SEO, Social Media and Branding are buzzwords you’ll hear a lot about in the context of marketing your business. There’s tons of writing on these topics but today I’d like to share a few recent blog posts on these topics that I think are pretty good.
Branding: a hot branding buzzword is story telling. The idea is that telling a story about your brand makes it more relate-able and appealing. Adweek published a lofty and pithy article on this topic, but I actually think the post by Dosh Dosh on this subject is a little easier to digest and relate to for the small business owner. Read either or both but then give some thought to ways that you can leverage the story behind your brand to give your marketing a push.
Social Media: This is the bandwagon everyone wants to jump on and volumes have been written on the topic by internet marketing bloggers. This post from Search Engine Guide really hits the nail on the head though. Before you log into your Digg account again, have a look at this article.
SEO: There’s tons of reading material on there on how to get your website search engine optimized and there are many factors that go into SEO. While this article doesn’t cover them all, it does a nice job on a quick overview of some of the highlights that are involved with SEO.
The long tail is a buzz word you’ll hear a lot about these days if you are paying attention to internet marketing. What exactly is it referring to and what does it mean for you?
The long tail refers to a key phrase that is relevant to your products or services with low search volume. It probably also has low advertiser competition in search marketing and low search engine optimization competition. For example, let’s say you sell baby clothing. Tons of people sell baby clothing which is bad news for you. It’ll be damn near impossible to get your website to come up first when people search baby clothing on Google. It will also cost you a pretty penny to get up top on Adwords results for “baby clothing”.
This is just as well, it’s a very generic term and you don’t need it to work for you. Instead, you focus on the long tail. Let’s say you sell baby clothing with bicycles on it. Your key phrases might be “bicycle onesie” or “bicycle baby clothing”. Parents who are cycling enthusiasts who want to outfit their kids with bike clothes are more likely to use this phrase to search, and they are more likely to want your products.
The good news is that there are very few pages on the net with those phrases in their title tag or URL (you can search the following in Google to find this out allintitle:bicycle baby clothing or allinurl:bicycle baby clothing). You can probably get this phrase for very little money if you do an Adwords campaign for it. What’s even better, if you create a page on your site with these phrases in the title, H1 tags, url and body content, your page has a good chance of coming up first when people search for bicycle baby clothing. (You make your chances even better if you get a cycling blog to post about your product line, since inbound links give you search engine optimization points.)
How do you go about determining the long tail for your website?
First, do a keyword analysis on your website using Google’s Keyword tool. See which phrases the tool finds on your site that have low advertiser competition, those are usually a good starting point.
After you find those phrases do a check to see how many other sites have those low competition phrases in their title tags and URLs (use the allintitle and allinurl attributes to figure this out on Google).
Once you’ve identified your list of low competition phrases, make sure pages on your site are well optimized for those phrases. This means you have them in your title tag, your URL, your H1 tag and in the body of your page. If at all possible, get a site that’s relevant to what you’re selling to link to your pages. Inbound links boost your page’s credibility and increase its chances of ranking higher in searches.
As you add new products and services continue with this process so that you can optimize for all of your offerings. The long tail won’t bring you scads of traffic over night, but the idea is that it will bring you some very well targeted traffic that is likely to convert. This is actually better than scads of traffic any way. One visitor that buys what you’re selling is better than 1000 visitors who don’t.
Working with what you’d call a “preferred partner” is a great way to drastically increase your brand’s exposure for no cost. It’s a form of cross-promotion companies can engage in with a carefully selected partner or partners. An easy way to implement this type of partnership is through an exclusive link exchange. This means you and your partner agree to provide prominent placement on each other’s websites, promoting one another’s businesses.
This concept is similar to a link exchange. The difference is that while some companies have link exchange pages loaded with sites, a preferred partner link is more integrated into your overall site, and your partner does the same for you.
You’ll commonly see this kind of advertising on sites owned by companies with more than one website. For example, the Palmer Cash website gives prominent placement to American Hips, an underwear company owned by the t-shirt label. While it certainly makes sense to promote your own businesses this way, the same type of promotion can be used by companies who share a customer demographic, and sell non-competing products. For example, if you sell bicycles but do not sell helmets or bike jerseys, you could choose a preferred partner company that does sell these things. Your site navigation could include a link to your partner’s site encouraging customers to get bike accessories from your partner. Your partner, who sells accessories but not bikes, could provide you with a link incorporated into their site navigation. The benefit here is that you are both marketing to bike enthusiasts, and this cross-promotion activity makes it easier for you to share customers.
