Paul's SEO & Internet Marketing TIps For Small Businesses: October 2015

Friday, 30 October 2015

SearchCap: Bing Shopping Campaigns Updates, SEO For Local Businesses & Google’s Halloween Doodle

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. The post SearchCap: Bing Shopping Campaigns Updates, SEO For Local Businesses & Google’s Halloween Doodle appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

The lead data hierarchy for busy sales people & savvy B2B marketers

As marketers, our actions have always been integral to not just driving business but capturing customer and prospect insight.

This is particularly the case in B2B, where everything from simple lead capture forms to more sophisticated marketing automation platforms have been a boon for enabling our colleagues in sales to understand the contexts of each lead that comes their way.

Yet despite all the advances in lead acquisition, nurturing and management, there is trouble in the camp.

How to Make Your B2B Content Stand Out From the Crowd

Is your B2B content marketing boring? Make Your B2B Content Stand Out From the Crowd using these 5 tactics with examples from MarketingProfs B2B Forum.

The post How to Make Your B2B Content Stand Out From the Crowd appeared first on Heidi Cohen.

Thursday, 29 October 2015

Analysing Amazon’s palliative approach to fake reviews

A couple of weeks ago, Amazon sued over 1,000 people for posting fake reviews on its site. The defendants in question had offered their services on fiverr.com.

But is Amazon addressing the symptoms, not the cause?

Last Chance to Enter the SocialPro Biggest Social Geek Contest

Enter the second annual SocialPro Biggest Social Geek Contest, sponsored by Marin Software. The contestant who can answer the most questions in the shortest amount of time will win the grand prize – a flight and hotel accommodations for two to Marketing Land’s SocialPro conference in Las Vegas,...

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Wednesday, 28 October 2015

#94: Honest Reviews

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Emma, Official Sponsor of the UnPodcast

In this episode of the UnPodcast, we talk about the importance of honesty in online reviews; how we took down Bell Mobile, why you should never shame your customers on social media, and the genius of selling your profitable business for $150 dollars.

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Keep app reviews honest!

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Don’t waste your customer currency.

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We helped take down Bell Mobile (Sort of)

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What does the rollout of Google cross-device conversions mean for marketers?

Cross-device conversions can now be reported at keyword-level in Google's search, display and shopping ad products.

This means advertisers can optimise for cross-device conversions within their automated bid strategies, for example looking at cost per acquisiton (CPA) across mobile, tablet and desktop.

What does this mean in the context of other recent Google product updates?

Are CMO Ambitions Too Low?

Ambitious CMOs focus on building credibility for their team.

Is that enough?

Some wonder if CMOs have what it takes to become the next CEO.

Are we setting our sight too high?

Actually, I read a report this week that points out that even these ambitions are too low.

The Report – When and How Does Board-Level Marketing Experience Impact Firm Performance? –released by the Marketing Science Institute, looked at the performance of companies based on the backgrounds of their board of directors. Not just ‘some’ board of directors, but 64,086 board member biographies from S&P companies.

Here’s what they noticed.

more a board included people with an executive-level background in marketing, the better the company performed. Interestingly, this wasn’t just under normal economic circumstances. The effect is even stronger when up against a declining market share. And, even more interesting still, companies performed better when there were fewer finance experts on the board.

How can that be?

My bet is that executives with a marketing background understand the need to invest in systems that engage with customers – and then actually engage with them. On the flip side, other disciplines – finance, operations, IT, HR – are all about driving costs out of the business.

But you can’t save your way to revenue growth.

Executives who’ve spent time in marketing are better positioned to understand the dynamics of today’s digitally led, quickly evolving customer. When was the last time you heard a CFO volunteer to spend more money getting to know our customers? Never. How often has a COO said that we need to experiment more and see how we can disrupt conventional thinking? Right after that pair of flying pigs landed.

Some tout that HR is the new marketing. While the HR team certainly plays a strong role in making sure we get the right people in the door, when have you ever heard a candidate say that filing out that online application was a pleasure. Exactly.

And then there’s IT.

In 2012 Gartner predicted that by 2017 marketing would have a bigger IT budget than IT. I don’t know if that will be the case, but it sure has added credence to marketing. While IT can be the partner that creates the systems of engagement along with marketing, they can’t create the customer-driven ecosystem that thriving companies have built through smart marketing.

In fact, a Gartner analyst pointed out that that the reporting structure for IT determined its focus. If it’s under operations, the CIO’s focus will be supply chain and distribution channels. Under the CFO it will be costs.

But under the CMO, the CIO will focus on systems of engagement and the customer while providing a holistic view on how the IT function can be a strategic differentiator for the company.

This all brings me back to marketing’s ambitions.

It’s Still a Long Haul

The study points out that “upper echelons theory states that firms are reflections of their top managers and that firm outcomes can be explained in part by the experiences their leaders have.”

That’s an incredibly important statement. Go back and reread it.

It’s telling us that the outcomes of a company are a reflection of the experiences that their leaders bring to the table.

However, there’s this clash of statistics…

“…less than 0.5% of board members at Fortune 1000 firms are currently leading the marketing function at their home firms, indicating that managerial-level marketing experience is largely missing from boards (Daum and Welch 2013). According to a 2011 survey, only 4% of corporate directors consider marketing an important type of experience for a board member, as opposed to 47% who believe finance experience, for example, is important (National Association of Corporate Directors 2011). Somewhat paradoxically, a recent survey conducted by executive recruiting firm Heidrick and Struggles (Groysberg and Bell 2012) indicated that board members consider marketing-related issue among their biggest challenges. This contradiction suggests that directors don’t see a connection between marketing experience and the ability to address firm-level marketing challenges.”

