M & A Rainmaker

The Internet Marketing Ecosystem ( I.M.E. ) has been producing some great results recently even when only partially implemented. You can find previous blogs on the I.M.E by searching on that term here. ( Use search box ). The I.M.E. is a strategy and a process rather than being absolutely rigid about the specific brand of product used. e.g. I recommend the use of WordPress for websites and blogs but websites and blogs based on other technologies and brands may also work using the strategy and process.

It should also be noted that if a website is already in place ( of whatever technology or whoever it is supplied by ) I.M.E. recommended products can be added and the strategy and process employed.

To summarise the recommended components ( products, brands etc ) are:

– A WordPress based website.

– A WordPress based blog.

– A Twylah page.

– Various Social Network pages such as Twitter, Facebook, Google +, Linkedin , Pinterest, digg etc. etc.

The WordPress website and blog and the Twylah page form the ” core ” of the I.M.E. Typically fresh, relevant ” content ” is produced on the blog and the Twylah page ( using the Twylah Power Tweet facility ) and then shared to the Social Network pages ( I use the Twylah share facility which I call Power Sharing ).

If we bear in mind that our overall objective is to get FOUND ( via Google etc. for relevant words and phrases ) to CONVERT visitors into prospects and customers and to ANALYSE how we did it ( basically noting what particular efforts produced the best results with the help of e.g. Google Analytics ).

If we also remember that producing a high ranking ( easily FOUND ) web and blogsite is dependant on ( amongst other things ) – It having relevant, frequently updated content; having on page S.E.O. and also having authoritative backlinks. Whilst conversion relies apon ” channeling ” the visitor through a sales funnel via relevant headlines, landing pages and Calls to Action.

The I.M.E. fulfills all of the above criteria. It would take a long time to explain all of the ways that it does but we can take a few  examples:

A blog posted on the WordPress Blogsite ( or page ) can then be Power Tweeted via the Twylah platform ( initially placing the Power Tweet into your Twitter community ). It can then be ( power ) shared to Facebook, Google +, Linkedin, Pinterest and Digg. This creates backlinks from all of these places to your domain ( the WordPress web/blog and Twylah page are all in your domain ).

It is worth remembering that Google is now looking at the whole picture rather than simply relevant keywords and phrases and backlinks so the fact that a piece of content is being shared ( liked, ReTweeted etc. etc. ) around multiple social networks is a powerful indicator to Google.

or to put it slightly differently – the number of visitors to your website, the number of those visitors that participate in a call to action ( do something ) and the number of those people that become customers – THAT is the mantra of hubspot.com.

They say that last year they had something like 2 million visitors to thier website of whom 160,000 participated in a call to action and of those about 1,000 became hubspot customers.

It’s a mantra that ALL businesses could do with keeping in mind.

Let’s have a look at this a bit more closely….

Getting Found/Getting Visitors

Hopefully most people now understand that being found by Google when someone types in your company name or a variation of it is a given – if that does not happen then you have not even left first base !! However your objective should be to be found for the products and services that you offer. Ideally you want to be on page 1 when someone searches for your key products and services. How easy or hard this is to do depends entirely on the competitiveness of the keywords and phrases that relate to your products and services.

 Getting found for what you have to offer is absolutely key.

Recently I have been having two in depth discussions with people that I am helping:

1.  Tell me the most important products and services that you want to sell ( List them all and then put them in order of priority ).

2. Tell me what keywords and phrases you think people will type in ( to Google ) to find your main products and services.

I don’t expect them to know every variation of keyword or phrase nor do I expect them to know how competitive ( how hard to rank high for ) those keywords and phrases are. I can find that out myself or with the assistance of my team.

The next thing that I tell them to do is to

3. Get Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools installed on thier website and to get access to it ( for which they will need a Googlemail email address ).

The reason for this is that we need a baseline ( a starting point ) to see the effect that we have on things like visitors, keywords, referrals, links etc etc

Understanding  what you want to promote and the keywords and phrases that relate to it  is the foundation of everything that you will do on the Internet to promote yourself and get more visitors to your website.

The basic key to a high ranking website is on page SEO ( keywords, titles,metatags – related to your keywords and phrases ) , frequently changing and updated, relevant content and lots of ( good ) inbound links.