Two of the biggest considerations for selecting a preferred partner are:
1. Do you and your preferred partner have a similar audience? Do you both have customers interested in what the other is selling. The more similarly appealing your product lines are to a customer demographic, the better chance you have of this type of marketing working for you.
2. Do you have a similarly sized audience? A company getting 1000 website visitors each day should not choose a preferred partner getting 100 visitors daily. It’s important to form a relationship that’s going to be mutually and equally beneficial.
This type of marketing can be great, but tread with caution before committing to a long term partnership. When developing this type of a relationship with a partner consider a trial period before you commit to anything ongoing. We recommend you agree to exchange links for 30 days at first, and then evaluate the success of the match up before moving forward.
Some other ways preferred partners can promote each other:
- Print ads
- Email newsletters
- Sweepstakes
- Printed promotional materials
- Word of mouth (This works especially well for service based companies,For e because they frequently talk to their customers. For example, if you provide web design services but not marketing, partnering with an online marketer and mentioning each other to your clients is a great way to build your business.)
The concept of working with a cross-promotion partner still seems to be fairly below the radar with a lot of business owners. The small biz and marketing blogs I read usually talk about search marketing, SEO and social media. These are all good things to talk about too but I am always pleased to see cross-promotion getting some buzz too. Today Dosh Dosh posted about creating strategic alliances (AKA cross-promoting or co-branding). You can view the post here.
Today for cross-promotion inspiration I’d like to share Mesh-Box It’s a blog dedicated entirely to co-branding and cross-promotion examples. Although they pretty much just talk about partnerships between large companies there are plenty of ideas here for the small business owner to borrow.
If you’re a small business owner, the concept of branding may be a somewhat nebulous thing. You might have your marketing strictly focused on your bottom line. Big companies care about this too, but their way of going about achieving their goals is a little different. They don’t expect to trace every sale back to the highway billboard sign you drive by every day, nor do they expect that the first time you see it you’ll make a purchase. The goal is to get their brand on your brain so that when you are in the market to buy what they’re selling, you’ll think of them.
What does this have to do with the small business owner? Last week I wrote a post about how to maximize your cost-per-click spending. While I am all for this highly traceable form of marketing, I am firmly against companies relying on it entirely. Cost-per-click marketing needs to be supplemented with branding efforts so that your company’s name can become familiar to your target demographic. This familiarity will bring your target demographic to shop with you rather than bothering to explore the web for your competitors. This type of marketing is what makes t-shirt companies like Palmer Cash and Noisebot premier destinations for t-shirt lovers. These two t-shirt companies have their names plastered all over pop culture websites like Perez Hilton and Cute Overload. Can consumers find better or cheaper t-shirts elsewhere? Probably. They choose these companies because they know them.
To maximize the effect of your branding campaign, be sure to really analyze your target customer demographic. Who buys from you and why? How can you reach these people in large numbers and in a cost effective manner? The more accurately you target your audience, the better your results will be.
A great way to research targeted branding opportunities is Google’s placement targeted ads. Two things I like to try are keyword suggestions and URL suggestions. Let’s say I want to run ads for a independent music record label. The first thing I might try is searching for the keyword phrase “indie rock.” This search will give me a list of URLs I can advertise on where this topic is discussed. I might also do a search for popular indie music website pitchforkmedia.com to see what URLs Google suggests that are similar to that site. My searches will yield a list of websites I can market my record label on that are visited by my target audience. Google accepts both impression-based bids and cost-per-click bids for these types of campaigns, so you can experiment to see what works for your needs.
If a branding campaign is too pricey for your budget, consider a co-branding venture with other companies that share your target customer demographic. A great example of this is ishopindie.com. This site enables small boutiques and artisans to all contribute to one large ad budget, and this budget advertises ishopindie.com. The companies contributing to the site’s budget all benefit from the marketing efforts because everyone who discovers ishopindie.com through its branding campaigns discovers the site’s member companies. When visitors to ishopindie.com have to buy birthday gifts or want to treat themselves, ishopindie.com comes to mind and the site’s member companies reap the benefits.