Experience at the C-level gives directors important expertise to tap as they influence top-level decision making.

So while we’ve spent a lot of time and energy talking about how marketing needs to have a seat at the (C-suite) table, maybe we’re selling ourselves short. Maybe what we should really be shooting for, if we want to drive revenue growth, is a seat on the board of directors.

Download the report and read for yourself, it’s worth the $18 cover charge. What do you think? Do marketing leaders need to aspire to the board table rather than just the C-suite?

This post originally appeared on the Type A Communications blog.

The post Are CMO Ambitions Too Low? appeared first on B2B Marketing Insider.

Enterprise Call Analytics Platforms – New Marketing Intelligence Report

Marketing Land and Digital Marketing Depot have recently published a new Market Intelligence Report, “Enterprise Call Analytics Platforms 2015,” that examines the market for call analytics platforms. The flood of mobile calls to U.S. businesses continues unabated, changing the way...

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

2015 Fortune 500 Social Media Use [Research]

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Research to help your social media marketing. 2015 Fortune 500 Social Media Use by UMass Dartmouth with charts and examples to aid all size companies.

The post 2015 Fortune 500 Social Media Use [Research] appeared first on Heidi Cohen.

Tuesday, 27 October 2015

SearchCap: Bing Halloween, Amazon Echo, AdWords Cross-Device & RankBrain

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the Web. The post SearchCap: Bing Halloween, Amazon Echo, AdWords Cross-Device & RankBrain appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

My Favorite Tool For Content Ideas

Great content is a must for any successful content strategy. Effective content helps your buyers, drives awareness for your brand as well as your service or product, and helps to convert your readers into leads and ultimately increase sales.

One of the best ways to measure content effectiveness is by looking at the number of social shares your content receives. Social shares are not the end goal, but they are an effective means to achieve reach to the widest audience of interested potential buyers who have a chance to convert.

How do know which content will attract social shares?

You can start by doing content profiling. This process helps you gather as much research and data as you can to inform your brainstorming and content ideation process, which will lead to better content ideas.

Content profiling also helps you learn about what works well in your industry, what your competitors are doing, and which social channels you will want to target. To get these insights, I love to use the BuzzSumo tool to conduct keyword and domain-based searches.

Keyword-based Search

When conducting a keyword search with BuzzSumo, you want to use content-driven keywords associated with your industry or product/service that are non-commercial in nature. This is because you want to get results on the top performing content created using those keywords, rather than product or service pages as you would get with commercial keywords.

To narrow your results, you can use quotation marks around the keywords you’ve typed in, and you can also filter the results by date so you are pulling up the newest content (i.e. last year).

You will see that the results are organized by total number of shares, then broken down by each social media channel. Do a deep dive into content pieces that have done well on all social channels. Continue running searches like this over time will help you identify content themes and ideas that perform best, which you can use to brainstorm your own content topics.

As you conduct your keyword search, you may have noticed certain domains that kept appearing in your search results. You want to note those websites down so you can do deeper dive research on them.

They are likely doing something right with their content efforts that’s worth looking into. As well, domains with higher social shares usually have a decent size audience reading and sharing their content, which may be sites you want to build a relationship or collaborate on a campaign with to help promote your content in the future.

As you work through your search results and deep dive research, you will also want to identify potential influencers who you can reach out to. You can do so by clicking on the “View Sharers” button for each piece of content you want to look into, or by clicking on the “Influencers” tab. Note those influencers down and start looking for ways to engage with them, as they may be open to sharing your future content.

Domain-based Search

You can conduct searches on domains the same way you run keyword searches through BuzzSumo. This is extremely helpful when you want to do a deeper dive into sites that continue to appear in your search results, as well as looking into what your competitors are doing. Keep in mind that in some cases you might not be able to get a good set of results, particularly for smaller niches or domains that BuzzSumo may not have enough data yet to be useful.

You’ll see that the search results look similar to a keyword search, but the results are filtered and limited to only the domain you’ve searched. From here, try to look for patterns and trends in posts that appear to do well, as well as names of authors whose posts have continued to appear in the top results. Not only does this give you ideas for content you can create, these authors may have a big social following and may be people you want to engage with to help amplify your content.

You can do all of this research with the free version of BuzzSumo. The paid version will give you more insights into your target keywords and domains, such as the social networks and sites that are generating the most shares for top content, average shares by content length, types, and social networks.

With the paid version, you will want to do this kind of deep dive analysis on your competitors as well, so you can find out what content is getting the most social shares and what social networks are working well for them. Check out this article from Moz that walks you through the steps of how you can use BuzzSumo API and Google Sheets to run this type of analysis more quickly.

BuzzSumo is my favorite tool to help you generate content ideas and build out your strategy. What other tools do you use to develop or improve your content strategy? Please share your ideas in the Comments section below.

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The post My Favorite Tool For Content Ideas appeared first on B2B Marketing Insider.

The future of multichannel marketing in APAC

According to a recent study by Econsultancy, it seems that APAC is significantly behind North America in deploying multichannel marketing.

In this post we'll look at some examples from the cutting edge which tell us where things are going.

Monday, 26 October 2015

Got Boring B2B Content? How To Make It Engaging

Have boring B2B content? 7 ways to enrich your B2B content marketing to make it engaging. Has tips, examples and research to driveB2B marketing results

The post Got Boring B2B Content? How To Make It Engaging appeared first on Heidi Cohen.

Friday, 30 October 2015

Thursday, 29 October 2015

Wednesday, 28 October 2015

Other topics include:

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Items mentioned in this episode

Tuesday, 27 October 2015

How do know which content will attract social shares?

Please follow me on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook and Subscribe here for regular updates.

Monday, 26 October 2015