategy is flawed. There are plenty of tools to help you do your keyword research and identify what keywords are actually the most commonly requested. Use your list as a starter and start using free keyword tools tools like Google AdWords Keyword Generator, Keyword Spy, WordTracker.

3. Predict Traffic Volume for Each Keyword:

Use Google AdWords Traffic Estimator to estimate search volume for each of your keywords:

Step 1: Input keywords:

Step 2: Currencies & Budget:

*(you can leave it blank for now and Google will choose maximum)

Step 3: Choose Languages & Geographic Regions:

After pressing “Continue,” Google will provide this graph showing cost per click, and forecast traffic volumes:

4. Local Versus Global

If you’re local, climbing the rankings for terms like “Business Card Printing, Milwakee” is a lot easier than trying to compete globally. Also, if you’re a small to mid-sized company that has a global strategy, but still gets the lions share of your business from one key market, consider running a  a micr0-site or sub-directory for that region and focus significant efforts in that market.

Lesson: if there’s enough in your backyard, dominate that market first, your dollars will go much further!

5. Learn From Your Stats & Get to Know your Long Tail

Chris Anderson coined the term “Long Tail” in his book about the phenomenon of the internet providing ever increasing level of targeted result for online info seekers, consumer and B2B buyers. It is important if you want to win the search engine game to really understand what niche market you’re targeting.

6. Use Google AdWords First!

Many people are poorly informed that Google AdWords is a) expensive and b) somehow cheating. The reality is that you really don’t know what keywords are the best ones to develop as your core strategy until you see some results. The best way to generate some results without over-investing in the wrong SEO strategy is to simply buy keyword placements with Google AdWords:

1. Start with broad terms that you know reflect your target market
2. Watch AdWords every day and adjust campaign budgets to ensure you don’t blow your budget in a day
3. Narrow your terms down to phrase matched specific terms that are generating the highest click-through rates
4. Track specific keywords all the way through your sales cycle to see which ones generate the most revenue

1. Make the Webinar an Experience
With YouTube videos, online television, and hundreds of thousands of websites that might interest your webinar attendees, you need to make your online meeting something to keep them from jumping to those other things. Plan your webinar to be interesting for even the person in the group with the least interest in what’s being said. How do you make it engaging and interesting? Present the information you have in a lively way. And keep your participants reminded that they’re part of the webinar, not just spectators.

2. Know Your Audience

Having them fill-out surveys or questions in advance to be touched on during the webinar will help engage them. Always ask an open-ended question if you can:

“what is one thing would you like to learn?”

“what is your biggest challenge relating to _______”

3. Engage Your Attendees

Interaction will keep webinar attendees interested. Stop and think–would you rather sit through 30 minutes of slides, or have a couple of sessions in that 30 minutes where you can ask questions or present ideas?

An interactive webinar will naturally be more successful at lead generation than a static one where attendees just listen–or get tired of listening and leave.

Q&A sessions, surveys, and other interactive activities can mean the difference between an unproductive webinar and one that produces leads.

4. Plan Content According to Group Size
It can help you to plan the interactive portions of the webinar–and there should be many–by having a good estimate of how many will be attending. Large groups are by their nature the hardest groups to maintain this interaction level with. Very small groups like 5 to 20 can be treated “family style.” Family style meals have diners sitting around a table, sharing food from the same bowls and passing them around. These small webinars can benefit from that feeling of intimacy; they’re a small group all passing around and sharing ideas and information. Our firm’s webinars are typically in the 10-30 range, and if they are under 15, we will open the line at the end for questions, this is a great way to start a sales conversation.

For larger the groups, the more polished and engaging a speaker should be, and the more important things like surveys and text-based Q&A can help keep the audience involved.

5. Kick Off With Warm & Fuzzy & Ditch the Credientials

I am getting really bored of analyst type calls where it is all credentials, if you want your audience to engage, and you’re not a speaker by nature, make sure you plan a few jokes and trade credentials for honest humility.

If the group size allows and you want this level of interactivity, let attendees introduce themselves before the webinar starts. If there won’t be this level of interaction from attendees, then before the webinar starts is a good time for speaker introductions and entertaining or lively stories and intro information from the speaker or moderator.
6. Have A lead Generation Goal!

While the webinar is your core presentation, it pays to have a clear idea of exactly what you want your ideal attendee to do next. Make sure there’s a way for attendees to get further answers to their questions and keep the sense of connection and conversation going; and after the webinar, a crucial time for lead generation, ensure there is a clear call to action to move them from audience to actual sales leads (ie a free 30 minute consultation etc.).

“If you liked what you saw here today, there are a few ways you can engage with us..