The small business owner is strapped not only for cash but also for time. Running your small business often forces you to wear a lot of hats: sales person, customer service department,accountant, etc. It’s easy for marketing to take a back seat when it comes to your time. There are only so many hours in the day. The beauty of cross-promotion is not only that it saves you money and hooks you up with customers you might not reach otherwise, it also saves you time.
When you plan your cross-promotion activities with a partner think about all the steps involved with making the campaign a success for everyone involved. Maybe you’re co-sponsoring a sweepstakes with another company. While it’s fine for each of you to just tell your own customers about this promotion, you’ll both benefit a lot more if you and your partner make an effort to tell the whole world.
Now, telling the world is quite an undertaking so your first order of business is to decide exactly how you’re going to get the word out about your campaign. Are there bloggers who might write about this sweepstakes? Are there places you could advertise the sweepstakes, either in print or online? Can you use social media to spread the word about your sweepstakes (message boards, Myspace, StumbleUpon, etc)? Identify all the ways you can get your campaign exposed to potential customers and then make a list of who is doing what.
Maybe your partner has stellar banner design skills and can design ads to promote the sweepstakes. Maybe you’ve got in an with a popular blogger who might mention your campaign to her readers. Maybe you’ve just got a really good media list you regularly correspond with when you’ve got a promotion going on. The idea is to pool your resources, time and skills with another company to get your mutually beneficial campaign seen by your audience.
Whatever you and your marketing partner decide you’re bringing to the table make sure you clearly define roles and responsibilities and stick to them. Establish time lines for activities to take place. If you’ve promised to tell 100 bloggers about your promotion make sure you follow through and get it done by the date you promised to do it. When it comes to cross-promotion you and your partner or partners are counting on one another to ensure mutual success. Failure to deliver on promises you make hurts your campaign, your business, your partner(s) and your credibility — not to mention your karma.
It’s also important to make sure you and your partner or partners have evenly distributed the tasks involved with promoting your campaign. There’s no better excuse for slacking off than feeling like you’ve been given an unfair share of the work to do.
Lastly, make sure you and your cross-promotion partners check in when tasks are completed. Let each other know when that ad arrives at the magazine for press or that blog editor promises you a write up. Keeping each other on track means keeping your campaign on track and enjoying terrific results.
While I think today’s article on the Small Business Branding blog was well-intentioned, it unfortunately overlooked the importance of great landing pages. To be honest, Google doesn’t do the best job of educating its users on the importance of landing pages either, so it’s not surprising that their importance hasn’t been given it’s due in other conversations about search marketing. Before you go beating your head against a wall and wind up paying for help with Adwords, let’s explore how to effectively use landing pages to make your pay-per-click marketing more cost-effective and better in general.
Google Adwords pay-per-click advertising (or PPC advertising as you may see it called) is the most widely used search by both advertisers and consumers, so to make it work for you it’s really important to get what makes Google Adwords tick. Adwords’ goal is to show its users the most relevant ads possible. The idea is that if they do this, the most clicks will take place and Google will make the most money. Your goal is to convince the Google robots that your page is relevant to the keywords you want to have people search to find you. When you manage to do this, Google Adwords rewards you by offering you a cheaper pay-per-click price than your competitors and a better placement for your ads.
So how exactly do you go about convincing the robots to love you and getting these cheap clicks? By writing landing pages that make use of the keywords you want used. Here’s a step-by-step to creating the best landing pages for your campaigns.
1. Do your homework
Let’s say I wanted run an Adwords campaign to get people to read this post. My first step would actually be to do a little research with Google’s keyword tool. I’d want to know how people were searching Google to learn about using Adwords effectively. I’d identify keywords such as “adwords advertising” and “internet marketing” and “pay per click”.
2. Write keyword-rich copy
Once I’d made a list of words people commonly search to get the information in my article, I’d start writing. (Google’s keyword tool will tell you how often people search for the keywords you’re interested in. It will also tell you how sought-after the words are by other advertisers.) As I write, I need to keep my list of keywords in mind and be sure to make liberal use of them in my copy. When the Adwords robots scan my page they’ll be checking to see if the keywords I put in my campaign are on my landing page and if so, how often they appear. The better job I do of using my targeted keywords, the more likely I am to be offered a lower cost-per-click price and better ad placement.
3. Set up the landing page
Adwords likes URLs that are related to your keywords. If I wanted to use this blog post as a landing page I’d make a URL for it that went something like http://brandtorrent.com/adwords_secrets/.