In thier ” Getting Found ” section Hubspot highlight SEO, Blogs and Social Media. These are the basic areas to address to improve the visibility and ranking of your website:

– SEO your website ( titles,tags,content etc ) in accordance with your keywords and phrases.

– Establish ( seperate ) blogs

– Establish pages in social media ( Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Digg etc etc etc )

In doing so you will establish an ” ecosystem ” of related online media. You will establish a network of friends/followers/etc for your blog(s) and for each of your social networks and you will also connect them to your website and to you ( they may come to you about business direct from your blog or social media page or they may come to you via your website ).

It is difficult to describe just how powerful this set of interconnected networks is. Facilities like ” share ” and ” join ” enable you to share information posted in one place to all the other places and to invite your friends from one place to another place.

Anyway, by now it will be time to look at your analytics to see where the traffic and links are coming from and how many visitors you are getting now.

Once you have got visitor to your website you have got to get them to do something.

Convert

On the hubspot home page ( thier main landing page ) you will see a number of ” calls to action ” e.g. ” Try Hubspot free for 7 days ” or ” Download a free Inbound Marketing Kit “. To do this you will need to provide them with information about yourself . This might range from a name and email address to a more comprehensive list of details about you and your requirements.

Each one of these is a ” lead “. You have converted a visit to a lead. ( Well done ).

As Hubspot mention – you need to track and manage these leads – then you need to analyse them –  so many referrals to the website came from ?? and they eg downloaded a white paper and then they did ??

Analyse

Analysis would include online and offline analysis. You want to analyse how well your marketing is doing; look at your competitive analysis ( how well are you doing relative to your competitors ) and also look at the quality of the leads. You should ensure that everyone in the company asks where leads came from – and not just ” from the Internet ” – you want to know whereabouts on the Internet !

Yes, well it may APPEAR as though nothing has happened but actually – in the background it has.

I have been talking to Howard at Seventh Wave Media ( http://www.seventhwavemedia.co.uk/home ) and Nikki at Nikki Pilkington.com ( http://www.nikkipilkington.com/ ) about what we are doing and I have one more ” adviser ” that I want to involve in the experiment.

Obviously the companies that we are working with have loads of other things to do other than this.

The main tasks that we have set have been for them to produce initial lists of what they want to be found on the Internet for. We have also given them an appreciation of the fact that when we try and get them found for these things ( and any others that we come up with after discussion ) some of them will be harder to do than others. So we are looking for some flexibility and lateral thinking. We also asked then to think about thier main products and services and then prioritise the keywords/phrases in line with what is most important to them.

Nikki made a great point which was that we not only need to look at what they want to be found for but also what it is worth putting the effort into being found for  ( effort/reward ratio ?? ). This made me think about a Cisco chart I once saw where they plotted all the things that they wanted to do from an Internet presence perspective on a graph of ” How difficult to do and how costly ” to ” What benefit would be derived from it ” and then picked off all the easy to do and derived great benefit points first and then left the harder more expensive and lower return ones until last.

This went well with the fact that we gave advice on the fact that some things are much harder to rank for than others and we have various ways of finding out how easy it will be to rank for different things.  If we can find relevant, less competitive keywords it will be much easier to be found and rank for these than it will be  for competitive ones.

Anyway we have initial lists back from both companies now and we are looking at these. I did have a bit of a test yesterday using Ecademy posts to see if I could get a ranking for a couple of the terms and I did get a number one listing for one of the terms within an hour and a middle of page one ranking for another within 12 hours. So, both of these terms look doable.

We have also asked the companies to get Google Webmaster Tools ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Webmaster_Tools ) and Google Analytics (  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Analytics )    installed on thier websites so that we can look at the effect that all of our effort has on traffic to thier website.

Remember, at the end of the day we are interested in how much business they get out of all this but first we will look to improve visibility, findability and then visitors to them and thier websites. We will be looking for all forms of inbound enquiries – emails, posts, phone calls etc etc

We also had a discussion about email-shots with one of the companies and I have put up a few comments about this both here on this blog and elsewhere. It was quite interesting looking at various email-shot companies and looking at what other people were doing with thier own email-shots. This led to an emphasis on the fact that email-shots are connected into the New Media Marketing Whirlpool in a number of ways eg the email-shot will refer people back to the website, offer links to eg Twitter,Facebook etc pages and needs a url with a relevant decsription so that the email can be posted on various Social Network and Information sites.