• A Deal: You Can Purchase a Complete Guide on Our Site, We Will Email You A Discount Code…
• A Lead: Let’s have a chat – book free 30 minute consultation with a senior
• Subscriber: join us on twitter

1. Make good use of your time

If you come to IMC, you will get absolutely the best, the latest and greatest of thought leadership, best practices for everything from web analytics to social media marketing. So you can start the quarter right and not spend all your time in webinars.. (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

2. Meet Trusted Authorities of Internet Marketing:

Avinash Kaushik was involved with Google when Google Analytics was just someone’s little pet project.. He literally wrote the book on Google Analytics.

Avinash Kaushik - Author of Web Analytics an Hour A Day

Did I mention LinkedIn, Facebook & Yahoo! will be represented? All in, about 70 other speakers in 2 days.

3. Workshops!

The first day, (this Wednesday) is entirely workshops! So roll up your sleeves for some hands-on internet marketing.

4. Free Consulting / You Don’t Really Have a Plan for How to Boost Leads This Fall

If you agreed with above.. let’s talk this week! (At IMC) of course.

5. Everyone Loves A Discount!

This link will take you directly to my VIP rate reserved for IIMA Partners and Corporate Members. Please enter in the registration that James Carter referred you.

Register Now!

See you at IMC!

Depending on what is realistic for you, you may want to set specific themes for each quarter, and not try to fix everything at once; “This quarter I will decrease homepage bounce rate by 30%” etc. Contrary to most people who take on Search Engine Optimization (getting more traffic) first, I like to do a round of conversion optimization first; this is marketing speak for making sure key pages are doing their best to either capture leads, generate inquiries, or in e-commerce, complete a transaction.

1. Traffic

Everyone gets excited when they get 10 million hits on their site, and so they should, but what really matters to us marketing folks and business owners alike, is the people who hit our site that will buy.

I once had a customer that was so well optimized in her image names and alt tags, that 99% of their 100,000 visits came from people simply looking for images of the San Francisco Bay area on the Google images search. She was a little disappointed to find out that really only 1% of her traffic number really mattered.

To really understand this, take a look at traffic by keyword and by referral sources.

Traffic Sources Report

Traffic Sources > Overview

Key Traffic Reports:

• unique visits per month
• return visits per month
• referral sources: direct | search engines | other site links

You can observe that there were 1,453 search engine visits and 437 via direct traffic. Many people misinterpret where this is coming from. It is important to look at the actual pages, as many people think this is existing customers or referral business, but email campaign traffic will be included in this statistic.
Top keywords have been summarized in this report as well. We have blurred these to protect the website owner.

2. Keywords

Take a close look at your keywords. If you are getting a lot of traffic from one particular keyword, make sure your site offers a very relevant call to action to turn that visitor into at very least an email or RSS subscriber.

Also, as discussed above, focus your SEO goals on getting more relevant traffic, not just traffic!

Keyword Report
Traffic Sources > Keywords

3. Geography

Another critical aspect to knowing if you are capturing your correct market is to look at your geography.

There are easy things to do to optimize if your site is not coming up enough in your target markets; google local listings, adding customer references and cities, adding links to partners in your market, and of course, your inbound links, local business associations etc.

The Map Overlay Report
Visitors > Map Overlay

This report shows a map overlay with the darkest colors being the highest traffic areas.

At the bottom of map overlay is a list of countries, total visitor numbers & percentages.

4. Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is the percentage of single page visits on your site versus the total unique visits on your site.

Most people start by reducing homepage bounce rate, and increasing overall time on site. You may also want to know what your top 5 other exit pages are, and work to improve content and “calls to action” on those pages.
Look closely at your top pages and top pages with high bounce-rates. This means they are arriving directly to that page and bouncing.
Examine keyword relevance: what were they looking for?
Examine calls to action: did the page have clear, engaging, enticing calls to action in content?

Finding Bounce Rate: Top Content Report
Content > Top Content

This is the best report to do a deep dive on exit rates. It shows your top content pages, their bounce rates and exit rates.

What’s a good bounce rate? There’s no firm answer, but my target is usually to keep 80% of my target market, so it does depend on your visitor quality. As you spend more time on Analytics, you may want to look at reports that show bounce-rate for specific keywords.

5. Top Exit Pages
Check out any pages that result in exits. perhaps they are not providing info customers are looking for. Doing some deeper digging on initial keywords etc. may tell you why they are existing.
Top Exit Pages Report
Content > Top Exit Pages

Shows top pages by exit volume. You may also want to sort it to identify top pages by exit rate %. To do this, simply click on the column heading labeled “% Exit”.

6. Time on Site

Average time on site can be a great benchmark for your site’s content quality and site usability (a fancy word for ease of use). This is definitely worth comparing month over month.

Remember: as much as we want our analytics to be an exact science, monthly changes can be directly affected by a single blog article or if you have an email campaign that is pushing visitors to a landing page which has been included in your analytics. Remember: be very sure that you have properly filtered out internal staff IP addresses otherwise you may get unusual spikes in visitor times.