4. Create smart ad campaign copy
At this point a lot of the hard stuff is done. Keywords have been selected and a juicy landing page has been written and created. The only challenge left is writing ad copy that makes people want to click. So think about the people you want clicking on your ad. What is it that you have to offer that will interest them the most? Can you boast about low prices, free shipping, and/or unique selection? Whatever you’ve got to excite your audience, that’s what goes into the ad campaign copy. You’re actually better off developing a couple of versions of your ad copy so you can do what’s called A/B testing. What this means is Adwords will run both ads for you and you’ll see which version is getting a better click-through-rate. This enables you to really maximize the success of your campaign.
5. Monitor and Adjust
Search engine marketing is a tricky science, so no matter how smartly you’ve crafted your landing page and your ad copy, you’ll need to keep an eye on performance and make adjustments as you go along.
I realize some marketers might think sharing this type of information with the small business owner is counterproductive. Why not keep ‘em in the dark and lead them down a semi-sabotaging path so they’ve got to turn to a pro for help? I am not saying hiring a search engine marketing professional doesn’t have its time and place. Developing a great Adwords campaign requires writing skills and time and effort. If you haven’t got the time or writing resources for DIY marketing, by all means, hire help. Search marketers not only understand these tricks of the trade, they’ve got loads of experience working with them. My goal here is to empower the little guy to make a go of this on his or her own. Because let’s face it, no matter how great pro marketers are, they’re just not always in the budget.
Ever notice how when you shop on a site like Amazon and you express interest in one book, Amazon suggests you buy a similar book along with it and offers you a price break for doing so? This “better together” type of promotion can be leveraged by two or more companies selling complementary products.
How it works:
1. Find a cross-promotion partner you want to work with. If you sell bicycles, partner up with a company that sells helmets or cycling jerseys. If you sell footwear, maybe you’d want to work with a company that sells handbags.
2. Provide your cross-promotion partner a coupon code for your business and have your partner provide one to you.
3. When your customers check out, offer them a coupon for your partner’s business and have your partner do the same for their customers.
As always, we recommend that you use a unique coupon code for each cross-promotion campaign so that you can track the success of your efforts. Even if you don’t see an immediate boost in sales from your cross-promotion efforts, this type of marketing still gets your company name in front of potential customers who may come to you in the future, coupon in hand or not.
Here at Brand Torrent we spend a lot of time and energy encouraging small business owners to work together to build their brands. Lest you think that co-branding is beneath your company, check out this popular Geico commercial that uses Mrs. Butterworth pancake syrup to simultaneously build both brands.
The humorous ad builds a positive association for both Geico and Mrs. Butterworth pankcake syrup. The ad’s humorous nature has also given the commercial some viral power, scoring over 18,000 views on YouTube.
Even if you don’t have a big budget for a viral video, sharing the cost to produce an entertaining viral video with another brand is a marketing option within reach for the small business owner. If TV air time is too pricey, with sites like YouTube at your fingertips you can still make use of a video marketing campaign.
Print advertising can be both expensive and tough to track. Earlier this week I wrote about how to track the success of a marketing campaign so this leads nicely into exploring print advertising as a means to market your brand. I’m most in favor or print ads for brick and mortar businesses but whether you want to advertise in print for your online or brick and mortar business, advertising with partners is a great way to save some cash.
One group I admire for their print-based cross-promotion activities is Indie Finds. This group of independent artisans and designers buys print advertisements in national publications. For each advertisement, several of the designers chip in to cover the cost and all the participants get a product from their shop featured in the advertisement. Although this group focuses on independent designers, there’s no reason other types of companies couldn’t form a coalition to advertise in a local publication or another type of special interest publication.
Indie Finds’ placements in magazines have a stylish design but they probably wouldn’t be mistaken for content from the magazine. While their eye-catching design work is likely to attract eyeballs, another way to pull off the print-based cross-promotion would be to employ an advertorial format. If companies selling products for new moms wanted an ad in Fit Pregnancy, they might consider framing their placement as an “article” on top five must have items for new moms. Of course each of these must-haves would be picks from five companies splitting the cost of the placement.
However you frame your print marketing. Be sure to supply a unique URL, phone number or coupon code for the ad if possible so that you can measure the ad’s success. It’s also important to keep in mind that print placements usually become more effective over time. If you’re not prepared to invest in several placements to see a return you may want to reconsider investing in this marketing medium.