Need to filter your IP Address? Watch this video

Where to find time on site: This metric will appear in the traffic report summaries and on the main dashboard.

7. Goals

Google Analytics makes it easy to build goals. People sometimes call these conversion funnels. Experiment with these as soon as possible; it’s easier than it sounds. This allows you to map out the optimum way you think the “personas” (your various target markets) move through your site.

This will give you a clear picture of how many people make it from your homepage to product page to inquiry form etc.. some other examples:

• home page > products page > demo request
• home page > services page > contact us page > call me form
• home page > free evaluation > form completion page

Goals Overview Report
Goals > Overview

8. Most popular pages internal navigation

if you have one page that is dominant, consider why, consider the following:
“    is this the logical next place I would go if I was in “buying mode”
“    what is the logical next place to go if I’m in “evaluation mode”
“    consider providing direct “call to action” buttons on your homepage content (as well as in the menu) example on the 1Path site: “Free Demo” “Join A Webinar”
Top Content Report
Content > Top Content

9. Site Search

Google offers an easy to implement, free site search tool that provides very useful analytics about what people are looking for.

There are 2 useful pieces of info here:

• what do people search for most commonly (this means they’re not finding it)
• what do people search for and not find

For the first question, consider making significant improvements to your site architecture to make that information more prominent

For the searches that result in abandonment, just add content.

10. Blog & Newsletter Spikes

Keep an eye on spikes in traffic to individual blog posts; there may be big opportunities to capitalize on any articles that really rise to the top. Use the ’sticky’ feature in your blog to make sure any top articles get a little more play before being archived.

Also, ensure that with any significant traffic, you may want to drive a ‘conversion’ from the bottom of the article, like “Download a Complete Report Now” etc..

More Free Tools, Tips & Tricks for B2B Lead Generation

For read rates, my typical answer was more than 20% and more than 30% is great. As it turns out that rough estimate was pretty accurate.

In terms of click-through rates, we always seem to play in the 8-12% range.. which by industry standards according to this publication are on the upper end. I suspect that is because Mail Chimp services a lot of entry-level Small Business marketers who may not be as aggressive about click-through rates and testing.

I was convinced that the answers were tied up in some extremely pricey benchmark report from a research firm, but www.mailchimp.com has provided them free. These categories are broken out to cover several business to business and business to consumer industry types.

Mailchimp Small Business Email Benchmark Report – Full article here

Leaner times call for bigger marketing accountability and ROI. These 5 strategies are guaranteed to deliver leads for less.

1. Keep Your Customers First!

Before you run out in a panic looking for new business. If your company is like many, you took a bit of a beating the last couple quarters.. so the obvious focus becomes ‘new business yesterday!’ This sounds good, but remember, it costs 500% more to get a new customer than to get more revenue from an existing customer.

A recent article by Harvard Business Review recommended at the very least a very earnest call with all customers may help keep you off their cost-cutting list, and or even uncover opportunities to do more business with them.

2. Nurture Your Database!

Many companies with a little creative thinking and some effective segmentation, can drive as much as 20% increase in top-line revenue just by doing more with their existing database. Are you leaving big money on the table?

3. Social Media Marketing Basics

The payoffs of social media marketing for lead generation and branding are too numerous to be neglected. Almost every B2B firm should consider at very least a well-optimized and engaging blog strategy, and utilize some social media strategy around this.

The good news about social media, if you think it’s a ‘time-suck’ there may be some unlikely contributors in your firm; it doesn’t have to be a marketing-only task, take a poll you might be surprised where you find some hidden talent in your firm.

4. Pay Attention to Google AdWords

If you’re using AdWords already, take a deep-dive on your account, and make sure you’re not wasting money:

• test variations of ad text
• remove low-performing keywords
• modify bid prices on secondary keywords to get you in the #3 or 4 position without paying any more than you have to

Not doing AdWords?? Get started. Many B2B companies site AdWords as one of their top ROI generating strategies, and if times are tough, it will bring leads in the door quickly!

5. Work Closer With Your Sales Team!

Where does your B2B Lead generation accountability end? Do sales reps clearly understand where the leads are coming from? Do they understand the needs of that specific market? Have they ‘bought in’ to the campaign?

Aaron’s site, seobook.com is a great resource.

In Summary:

1. Start by Looking at Analytics

Look at your site analytics and Google Analytics. It’s easier to rank for keywords that you are already getting some traction on than entirely new keywords.

2. Scout Your Major Competitors for Long Tail Terms

Scout out long-tail terms that matter. Look at how your competitor’s menus are structured. What are the key product or service sub-categories?

If this is a very competitive market, product menus can give a lot of ideas about long-tail keywords.

3. Get Serious About Long Tail Terms

It’s been proven that long tail terms are easier to rank for and rankings can be achieved much more quickly by younger sites.

4. Use Keyword Tools

There are lots of them, here are the three free keyword tools we like the most

Thanks Aaron!